'Civil Rights' 5 Minute Freewrite

I usually stick to fiction, but I thought I’d give a non-fiction ramble for today’s five minutes, with a prompt of ‘civil rights’:

I’ve been teaching a class to local homeschoolers for the last few weeks. My series ended up being titled “Ancient Romans: Life and Culture”, so we’ve been discussing a lot of, well, life and culture. My main goal in my approach was to help the kids have a thoughtful understanding of history.

Sometimes I feel like there’s an attitude, in some circles, to laugh at the people who came before us. To look at how naïve they were, how ignorant their practices could be. And while there certainly are many humorous aspects to history, I wanted the kids to see the Romans not as pointless facts or old rubble, but as living, breathing people.

I get nervous each week before class, but I think it’s been going well so far. Coming up with crafts for the end of class has been challenging with more than a couple late nights of preparation, but it’s rewarding to see how much the kids like them. They’ve been surprisingly interested in my PowerPoints, and their constant questions usually make us run overtime.

One thing they asked surprisingly little about were slaves. The Romans owned slaves from anywhere they conquered, and discussing them is unavoidable when talking about their lives. Nor should it be avoided, necessarily, since it was just a fact of life for them. Anyways, with today’s prompt of ‘civil rights’ it made me think of it.

It also reminded me of a conversation I had with my mom earlier today. She was asking about the rights or roles of women in ancient times, and suggesting that maybe I could do a class on that. At first glance, it would appear to be a major contrast from our world today.

In Athens in ancient Greece, women were essentially property. Their fathers made every decision for them, and when they were married their husband would take over. It’s not that women weren’t respected exactly (dying in childbirth was considered as equally honorable as dying in war) but they had basically no freedom.

Things were better in Rome, at least eventually. Women were still subject to their father’s will, but they had a choice when getting married: stay under their father’s control or their husband’s. This might not seem like much, but when the father died, the woman was then in charge of herself. She was free to own property, run a business, things like that.

As a general rule I don’t like talking about politics with people, but I will say that parts of the world still aren’t that far off from the Romans’ view of civil rights. I won’t rant about that, but even the Romans came around to letting women attend sporting events. Recent news has highlighted that even that isn’t allowed everywhere.

That sort of thing isn’t exactly what I want to explain to ten-year-olds, but maybe there’s a way it could work from a historical orientation. I’m not sure how many of my current students would be interested in a class on that, especially if there’s no craft at the end, but we’ll see.

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So, more like ten minutes, and very much a thought ramble. Oh well, I’ll probably go back to fiction freewrites next time.

Thanks for reading!

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The picture is one I took. It doesn't have anything to do with civil rights, but it is Roman. And as a side note, I did discuss musical instruments in one of the classes. This statue is Apollo playing a kithara. Although it sort of resembles a harp, it's actually the etymological origin of the word 'guitar'.