Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown Texas.
In the days leading up to my HS matriculation in 1970, my older brother was talking up Slave Day, and how miserable it was going to make me. I simply determined that I was not going to cooperate, and let the chips fall where they may.
It was ALMOST a letdown when it turned out to not happen.
Well that’s probably just sour grapes. (If Alaska were divided into two states of equal size, Texas would become the third largest state in the U.S.)
There are people on twitter actually defending the assignment.
Jeepers!
Creepers?
Yeah, reading on it it was like, “wait, what?” As Stranger_On_A_Train put it,
So it is really a lesson about not really “chivalry” but about the caricature of a “genteel” society’s “values” that has been strongly identified with Texas and the South (but exists among upper social classes elsewhere, let’s not get smug). In a way, it works in that it does show how the definition of “chivalry” got corrupted and degraded into a figleaf for these traditions.
Thankfully I wasn’t there, but in High School (I’m in Hawaii) I heard about Kill Blacks, Slap a Jap and Kill Haole (caucasion) days.
The irony is that the high school I was supposed to attend, McKinley was known as Tokyo High because of the high number of Japanese. I’m sure they didn’t have Slap A Jap day!
I’ve heard variations of that story over the years. Hawaii is another popular state to be confused with a foreign country.
LOL! People still ask what it’s like to visit the U.S. when we travel to the mainland! Also, do you speak Hawaiian?
Edit: Do you speak Hawaiian? Sure! As much as you speak the language of the original inhabitants of your State!
I was born in after 1959, so I joke with my siblings that I’m the only one in the family to be born in the United States!
After living on Oahu for 4 years, I still struggled with just the place names. My English trained brain could not accept that things could be spelled how they sounded. Not to mention the shortage of consonants (my original last name had 13 letters and 3 vowels). The most embarrassing was the early exposure to Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z (ironically taped by my friend’s aunt from Hilo since they didn’t show it in Florida at the time) left me primed to never say the most famous name on the island properly.
I’m talking about its practical purpose, and specifically in the context of male/female relationships as being pushed in this class. My point was that it was not the women who were restricted, but the (male) knights. The restrictions in the assignment thus do not make sense for teaching that concept.
That said, the way I said it was overly reductive, and I’m sorry about that. I was actually copying that style from another post elsewhere, where no one objected. But I should have realized that sort of thing wouldn’t fly here.
Chivalry had lots of parts, and its purpose evolved over time. But I would still argue that one of its original purposes was to stop knights from going out and raping and pillaging. Or, at least, that’s always been my understanding.
Same here, most often with New Mexico as the state causing confusion.
Not to take us too far down the rabbit hole, but one interesting explanation I heard is that the Late Medieval chivalric code was largely a response to encounters of the knightly elite with their counterparts outside Christendom when on crusade in the Holy Land. Similarly to growing white support for civil rights in the mid-20th-century USA being partly a response to Cold War competition with the USSR.
The idea being that in both cases the western culture was somewhat thrown on the defensive concerning its “way of life” upon confronting a conscious alternative to it, and competitor with it, on a hitherto unprecedented scale. This resulted in a lot of jingoistic xenophobic chest-thumping, but also in a certain amount of idealistic self-examination and a strong motivation to appear impressively humane and righteous.
I don’t remember who advocates this theory and don’t know whether it’s true, but it’s always struck me as interesting.
Almost all cultures have some kind of ‘warrior code’ that evolved to limit and control violence, from hunter-gatherer cultures up to elaborate Samurai and Chivalric codes.
In western Europe, Roman and Germanic cultures both had warrior codes long before medieval chivalry, and chivalry grew out of them.
Encounters with Muslims in Spain and France predate the Crusades, and you find early ideas of chivalry in the Song of Roland, for example. That doesn’t mean chivalry was a result of that cultural clash, because it existed earlier in other contexts.
The component of respect towards women was added to the warrior ethos in later medieval chivalry. It originated with the Troubadours and the concept of Courtly Love.
Modding:
This thread started out about a stupid HS program and has evolved into the nature of medieval chivalry. If you want to debate that, start a new thread, but the original question in this thread seems to have ended.
Modding: Moved to IMHO and reopened.
Have fun storming the castle.
I still wonder why this program didn’t get shut down the previous year. Is the fact that this was publicized nationally the only reason, or did the fact that there was much worse going on all over the place a factor?
Is there any sense (in either the course materials or statements from the faculty) that this was done with any effort to encourage or condone chivalry? I wonder if it might have been intended in the same spirit as a visit to a living history museum, like Colonial Williamsburg; “life used to be tough so be grateful we don’t have to live that way anymore”. I’m in my 50s and didn’t have to wear a jacket and tie to school. For kids today it must feel like ancient history.