Flawless Heroes? It is important for young people to have heroes, but society cannot ignore the facts and only report the good side of those heroes. Everyone is human and will make mistakes. Hopefully they learn from those mistakes, and if those mistakes are brought to light and communicated to young people, then they will learn from those mistakes too. History has a duty to tell the whole story. To report anything less would be wrong. Simply saying 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. Today's young people, however, need to be prepared in some way for life. They can't be fed everything with a sugar-coated spoon. If they had been given everything on a silver platter like that, when they first stepped out into the real world they wouldn't have been able to adapt and become a productive part of society. Today's youth are looking for heroes as Mr. Gibbon suggests, but every person will have skeletons in their closet, hero or no hero. Asking society to ignore the facts just so young people can feel that 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 says there is a kind of "tradition of exemplary lives" in society's heroes that used to exist but no longer exists. Yet there has never been such a tradition of wonderfully perfect people with perfect lives. Then people ignored the facts and decided to believe that these people were perfect when the fact was that they were not perfect, they were simply human beings. You can't protect today's young people. You can't just cover their eyes from reality. 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 must try to make their lives exemplary so that their children can.