Column: Why are Indiana's lawmakers so focused on keeping knowledge away from children?

It should come as no surprise Indiana lawmakers are so focused on preventing students from learning a true history of their state and country. After all, their views for the most part are the result of generations of indoctrination, of the preaching of a sanitized, even mythical recounting of the past heavily weighted in favor of a white, male storyline.

People of color, even women, were given little notice, at best granted maybe a paragraph within the text of public school history books or a footnote hidden away in the back pages.

And as for the LGBTQ community, it never existed — at least not on paper. An English teacher did one day warn us we could “turn queer” if we ate Twinkies or drank too many Cokes.

My ninth-grade shop teacher gave us boys “the talk” about “homos.” (Did the Home Ec teacher give a similar talk to the girls?) Apparently, after graduation we all would be serving in the Navy and at some point while on shore leave would go into a bar in some city where we’d be approached with an offer of a “deviant nature” — which he described to us in graphic detail.

Not one of my classmates was Black or brown but I was pretty sure some were gay and lesbian. I was too self-absorbed in my own life to give much thought to what their experiences were like. But I didn’t think of them as “deviants” or go out of my way to avoid them.

So the world I grew up in (and the world most state legislators grew up in) was in fact populated by people of different colors and sexual preferences, even if some of us rarely encountered them.

I certainly wasn’t learning about them in my school books, and had to look elsewhere.

My senior year I tried to find a copy of Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in the school library. No luck. I tried the local Carnegie Library. Again no luck.

I did find a paperback copy in the book racks at Pielemeier's Drug Store, my go-to place for the knowledge I wasn’t getting in school. It was right there among many other books, including “Soul On Ice,” “The Boys in the Band,” and “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.”

Gayle R. Robbins is a retired newspaper editor and publisher who lives in Bloomfield, where he was born and raised, and where the biggest influences on his young mind were the local Carnegie library and the book racks at Pielemeier’s Drug Store.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Columnist writes generational indoctrination drives Indiana lawmakers