We Cannot Escape History
Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) June 3, 2023
Learning from last
week’s Marietta Daily Journal that Marietta and Cobb County schools will
graduate 8,800+ students this year, I began to reflect.
I’m not sure which
group I most enjoyed teaching. Was it high school seniors, college freshmen,
college English majors, or prison inmates? All four groups had at least one
thing in common: their minds were on the future. Yes, even the minds of the
inmates in two of Georgia’s state prisons: the twenty-somethings, the pastors,
the successful businessmen and business women, nurses, lawyers, and a few
former ne’er-do-wells who had run with bad company.
Believe
it or not, thinking about the future was as characteristic of the high school
seniors as it was of any other group. Many people tend to think that high
school seniors have their minds either on partying and “getting out of here” or
on relaxing a bit their last year since after all, seniors know everything
anyhow. No such attitude was held by the seniors I’ve taught in two different
states and four different high schools. Most I’ve taught evidenced a sense of
seriousness and in some cases worry. What’s next for me? Toward what line of
work do my abilities point me? How long will Mom and Dad let me hang around?
Knowing as early as the 10th grade that I wanted to teach, I often felt
sorry for seniors who had little or no clue of what they should or could do
after high school. Sad uncertainty lay on their faces.
I
left the high school scene after 37 years of public school teaching. I left
college teaching after 14 more years. Both experiences were equally rewarding.
Over those 51 years chalk boards and dust yielded to white boards and markers,
then white boards and markers yielded to computer screens and loss of the human
touch, but students –whether youths or adults – did not change. In 2022 they
were just as respectful, just as disrespectful, just as hardworking, just as
lazy, just as inspiring, just as non-inspiring, just as engaged, just as
neglectful, just as confident, and just as needy as they were five decades
earlier. Modern times and technology have not changed human nature.
To
teach is to hold one’s grip on the pulse of the times. To teach is to watch
history in the making. Perhaps the most exciting thing about teaching is that
teachers and what they teach are essentially about the past but are for the
future. Today the growing number of absent fathers, the weakening of the
family, the beckoning of Hollywood’s moral poison, and the influence of sexual
chaos on children and youth are all things with which teachers are very
familiar. If only parents knew what teachers know about the negative influences
their children face.
It
is the possibility of a brighter or, with some, a less dark future that keeps
many young people and adults going these days. The same is true of the
imprisoned, whatever their age or background. Better than anyone else, prison
inmates know that you cannot escape history, particularly your own. Would that
those who have never been in prison could realize this truth.
But
how are schools handling history? Primarily they give us political history
(wars, dates, elections, etc.) and little if any intellectual history (ideas,
say, of Jefferson, Socrates, Cicero, Benjamin Franklin, and others). Political
and cultural revolutions, wars, and economic depressions spring from actions
which spring from ideas. No political leader has influenced us more than the
ideas of Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Dr. Spock. How many wars, religious
controversies, and personal/family struggles can be traced to Marx, Darwin,
Freud, and Dr. Spock? The answer is almost all of them. Yet, we all studied
what these four opinion-givers caused rather than what they first thought up
and wrote. Failing to examine the ideas behind our wars and our poor parenting,
we therefore repeat our errors.
Mississippi
novelist William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past isn’t over yet.” Indeed it
never will be. What our 8,800+ graduates learned is that America in its
beginnings aspired to be a different kind of nation, one that shook off the
tyranny of the Old World and fought for freedoms that had never been enjoyed by
any nation before. But what they face today is a nation of group identities
with group grievances. Teddy Roosevelt warned us that if we lost the vision our
framers intended, we would become “a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”
History
has been defined by several scholars as “a rich weave of many threads.” I pray
that our graduates will awaken to this fact and do their part to stop the
unraveling that is now occurring in America.
No comments:
Post a Comment