ANST - Educational view

[Russell Kinder]

There's a flaw in your logic, Karl. We don't have to exactly re-create
the middle ages, or any specific peroid within it, in order to be
educational. We just have to research and teach now and then.

I have a question for you. You give a long list of historical
inaccuracies in the way the SCA is played. But where did you learn that
these are inaccuracies? In your UNIX networking classes? No, we don't
play the middle ages the way they really were. But many of us do
extensive research on the way things *really* were, and then teach it.

In the end, the educational requirement for our non-profit status is
satisfied not by how we play the middle ages, but how we research and
teach about the middle ages. The other is just organizational structure
and social activities. The actual re-enactment doesn't have to have
anything to do with the research or teaching.

Besides, we admit up front that we are all pretending to be nobles, and
pretending that we have serfs and retainers. 

Lord Guillaume de Troyes
...
owner-ansteorra at ansteorra.org wrote:
> 
> I myself am having a harder and harder time believing that the SCA is an
> educational group.
[snip]
> If I joined the SCA for "educational" purposes, I'd learn that in the
> middle ages:
> 
>    * Almost everyone had the opportunity to aspire to a position of some
>      sort, whether it be king, queen, knight, baron, autocrat, or whatever.
>      That the blue-blood to peasant ratio was not that different.
> 
>    * Most of the people were rich as is evident by their fine clothes,
>      clean clothes, their plates, silverwear, etc.
> 
>    * Awards, honors, and special mentions were quite plentiful.
> 
>    * Almost everyone owned metal armor and fought with rattan.
> 
>    * All people fought honorably and everyone tried to be polite.
> 
>    * Religion was not a very prominent part of people's lives.  Crosses
>      were rarely displayed and religious talk rarely heard.
> 
>    * Kings never defend their throne from usurpers.
> 
>    * The majority of the people in the middle ages were from Europe.
>      Very little of the earth's population were in the Middle East or
>      Far East and nobody lived in the Americas.
> 
>    * Women alternated between middle-eastern and traditional european
>      clothing.  Several traditional european types donned belly-dancer
>      garb and danced to the drums at night.
> 
>    * People camped in canvas tents with screens and zippers.
> 
>    * Early period personas lived side-by-side with later period
>      Rennassiance personas.
> 
> The SCA is more of a 20th century, politically correct, polished version
> of the middle ages.
> 
> Granted, I'm no authent-o-crat myself.  I appreciate the things of the
> middle ages, but I'd prefer a party to a museum tour.  But I'm not trying
> to fool myself that it's education for me or anyone else.
> 
> -Karl von Augsburg
> __________________________________________________________________________
> Joel Schumacher                        JCPenney Co. - UNIX Network Systems
> jschumac at uns-dv1.jcpenney.com          12700 Park Central Pl
> (972) 591-7543                         Dallas TX  75251
============================================================================
Go to http://www.ansteorra.org/lists.html to perform mailing list tasks.