Well out here in California, kids all have to build models of the missions in 4th grade. I don’t know how much teachers push the ideas of forced labor and conversion and class differences though,

My wife Becky does in her 4th grade class. As evidenced by this student comment about a film that failed to list the two Native Californians killed and eaten by members of the Donner Party as casualties of that episode:

“It’s like… it’s like they didn’t even matter!”

She teaches in Berkeley, so make of that what you will.

Also, so as to make Tim feel better about his pedantry, I’ll note that the “Ring Around The Rosie refers to the Great Plague” notion is not particularlly supported by fact. (I was surprised to learn that, myself.)

Which, as I pointed out in an e-mail, is really like saying “Who Would You Be In 20th-Century America?” and making the choices The President, a Senator, a CEO or a Professor.

Unless the analogy you’re drawing is with, I dunno, some specific instance of Cold War politicking rather than actual 20th-century America, it’s pointless, and actually kind of disturbing. It’s bad enough that we spend so much of our lives right now pretending the lower classes in our society don’t exist — doing it for other time periods just underscores it.

(Of course, the cynical will not be surprised to learn that in this experiment in market simulation, fraud and corruption was rampant. I recall that the merchants (like me) who were obviously supposed to prosper, rapidly lost out to some of the more quick-thinking and talking peasants.)

We also had a “leper” stumble into camp one day. She told them about her condition and mentioned that she had lost some body parts in the woods. This turned into a treasure hunt to find the body parts (googly eyes, yarn “hair”, sequin “fingernails”, etc.). Once the teams of girls found all the body parts, they had to draw a body on a large sheet of construction paper and glue all the parts onto the right spots in their drawings. The girls LOVED the game. Later on, all the girls dressed up as lepers and we put on a “haunted house” for the rest of the campers.

So I think that there are definitely ways that younger kids can learn more historically accurate views of life in the Middle Ages. As long as you keep it in fun and don’t get too gruesome/bloody. It’s not any worse than Hansel and Gretel shoving a witch in the oven or Simba’s father dying!

Still I would think that doing something on medieval agriculture or crafts and barter would work for helping them think about the peasantry, and could be slanted in a more positive way to think about cooperation and sharing, if people were scared off by presenting the blood-and-destruction parts of the middle ages.

Oh, and to tie my two comment sections together, the guy who wrote _The Island of the Blue Dolphins_ (a young adult novel about the mission Indians and coming of the colonists) also wrote a book (I forget the title) about St Francis of Assisi and the children’s crusade. I’m actually really fuzzy on the plot, and I think it was focused on aristocrats, but it was more dark and realistic.

The role-playing can be educational in unexpected ways. After my niece told me about how her class played “pilgrims” at school (grade 3), I asked her what she learned. She told me that the girls had to do all of the work while the boys got to play. It seems the girls had to role-play cleaning, making soap, cooking, etc., while the boys role-played learning to hunt and fish. Needless to say, my niece was more than a little disgruntled. Of course, as I started to smirk my now ex-brother-in-law the anti-feminist told me not to encourage her (apparently assuming that I would corrupt his child and turn her into some anti-American, ant-Thanksgiving super-feminist*). Fortunately, grandma spoke up to say that she had made a very smart observation. It really is amazing, though, how kids can make unexpected and interesting observations in these types of educational experiences.

*It should probably be noted that this wasn’t long after I gave her Pam Munoz Ryan’s Esperanza Rising, a historical novel about a mother and daughter forced into becoming migrant farmers. It has a fairytale feel and is very age appropriate.