Tales from the attic: Learning about people

Sam Smith -  At Germantown Friends School, Howard Platt was in a class by himself. Mr. Platt taught a 7th grade full-year course in geology, including field trips to the Pennsylvania RR's  Upsal Street Station to look for garnets. And in 9th grade, alone except for one other high school teacher in America at the time, he offered a highly popular course in anthropology.

Mr. Platt was a tall, bald, bespectacled Quaker who spoke both quietly and expressively. It was a wonderful world that he laid before us. Not the stultifying world of our parents, the monochromatic world of our neighborhood, the boring world of 9th grade, but a world of endless options, a world in which people got to cook, eat, shelter themselves, have sex, dance and pray in an extraordinary variety of ways. Mr. Platt's subliminal message of cultural relativism was simultaneously a message of freedom. You were not a prisoner of your culture; you could always go live with the Eskimos, Indians, Africans or the Arabs. By the time the bell rang I was often ready to move, an inclination heightened by research into the mammary variations of cultures as revealed by the photos in National Geographic.

What we learned that year was strikingly different from what we were learning elsewhere. The world around us, in many ways, was teaching us to define our place by a process of exclusion, a place secured by the fact that we were smarter, whiter, or faster than someone else.

In Mr. Platt's class, things were different. The world was defined by people who built igloos and pyramids and stone axes and rafts that could cross an ocean and they lived together in strange combinations and went into the forest to have babies and some of them had more gods than others and some didn't like to fight as much as others and some thought if you died in your sleep your soul would fly away.

You couldn't help liking them. After awhile, it was no longer odd to learn about a new culture. The difference of it all seemed natural and, in fact, brought us closer to those we were reading about.

But what I read in anthropology about some of the peoples conquered or swept aside in the great march of Western Civilization made me uncomfortable. There were American Indians, for example, who were considerably more likable than the white men who got rid of them. And it annoyed me to read of white missionaries landing on Pacific Islands and making the natives wear western clothes and some of them dying of pneumonia because they in wet western clothes after a rainstorm or going swimming.

By the end of the year I could take the Romans or leave them. I liked their domes but didn't like them beating up people because they were 'barbarians' and had some land the Romans wanted. I liked the independently invented domes of the Eskimos too, but didn't care for their tendency to dump their old people out in the snow to die when the food got short. I had become acquainted with so many cultures so vastly different from my own and from each other that I was hard pressed to say which was inferior or superior. I was not even inclined to try.