What a wonderful world this would be
In a New Criterion article, Alan Charles Kors, a professor of history, points out the misperceptions that many college faculty members harbor. If only their presumptions were true!
Those often kindly teachers, however, do have a sense of urgent mission. Even if we put them on truth-serum, the academics who dominate the humanities and social sciences on our campuses today would state that K-12 education essentially has been one long celebration of America and the West, as if our students were intimately familiar with the Federalist Papers and had never heard of slavery or empire. Having convinced themselves that the students whom they inherit have been immersed in American and Western traditions without critical perspective–they do believe that–contemporary academics see themselves as having merely four brief years in which to demystify students, and somehow to get them to look up from their Madison and Hamilton long enough to gaze upon the darker side of American and Western life. In their view, our K-12 students know all about Aristotle, John Milton and Adam Smith, have studied for twelve years how America created bounty and integrated score after score of millions of immigrants, but have never heard of the Great Depression or segregation.
To avoid accusations that I care not about the Joads or Martin Luther King, Jr., I’ll add this bromide: High school students should learn about the Great Depression and segregation, too.
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June 13th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
I teach Black History and Multiculturalism, in addition to other social studies classes, in a predominantly Black inner city school. In the past, the kids had obviously been introduced to the standard Black and Brown heroes and celebrated key anniversaries. Now, it is obvious that they have been exposed to no African American history at all. In the hometown of Ralph Ellison, I kids almost never get exposed to him.
A similar pattern applies to global warming and the carbon cycle. I was an award-winning historian when my near central city neighborhood was wiped out by crack and gangs, the banking collapse, the Reagan HUD scandal, and the “Keating Five’s” savings and loans. I would teach community gardening to my neighbors. Even the kids from the toughest inner city schools had been taught about recycling and ecology. Now, it is clear that my high school kids have never been exposed to any lessons on environmentalism.
Its a shame because my students are motivated to learn those lessons. We’re supposed to teach about Melvin Tolson as a great Oklahoman, but until I saw the Great Debaters I didn’t have a clue about how to do it effectively. (ironically, I had personally known a White co-founder of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and I knew their were Black leaders, and I knew Tolson was a poet, but I had never known they were linked) A year after MLK was killed during a sanitation strike, Ralph Abernathy lead a sanitation strike march in Oklahoma City. The DA had been trying to provoke violence and the city had passed an ordinance outlawing a march across a certain street. The police and their dogs were locked and loaded when the Good Ol Boy sheriff yelled at the chief of police that you can “shoot me too” joined Abernathy and a massacre was avoided.
Your buddy, former congressman J.C. Watts, can probably tell the story about his uncle preventing an Attica at our prison riot. Orders had been given to start shooting on the hour, but Rev. Watts gained entry and stopped the nearly inevitable with three minutes to go. (I’ve seen the official records so its not a family tale)
How much more effective would teachers be if they, a) had knowledge of these histories, and b) were not discouraged from teaching history that is not on the test?