We Cannot Escape History

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 10^th 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.