“I considered Yamacraw a touchstone: if the Yamacraw children knew about it, then the chances were excellent that the vast majority of American children had been reached.” This sentence stood out to me when they were having a discussion about the movie, The Wizard of Oz. The children on Yamacraw Island do not appear to know about many things that many other American children that live off the Island know.
Building off of that quote, in my opinion, the children of Yamacraw Island probably do not know numerous things because they have not had the experiences to go along with the material they need in order to learn and relate to. The children are stuck in the classroom and do not get out to have experiences and learn from and build on them. Conroy’s Halloween escapade seemed like a huge step in chapter six. The children were allowed to leave the island for probably the first time in their lives and participate in Halloween with the white children. The opposition against this trip upset me. Mrs. Brown hassles Conroy all the time that he needs to teach the children the material and not play around, but in reality she’s the one denying her student of life experiences to learn from and make connections. Conroy even writes, “I knew for a fact that Mrs. Brown and Miss Glover both believed that education as best served in the cramped environs of the classroom, that both of them made a vast distinction between learning and recreation, that both of them felt that education and the leather strap went together like whiskers and catfish, and that both of them thought the trip was a welcome vacation, but not an experience that could be counted as having furthered the name of education.” Mrs. Brown’s and Miss Glover’s teaching philosophies greatly differ from Conroy’s in this manner. Even if Conroy doubts whether or not the Halloween trip made a difference and whether he is making a great difference, it is a start that the children have never had.