Before the Internet
In 1983 I was teaching at the Middle School. Mostly, it was eighth grade American History, but I also had two sections of sixth grade social studies. I was good with eighth graders, tons of energy and the “top of the school” attitude to go with it. But sixth graders were different, especially in 1983. It was the era before the internet and social media (Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t even born until 1984), and there was still a lot of naivete in twelve year old kids.
A couple of years at Middle School changed that, and there was always a stark contrast between my classes. The eighth graders who thought they knew everything, and the sixth graders who knew they didn’t.
My philosophy of education was that I would do my best to answer every question the kids had. Sometimes the answers had to be appropriate to their age and understanding, but I wanted my students to feel that we could talk about whatever was going on in the world and I would give them an honest answer. I wanted them to know about history and the world, the failures and the glories, and give them more than just “dates and names”. My goal was to help them become good “citizens”, who could ask questions and reach logical conclusions about our world. Discussing, questioning, evaluating information: that’s what good citizens do.
Too Much Information
So it was in a sixth grade class during a current events discussion that a boy brought up a “gay murder”. In 1983 “gay” wasn’t much discussed in school, much less middle school. In fact, I was relatively sure that my sixth graders didn’t even know what “gay” was. The AIDS crisis was just beginning, with the government still in denial about why it was centered in the gay population. A forty-three year old virologist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was one of the leading researchers in the field. Ultimately 700,000 Americans would die from AIDS over twenty years, ironically near the same number that COVID has taken in the past year and three-fourths.
As a teacher I wanted to answer the student’s question, without giving him and the rest of the class way more information than they were ready for. So I began asking him questions about what he knew about the murder. We were just getting into the issue, when the bell rung.
That gave me some time to research it myself. In those days, that meant going to the school library and digging into the Columbus Dispatch to see what happened. To my relief, the murder wasn’t a “gay murder”. It was a murder ON Gay Street in downtown Columbus.
Warts and All
But I tried to let my students face controversies, especially the eighth graders. We confronted slavery and the Native American removal, bigotry and labor exploitation, the Holocaust and the Japanese-American Internment. They heard my story about meeting the hero Jesse Owens, and how he came home with four gold medals from the 1936 Olympics, but as a black man couldn’t find work. We spoke to an internment camp survivor, a World War II spy, and a Vietnam veteran, the War of my students’ fathers.
My classes looked at the pictures of mountains of piled buffalo pelts, and discussed how it was a military strategy to starve the Native Americans on the plains and force them onto reservations. We learned the pathos of brother against brother in the Civil War, but also learned that one side was fighting for the right to enslave men.
I wanted my students to see America as a nation of destiny, warts and all. Not everyone was bad, but they weren’t all “angels” either. Our Nation started in contradiction: a man who enslaved others writing “…all men are created equal”.
Faux Balance
This week in Texas, a school administrator told a teacher that she had to “balance” the “controversial” literature in her classroom. Her books on the Holocaust had to be balanced with…
Books that deny the Holocaust occurred? Ones that tells the stories of the “good Nazis”?
When I was attending Denison University, I took a comparative historic literature class. We read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the novel about slavery that helped ignite the Civil War, and several of the “Anti-Tom” books written to defend the South’s “peculiar institution”. It was an exercise in understanding propaganda from both sides, as the nation approached the war. But we didn’t “balance” abolitionism with slavery – we acknowledged that there was an absolute evil in enslavement, period.
This isn’t about “Critical Race Theory”, an idea intentionally misunderstood by some to mean diversity education. There can’t be “balance”, presenting “both sides” of some issues. There is no “positive side” of discrimination. And just because you can “find” Holocaust deniers, or modern segregationists, or any other number of extreme views – there still is right and wrong. Teachers’ need to be more than “neutral presenters”, they need to explain the fundamental truth of all history: that it was made by humans, women and men: of all races, identities, and views. And that out of that mishmash of humanity mistakes were made – but a lot of progress was made too.
Wrong Message Received
There are folks running for School Boards all across the nation, and right here in Pataskala, demanding that classroom teachers be muzzled, prevented from discussing any “controversial” issue. Even when they don’t get on the Board, that message is getting through to those on frontline in the classroom: don’t take the chance and “rock the boat”. Avoid all controversies – muzzle yourself, and even worse, muzzle your students.
It’s important that students learn mathematics. It’s important that they can read and write, and understand science (now more than ever). But it’s even more important, in an age when “all knowledge” is at a student’s fingertips, that students learn to evaluate information and reach reasonable decisions. That’s called teaching citizenship. In our currently fragile Democracy, perhaps it is the most important goal a school should have.
