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What are we learning in school? |
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Tuesday, 09 March 2010 |
Danny Gardner — Columnist
“Why don’t they just teach what happened?” my friend asked. At our weekly meeting with the guys, I told about attending a workshop for secondary history teachers in northeast Mississippi.
During the morning session, specialists from “Teaching for Change” – a politically progressive, DC-based resource for Kindergarten through 12th grade – regaled participants with a host of activities and methodologies (pedagogy, for those academically inclined) proven to increase students’ interest in history.
I told the men about some of the resources the specialists had touted, including a video clip of Howard Zinn performing a monologue depicting our Founding Fathers as the bad ‘white men’ who got what they wanted while giving nothing they had promised to thousands of soldiers who had fought beside them.
Zinn accurately pointed out desertions among Continental troops during the Revolutionary War, and rebellions afterward in communities throughout our young republic when citizens felt slighted by powerful ‘white men’ in government who didn’t share spoils of war with ‘ordinary’ citizens.
Who was Howard Zinn? Zinn died this past January, and the New York Times included in his obituary comments about “A People’s History of the United States,” probably his best-known work published in 1980.
“To describe it as a revisionist account is to risk understatement. A conventional historical account held no allure; he [Zinn] concentrated on what he saw as the genocidal depredations of Christopher Columbus, the blood lust of Theodore Roosevelt and the racial failings of Abraham Lincoln. He also shined an insistent light on the revolutionary struggles of impoverished farmers, feminists, laborers and resisters of slavery and war.”
Zinn’s take on criticism of his book? “It’s not an unbiased account; so what? If you look at history from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated, it’s a different story.”
I suppose all accounts of history are biased, some like Zinn’s on purpose, the rest merely tainted with biases of their authors. Even tomorrow’s history, today’s news covers the spectrum of ideological philosophies and biases.
With today’s information overload, most Americans glean little bits of current events from favored sources. Each of us tends to read, listen, or view what we already agree with. “Just teaching what happened,” or reporting what happened for that matter, is complicated at best.
In my own K-12 days, most of my teachers taught me what we were supposed to learn. I was also fortunate to have teachers who taught me how to think, something Zinn and his ideological colleagues and counterparts have abandoned.
The most vulnerable among us are our children. What are they learning in school? Whatever they’re learning will pre-determine which facts and sources they will believe and trust as they grow into adults.
Adults who participated in the healthcare summit in Washington could not agree on ‘the facts.’ Nobody won. School children and adults will likely learn only one side of ‘the facts.’
In history as in news or life, what happened is always skewed by ‘who said’ what happened. As the song says, “Teach your children well.”
(Danny Gardner is a columnist frfom Starksville, Miss. Reach him at
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 17 March 2010 )
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