Notes From My Knapsack 2-12-06
Jeff Gill

What They Don’t Teach You

How would you feel if your child brought home a history book that was 1,200 pages long and weighed as much as a small engine block? If it came with wheels and a retractable handle it might not actually attract much notice. "Don’t forget to wheel along your text cart, honey."
As an occasional purveyor of history, in classrooms and less formal contexts, I get weary of the refrain "they don’t teach that in school." Truly, there is much we don’t teach in school. Give me your child for 180 days a year from K through 12th grade, six hours a day, and I’ve got access to about 9% of their life from birth to age eighteen. In that sliver of their lives, sayeth the teachers, we do math, science, grammar, health, too little gym and nowhere near enough music.
But somehow you don’t get a constant threnody of "boy-o-boy, they sure didn’t tell me about the rules for cricket in school," or "isn’t it sad that they never explain the Finnish mythology behind Sibelius’ symphonies in the classroom." Nope, it’s only history teachers who are all part of a vast academic conspiracy to hide vital information from the kids.
English teachers would love to show the development from Indo-European roots through Latin to our modern language, which reveals how our speech changes today, and Math folk wish they could spend some time on Euclid and Euler and Riemann and all the marvelous characters who pressed the sphere of our knowledge of numbers out towards infinity. Yet no one implies that they’re keeping this complex narrative from the public, just that in a certain amount of time, with texts a certain length, some stuff has to be left out.
History goes into a very different evaluation system. To some degree, historians, professional and otherwise, understand this. We are telling the story of communities and groups and nations who have a strong, usually passionate relationship to the narrative thread that is running through our hands. Minority perspectives and voiceless groups looked at history books from a past era (Our Nation Marches On To Her Manifest Destiny) and said, "Um, could you, like mention us? Other than as, say, "savages," please?"
Good points, most of which have been worked into the standard texts in use for decades now. We hear from the lower decks and not just the captain’s cabin on the voyages of discovery; the slave ships are shown through the magnifying end of the telescope, instead of the minimizing glance sweeping past on the way to the focus on the Civil War (which was fought why? The slaves just kinda showed up?).
And there is still some work to do, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. When I was teaching American history to college freshmen, I never felt like I spent enough time on Reconstruction. It came at the end of the semester (Native American empires circa 500 BC to Columbus 1492 to 1776 to 1877. . .can you feel the squeeze?) so was often noted on the last ill-attended day of class with "this is a tremendously important period in our nation’s history and I recommend Prof. Blank’s course on the Reconstruction period" which of course hardly anyone took.
(Editorial aside: if you had this happen to you, and it did, go to the library or your favorite on-line book source and read Eric Foner’s magnificent new book, or his still awesome older one on what went down 1865 to 1877 in our land. Then read Taylor Branch’s final volume in his civil rights trilogy "At Canaan’s Edge." You’ll listen to yourself going "ohhhh, ah ha, now I see. . .ouch" and other deep historical insights.)
But the bottom line is that history classes will never cover it all, choices will be made, and reasonable people can disagree over which choices they would have made. Now we have conservative groups crying foul over the fact that there is less or no Winston Churchill, but much of the contents of Mrs. McGillicuddy’s sewing bag in the tenements of Boston. Liberal groups protest the "exclusion" of gay Basque sheepherders when three pages are "wasted" on that noted reactionary Harry Truman. Thanks to all for playing!
There is no end to that particular game. What we need is an understanding and commitment to life long learning in American culture; that we will read and visit and listen and talk about all the interesting details, often near at hand, of the story sketched out in the classroom.
No one taught me in any classroom about the Sepoy Mutiny in British India 1857, but knowing about the rebellion of Muslim troops beginning with a rumor than their musket cartridges were smeared with pig fat, culminating in the infamous "Black Hole of Calcutta" gives me a useful perspective as riots in the Arab world result from some cartoons in a Danish magazine. I was curious about where the term "Black Hole of Calcutta" came from, and spent precisely zero time wondering why "they" didn’t tell me; I went looking for the answer, using the skills "they" did teach me.
I’ll bet math and literature and science teachers wouldn’t mind if we all took that principal to heart for their fields. They are giving us a launch pad, not a gated enclosure for knowledge. Start the countdown!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; point out an area worth learning more about to disciple@voyager.net.