Growing Up Too Fast

"Trying to protect his students' innocence, he told them that the Ice Age was really just the Chilly Age, a period of a million years where everyone had to wear sweaters."

It seems absurd to the modern teenager that the children in Billy Collins's The History Teacher would even believe the lies they are fed on a daily basis. It's hard to imagine a world in which children believe the words they are told without hesitation or questions. This poem does more than highlight the importance of history, it highlights the lost idea of a childhood. 

Kids growing up in the 2010's, "Generation Z", have something that past generations never would have dreamed of: an endless source of information, entertainment, and social interactions. From many angles, the implementation of technology into daily life is a blessing! Kids are so much more knowledgeable about the world than their parents ever were. By being exposed to the world's issues from a young age, we become extremely passionate about fixing them by the time we graduate from high school. Technology has become a path to saving the world. However, many of us don't remember a time when we weren't stressed about something. We are being raised in a world where innocence is just a concept. 

To me, an older member of Generation Z, The History Teacher is more than a symbol of the importance of history. It depicts a world that is lost, a world in which children are still naive enough to believe that "the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan." To me, this idea is impossible. In class, we decided that knowing the truth of history is important in order to avoid repeating mistakes. Right now, this is more true than it has ever been, and as myself and those my age continue to grow up, it becomes obvious that the innocence of the children in the poem was never a reality for us. We were born to save the world, and we have always known that. It's a fact, just like the events of history that were shielded from the children in the poem. Protecting our innocence has become useless, for there was never anything to protect.