It is Summer so I have time to write a bit. @BlueCerealEduc decided to share something that made me think and feel guilty about not writing. Not that it’s worth reading, but it is something I tell my students all people should do. The article is a plea from academia to make your voice heard. Go read it here. History is happening folks and it's our job to write it. We discussed in class several times this year “the past is what lasts” and you cannot tell your story once you are gone.
The story makes some remarkable points and is absolutely something that needs to be done. I’m going to keep up with this more especially since I plan to make my students do something similar this upcoming year. They have no idea how much they are going to love this!
I’ll discuss current topics of concern as they come up and in future posts. For this entry I want to discuss something else. I’m teaching a seminar for TPS Summer Professional Development (shameless plug check it out here) on teaching History in Today’s world. I can blog more about that after I present but as I was doing laundry at 4:30 this morning (I have a weird sleep schedule) a thought came to me. I spent countless class periods last year discussing the importance of studying the outcome of historic events. More often than not, the aftermath is more critical than the instance.
Too often our discipline focuses on the timeline. Just what and who happened. In doing so we, as has been stated before, dilute history to rote memorization of names, dates, and body counts.
There were faces to those names and stories before and after those dates. There are narratives (notice plural) that go along with that timeline. There are also scarring, traumatic, and corrosive open-wounds metastasizing beneath the lost voices of those body counts. Those wounds are not going to heal on their own. And we are going to keep making them worse, and creating quite a few new ones along the way if we don’t alter our behavior. They will continue to flare-up, and we will continue to have the same conversations over, and over, and over.
We are told ad nausea (and as a history teacher I absolutely hate this phrase) “Those that don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” Here’s the thing, we know our history, and we are STILL repeating it. Why is that? This statement is logically false, if taken literally. We cannot do the exact same thing with different people, technology, and cultures. So only a fool would take it literally, right? Then why, when we try to make those comparisons we are constantly countered with the “well, it’s not exactly like that” argument. It almost feels like some institutions and people, at the very least do not want to talk about these problems, or at the worst, do not want these problems remedied for any number of reasons (see: money and power). And that is absolutely for several other blog posts…
To reiterate, there is no such thing as an identical historic event. But there are several similarities within several similar events. We have to be willing to see those similarities. We have to be willing to own our ancestors mistakes. They are our situation now. And we have to be willing to learn and grow or we are going to leave them, and any new ones we create for our kids and grand kids to deal with.
We cannot use our historic events as lessons if we don’t take the time to compare, analyze, and create an understanding of our common cultural and human nature. Of course we don’t have slaves anymore (well kinda), so why do we need to know how “personal liberty laws” played out? We just need to know it happened right? Wrong. There is a world of difference between the experience of American Slavery of the 17th and 18th Century and the situation Undocumented workers face today, but that’s the point. I picked this one because it is right in the wheelhouse of the “not exactly” crowd. It won’t be identical but it does give us a road map. I would encourage you to think about this when events happen. Ask, has this happened before? Go study and find out about those “other times”. What worked, and what didn’t. We don’t have time to analyze and road map how our decisions today will play out, but we can make good guesses off of past experiences.
If history teaches us anything, it is that our actions can echo through generations. We need to understand that when we make decisions. We need to understand that when we vote and when we support candidates and causes. And we need to be able to transfer what we learned from past experiences and make better choices the next time an opportunity presents itself. Because believe me we are going to have plenty opportunities to make big generation-echoing decisions in our near future.
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