Both of my parents were born in the 1930’s and went to rural one-room schoolhouses. That’s where kids in first through eighth grade all went to school together in the same classroom taught by a single teacher. There was no kindergarten then, no English as a Second Language (my Dad’s first language was Norwegian, English was his second tongue even though he was born in Wisconsin), no special education, no school lunches, no extra-curricular activities at that level, no aides or tutors and no custodians – the kids and the teacher cleaned the school and grounds.
When I started teaching in Mitchell in 1982, the district had all the latest cutting-edge technology; film loops, film strips (some even came with sound), 16 mm movies (the old reel to reel), opaque and overhead projectors, a mimeograph machine and one copy machine for office use only. Eventually, teachers were allowed to make 20 copies a month on the office machine.
Things changed of course, computers were slowly introduced and Xerox copies replaced mimeographed handouts. Movies moved from film eventually to DVD and Blue-Ray formats. Notes on the overhead were replaced with notes via power point. There were a myriad of other changes as well.
Those changes were primarily in how content was delivered and not what content was communicated. I taught American History and loved it. In the United States we started with an ideal at our founding that “All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Of course, at the time, only white men over the age of 21 who owned property enjoyed those inalienable rights. As a result of the Civil War, Black men got the right to vote. Because of the agitation of activist women over nearly a century, finally women were granted the right to vote too. Other groups have had their struggles for recognition and rights over the years as well.
We’ve hated immigrants since we became a country. It’s always the same; immigrants are wonderful and welcome, that is until our relatives and people get in the country and then it’s time to “close the door” on everyone else. There was a time when the Irish and Catholics were hated. We’ve enslaved Africans and engaged in a kind of genocide against Native-Americans; at first, militarily and then once they were safely on reservations – against their culture. At various times we’ve persecuted and tried to deport immigrants from Japan and from China. We’ve tried to send Black people back to Africa. We’re not very nice to new immigrants. When I was in high school it was the Vietnamese Boat People that we hated. When my Dad was in high school it was the Japanese that we were at war with that everyone despised (Japanese-Americans were interned in prison camps in this country for simply looking Japanese during WWII). When my maternal grandfather was in high school, everyone hated people like him. He was Irish.
During our history we’ve been a colonial power as well as later an anti-colonialist champion of colonized peoples around the world. We’ve been the aggressor in wars, picking fights over territory and for pride but also as an unselfish combatant, a champion of freedom and humanity battling tyranny and villainy all around the world.
We’ve expanded voting rights and civil rights for some while simultaneously trying to take them away from others. Our progress as a nation has been akin to that of a toddler learning to walk; wobbly with unsure steps and lots of falls before learning to stride confidently but always with our share of scrapes, bruises and scars accumulated along the way.
The United States has been wrong, sometimes very wrong; more often though, we’ve been right. Even when things haven’t worked out, frequently our intentions were good, even noble. We are an extraordinary country with a past full of interesting figures striving for greatness. They didn’t always know what we know now. The values of today weren’t necessarily the ethics and standards of then and we should recognize rather than judge that. British philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”
If you’ve studied George Washington’s tactics in the American Revolution against the British then you understand why Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong were successful against the United States in the Vietnam War and why any country (the British, the Russians and the Americans at different times) would ultimately be unsuccessful in Afghanistan militarily. If you’ve studied the history of cultures and societies around the world then you know that extreme income inequality always leads to riots and revolutions if allowed to persist unbalanced and uncorrected for any length of time.
Right now, in the Florida Legislature, there is SB 148 that would make it a crime to make white people feel uncomfortable about race and discrimination either via history lessons or through presentations. When I was a kid our leaders and our educators were forever mocking the Soviet Union’s tendency of sanitizing history. The Soviets would do that by photo shopping pictures to get rid of people out of favor or to add the latest political darling. Historical events were omitted, glossed over or actually rewritten and lied about to indoctrinate people. In Japan today, their history books deal with WWII by basically saying Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, which made the United States angry so Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked, end of story. The Rape of Nanking, the issues of the Korean Comfort Women, war atrocities of all kinds including the treatment of American POWs are all left out of their history books so that now generations of Japanese really have no earthly idea why their neighbors continue to be mad at them and while the United States has forgiven, we still haven’t forgotten.
History needs to be taught truthfully, that means warts and all. We can’t understand why race is still an issue in this country without learning the history of race – not just with blacks and slavery but also with immigrants and minorities of all kinds. That includes “minorities” one doesn’t usually think of as minorities; for example, Americans of German descent during the world wars, the Irish, Jews and Italians to name a few. Did you know that Italians weren’t considered as “white” people when they first came over from Italy? Without understanding Vietnam one can’t understand America’s later reluctance to engage in military interventions and when we did intervene militarily why we tried to achieve our goals the way we did. The list of examples goes on and on.
The physical location and layout of the schoolhouse may change. Educational philosophies and the latest fads for in-services will come and go. Certainly technology and delivery systems will undergo transformation but what can never change is a commitment to the truth. Our children deserve to know the truth of our history.
Our nation’s history is very much like our individual lives with moments of heroics, spells of occasional weaknesses and lapses, periods of doldrums and depression, times of crisis. History is not all parades and glory; there are some pariahs and gore as well. As Christ said in John 8:32, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” We are a strong nation, certainly strong enough to hear the truth about our past. We should be free to learn it, tough enough to face it and willing to take a lesson from it.