History? Or His Story?

      Recently in class we read a poem called "The History Teacher" by Billy Collins. It was about a history teacher fabricating the events of wars with intentions of protecting the innocence of his students. 

However the same teacher who was trying to 'protect' is students didn't know that it was them whom other students needed protection from, while they bullied kids and broke their glasses. 

There seems to be a slight misinterpretation and a thin line between protection and ignorance, approach and avoidance. 

Protecting someone doesn't necessarily entail the act of having to lie to them, but to simply restrain from sharing too much in too much detail for them to process and interpret what it means to themselves. 

There's a reason why the hideous crimes committed were never explained to us as children but simply labelled as 'bad things' done by 'bad strangers'. 

It's not like our parents or other adult figures hid the truth from us, they just never disclosed the severity and detail of things we weren't prepared to be so aware of. 

We still aren't prepared to be aware of some of the things we are made to. 

It's simply a matter of how we comprehend our surroundings.

Sometimes we can't be protected from the things we learn. We can only learn from the things that can't protect us.