Head scratcher for the day.

Tales of war, bombs and abduction — coming to a third-grade classroom near you.

City and state education bureaucrats have given the green light to an English curriculum for elementary schools that includes picture books with startlingly realistic portrayals of war — to be read by 8-year-olds.

They include “The Librarian of Basra,” which contains drawings of fighter planes dropping bombs on a palm-tree-lined Middle Eastern town.

In another illustration, the protagonist looks worried, peering out a window at soldiers manning machine guns on a rooftop.

The terrified townsfolk wonder, “Who among us will die?” and “Will our families survive?”

Similarly, “Nasreen’s Secret School” depicts the abduction of a young man from his home in Afghanistan by soldiers and discusses Taliban rules that forbid women to go out in public alone.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/scary_lesson_for_children_bO5X9X3DL645bfAireDgnM

The problem with the book, 1984, was that everything in it seemed impossible to ever happen.

In 1949, when George Orwell’s 1984 was first published, the New York Times book reviewer wrote that, though it was “not impressive as a novel about particular human beings” as a “prophecy and a warning” it was “superb.”
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/teaching-orwell-and-1984-with-the-times/

"...To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle..."

"...In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia..."