Carefully Taught: The Lesson Plan of Hate
You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught from year to year,
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear…
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
When Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote those lyrics for South Pacific in 1949, they likely knew they were poking at a nerve. But they probably didn’t realize they were writing what would become one of the most quietly radical pieces of musical theater ever staged in America.
The song is short. Melodically simple. Nearly spoken. And yet it does what very few works of art ever manage: it tells an unflinching truth without apology, metaphor, or dilution. It calls out the system, not just individuals, for what it does to children. How it conditions them to hate.
