Democratic View: Teach your children well

A few days before the president of the United States held his rally in Tulsa, my daughter called, irate, to ask, “Why don’t I know about the Tulsa Massacre?”

The answer is complex, but as with most things that irritate her, it’s largely my fault. First, it’s my fault as a parent for failing to force alternative history texts on my child. Second, it’s my fault as an educator for failing to do the hard work to improve the way we teach children history.

My day job is writing educational materials for pre-K through grades 12 and above. For the decades I’ve done this work, I have avoided writing science and social studies. I’m not a scientist, and I’m not willing to finesse garbage science for southern states. When it comes to social studies, I find myself falling down the rabbit hole every time I try.

Here’s an example. As a favor for a client, I had to write a page recently on Michigan statehood. To apply for statehood, territories in the 1830s had to prove they had reached a certain threshold in population and land mass.

Down the rabbit hole I go: Do I explain how and why the census didn’t count indigenous peoples? Do fourth-graders have the context to understand where that land came from and how and at whose expense? How do I fit all that onto a page? Pretty soon I’m staring at a blank document for an hour and wondering why I took the gig.

Same job, different day: I wrote a sentence suggesting that Detroit hit its zenith as a manufacturing center in the mid-20th-century. The reviewer called this “mean” and remarked that “we want the students to feel proud of where they live.”

Is that the point of teaching children their history? It certainly was when I went to school. Back then, history was all about how much better we were than the Soviets. My fourth-grade teacher in Ithaca regularly reminded us all that we’d be lined up and shot if we behaved this badly in the USSR.

If our goal is to make students feel proud of where they live, we will clearly have to avoid all uncomfortable conversations about race and money and power. That pretty well describes how we teach history in this country: through avoidance, whitewashing, obfuscation and myth-making.

If you doubt me, try this classic example. Ask yourself how old Rosa Parks was on that bus and why she didn’t give up her seat. If you picture an elderly seamstress with sore feet, it’s because of myth-making and whitewashing.
It’s more convenient if Parks is a hardworking old person whose transgression is easily understood. We white folks can feel “proud of where we live” if we pretend we handed Parks a measure of freedom rather than caving to her strategic activism.

Very recently, Oklahoma added the Tulsa Massacre to its curriculum. Now students in Tulsa may learn about their own history, though possibly under the title “The Tulsa Race Riots.” Next door in Texas, or here in New York, the massacre gets no mention unless an individual teacher or school decides to mention it. That’s what local control does to our national understanding.

We tend to teach “meanwhile” history when we mention BIPOC at all. “White (men) did X, and meanwhile, here’s what Black people were doing.” “White (men) did Y, and meanwhile, here’s what happened with immigrants.” We often set the “meanwhile” material in a boxed feature off to the side. Our social studies curriculum is as segregated as the schools in which we teach it.

There are years that represent sea changes in the world – the revolutions of 1848, the uprisings of 1968. 2020 feels similar. Let’s hope we don’t end up with the reactionary pushbacks and repression that followed each of those milestones but instead achieve historic reforms.

Please let one of those reforms involve tearing up and transforming the way we teach history—not just a patchwork renovation, as with multicultural education post-1968, but a real rethinking of why and how we want children to learn about the past.

There are plenty of great resources for parents who want to supplement what kids are getting in school. The Zinn Education Project is good: zinnedproject.org, and I like Teaching Tolerance: splcenter.org/teaching-tolerance. Penguin’s ReVisioning History series puts marginalized points of view at the center of history rather than on the sidelines: penguinrandomhouse.com/series/RVH/revisioning-history.

For teachers who want to expand their anti-racist instruction, NAEYC has good resources naeyc.org/resources/topics/anti-bias?, and so does New York state nysed.gov/common/nysed/files/programs/crs/culturally-responsive-sustaining-education-framework.pdf.

Congratulations to Anna Kelles, Matt Van Houten and Seth Peacock, unofficial winners of their respective primaries for Assembly, district attorney and city court judge following the absentee ballot count. Nearly twice as many people voted absentee as voted in person in this unusual year. Kudos to everyone who campaigned in this incredibly difficult environment and to the Boards of Elections that changed course every few weeks to ensure that elections could happen.

Kathy Zahler is the former director of communications for the Tompkins County Democratic Committee. See the committee website at www.tcdemocrats.org.