A New Kind of Education

Thanks to both of the groups who presented this week.  I learned a lot, and both presentations made me think.  It’s not the first time that this class has made reconsider my high school education and what it actually taught me about history, literature, and life generally.  This is not to knock my high school teachers, because a lot of them helped me to become a better student and forced me to think through my value systems (and since then Rhodes has done that again, on the daily), but it is interesting to me how little time we paid to the not-so-pretty pieces of US History, World History, and, in my Catholic school, the history of the Church. 

In class, someone asked what kind of impact it would have if we started complicating things earlier and how we might go about doing that.  A guy I met who teaches fifth grade in Colorado told me that he read a book with his students about how to combat racism.  I think this is great and important, but it seems like there’s a lot of conversation about how to fight racism and not a lot of conversation about why racism exists and who benefits from it.  In our yearly section on Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, we talk about justice and injustice and the legal battle against racism, but there’s not a lot of discussion about how our founding fathers had no intention of including their slaves in the Constitution.   As the group presenting on Eze noted in class, there is so much work to be done in order to reframe history in a way that doesn’t gloss over, excuse, or ignore entirely the reality of racism and its impact on the way that we think and then, act. 

How, though, do we start this reinvestigation and reconsideration of our history?  And when?  It seems clear that we need to reread the major texts that everyone considers in school in light of the voices, experiences, and perspectives of people of color (and of women) and with a frank acknowledgement of the problems with our founding fathers, major literary figures, and philosophers.  There’s a program called Facing History and Ourselves that focuses on confronting bigotry and teaching through the Holocaust in particular.  I know that in my high school, it probably wouldn’t have been great for any teacher to provide Howard Zinn’s “People’s History;” parents would not have responded well.  So, how do we do this?  I know it’s a huge question (sorry), but I thought it was a really interesting conversation in class and wanted to continue the conversation here.