Flawless heroes? It is important for young people to have heroes, but society cannot ignore the facts and only report on the good side of these heroes. Everyone is human and will make mistakes. Hopefully they learn from these mistakes, and if these mistakes are brought to light and passed on to young people, then they too will learn from them. History has the duty to account for the whole story. Reporting less would be a mistake. To simply say that Columbus was a perfect man who never did anything wrong would paint an unrealistic picture of the past. Mr. Gibbon, the author of this article seems to think that reality is a bad thing and should not be taught in our classrooms. However, today's young people must be prepared for life in one way or another. You can't feed them everything from a sugar-coated spoon. If they were handed everything on a silver platter like that, when they first entered the real world, they would not be able to adapt and become a productive part of society. Young people today are looking for heroes like Mr. Gibbon suggests, but everyone will have skeletons in their closet, hero or no hero. Asking society to ignore the facts just so young people can feel like these people are squeaky clean is wrong. Society cannot lie to them. There is some value in teaching reality even if Mr. Gibbon doesn't seem to think so. Mr. Gibbon mentions that there is a sort of "tradition of exemplary lives" among society's heroes that once existed but no longer exists. However, there has never been such a tradition of wonderfully perfect people with perfect lives. Back then, people ignored the facts and decided to believe that these people were perfect when in reality, they weren't perfect, they were just human. You cannot protect today's youth. people. You can't just hide reality from them. Reality must be exposed and studied so that they can try to understand the world. I agree with Gibbon that parents are the first and most important educators and they must try to make their lives exemplary so that their children can do so..