The next film I’m adding to my classroom...
Gone with the Wind.
Because My Fair Lady, Robin Hood (with Errol Flynn), The Enchanted Cottage, The Little Princess, A Knight’s Tale, The Chronicles of Narnia, Ender’s Game, The Giver, Gattaca, Lord of the Flies, The Scarlet Letter, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliette, Pride and Prejudice, Watership Down, Animal Farm, etc., don’t always teach easy lessons. They have hard truths. But how else do we learn but from reading and seeing things that change our perspective?
Books that were painful and uncomfortable to read but changed my perspective or impacted my worldview in some way. Some are fiction. Some are biography. Some are autobiography. All are impactful (and I'm not talking about films or TV shows--it's the books or nothing):
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCort
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
Watership Down, Richard Adams
1984, George Orwell
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Fifth Chinese Daughter, Jade Snow Wong
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitgerald
Friday Night Lights, Buzz Bissinger
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
I Am the Cheese, Robert Cormier
Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
The Book Thief, Markus, Zusak
The Giver, Lois Lowry
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
The Stand, Stephen King
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
They Died with Their Boots On, Thomas Ripley
The Covenant, James Michener
The Film Club, Jesse Gilmour
Blindness, Jose Saramago
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
And that list is hardly exhaustive. It's barely scratching the surface of what I have read and what has impacted me as a person from my limited worldview. Iron sharpens iron, and I am raising and teaching thinkers, challengers, warriors, doers and not just hearers of the Word. And sometimes your comfort zone has to be challenged in order to grow.
The Color Purple is a million times more racist (going in all directions) than Gone with the Wind and yet I firmly believe you need both on the library shelf.
How about this—include a massive history and context lesson with the movie and explain the plight of people of color rather than deleting the movie and pretending it doesn’t exist? If we start pretending things didn’t happen then it’s only a matter of time before we forget they actually did happen. And that is terrifying.
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