Unlearning the Myths That Blind Us by Christensen: Reflection

When I first started to read this article, Unlearning the Myths that Blind Us, by Christensen I knew exactly what I was going to write about.  This topic I have always wondered about because I feel that the media has had a impact of what I have done while growing.  Growing up every girl thinks they are going to fall in love with their prince charming a live a happy ever after.  It sometimes always doesn’t work like that.  Disney and all these other cartoons in the media have put these images, good or bad into our head from a young age that make us be a stereotype people and situations around us as the author called “secret education”. 

I remember in high school we had to do a similar project to the one the author gave his students.  In my psychology class in high school we had to do the rice babies and had to pretend we were parents.  Throughout the process of being a parent we had to watch different types of cartoon movies with our child.  When you watching these Disney movies as a child you never really think of what the message is, you just see a beautiful princess that is looking for love and an evil women that is trying to get in the way to stop her dreams from coming true.  Anyways for my project we had to look at all the things in the Disney movies The Little Mermaid and Mulan. Watching these movies now I could not believe what messages they were sending to these kids.  Take Mulan for example, one part of the movie Mulan is trying to impress a man to marry.  That is not a great message you want to be sending to kids because girls are going to think that you have to dress to impress someone.  Girls in a lot of these movies are portrayed as beautiful and sexy women which isn’t the reality.  Take every movie that has a evil stepmother or some kind of evil women.  Back when I watched these I thought they were scary to look at and they still are today.  That is not showing a great message either because not every fat or ugly or old person is going to act that way toward someone.  There are so many more examples that I can go on with but we might be here forever!

 

As much as no one wants to admit what we see as little kids on television and as young adults portrays part of what we are today.  As much as I love my Disney movies and loved my shows growing up, there is a part me that wants to go back and tell myself that a lot of the stuff that happens in movies and on television doesn’t happen in real life.

Questions/Comments:

I feel that we should do a project on this with race.  I feel that it would be interesting to see what we can conclude.  Also I would like to know why the author started to do this project.  I feel that a lot of students as they grow up should learn about information like this.