I remember it as being Little Joe, who, forgetting that an illiterate man might take the word “fight” literally, had his debate challenge accepted as an offer to scuffle, and got his ass handed to him.
The fact that LJ showed up and took his ass-kicking like a man served to open the guy’s eyes to a new perspective.
Actually, I have a real world example. My husband’s sister’s ex, who I never met, was apparently concerned that she spent too much time reading aloud to their son when he was a toddler, because it would “make him gay.”
FTR, he is 24, not gay, and has a college degree, only the second in the family after my husband.
I’m sure he’d have the exact same reaction as a fifty-year-old White male from the suburbs of the American Midwest, I’ll tell you that much, and validate every single one of that person’s opinions with an unimpeachable authority.
Have Gun Will Travel had an episode where a schoolteacher was being attacked for teaching an inconvenient, though correct piece of history. So I bet you are right. Westerns could address controversial topics in the same way as SF. Whatever show this was, it reminds me of Fahrenheit 451 in message.
A friend with a graduate degree, told of his parents who would tell him in HS to get his homework done; his friends’ parents, in a working class neighborhood, would scold their kids for sitting around doing nothing - go get a job!
That sounds very similar, but it doesn’t mention the father being physically abusive, and my hazy recollections include just one son, who didn’t have behavioral issues. There was a very specific scene where the main adult character happens to walk in on the boy as he’s putting on his shirt, and sees the boy’s back covered in welts from a whipping. And the actual teaching wasn’t taking place in school — the father wouldn’t allow the son to attend. Rather, the boy and the teacher were meeting secretly for lessons.
Arg, trying to accurately recall something I saw 30+ years ago is frustrating. Did I actually see what I “remember”, or has time embellished the memory?
I was going to suggest *The Rifleman *as well, but I think this trope appears in quite a few Western T.V. show episodes.
Albert A. Michelson, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. He grew up in Virginia City, where Bonanza is set. Early episodes of Bonanza often incorporated real historical people who lived in or visited Virginia City, like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and Lillie Langtry. Of course the whole story about his father and the illiteracy was completely fictional. Michelson’s family were Jews from Poland and his father was a merchant.
I remember looking Michelson up years ago after I saw the episode, and being disappointed that the backstory wasn’t based on fact.
