On the bus this morning around 6:45 listening to two boys quizzing each other: What happened on October 29, 1929? What happened in 1933 to factory production? What is infrastructure anyway? Since it's mid-May, the social studies curriculum has finally reached the twentieth century. Now, the students are in the time period of their great grandparents, people they may actually have met. Judging by their answers, however, the boys have no clue that history is anything other than a source of test questions. What do you know of catastrophe, of economics much less economic hardship, of political compromises generally?
The era I know best, from the election of 1960, is mythic but immaterial for my children. Who remembers the nineties, much less the eighties and seventies? Indeed as I review the deep background of current events, I discover how much I've forgotten, wasn't aware of at the time (but could have been) or have plain gotten wrong. Were I to be tested even on the facts of my own lifetime, I could be easily embarrassed (and this without resort to the sly tricks teachers (I among them) employ with multiple choice questions.)
Still, you guys, there is something that I didn't have at your age but do have now. Acquired over decades of much reading of the news and in history, it's a feel for the 'worldiness' of the various eras of the past; that then was a place where people lived and strove and feared and hoped as we do now. My mind has been furnished with atlases, timelines, sweeping narratives, stories of individuals, pivotal moments, menus of great themes, upon which I reflect. Not everything I believe is coherent or resolved, much less organized, but I do have upstairs a framework within which to begin making sense of the human story of different places and times, and within which also to slot various bits (or hunks) of information as I come across them inadvertently or by design.
In fact, I'm still in the middle of world history in the age of Me, since I actively participate in the goings-on of the society, economic, political, intellectual. I contribute to history happening today as did any who lived in the past that you students are getting ready to be tested on.
So too, you two, who now were this A.M. swatting up on names and dates and terms to survive the trials designed for you by your teacher, will be bundled in an age which will be summarized, simplified, approximated,and stereotyped by the students of tomorrow, even though your experience will be of hard travail through the intricate and perplexing dramas.
Some people of the future, though, will seek to construct a kind of framework by which they can begin to encounter history by making sense of the details by reference to the generalizations and experiencing the generalizations in the character of the particulars, all connections extending, deepening, multiplying and evolving as more information incorporated, more thought applied and more investment made.
You two may be among these. You may get beyond the puerile complaints about history as just 'names and dates' and see it as the most rich, fascinating, fantastic, tragi-comic story ever told or conceived, and see your uncertainties concerning the Great Depression as just part of the story of a bus on its way to Forest Hills on a particular late spring school day.
The era I know best, from the election of 1960, is mythic but immaterial for my children. Who remembers the nineties, much less the eighties and seventies? Indeed as I review the deep background of current events, I discover how much I've forgotten, wasn't aware of at the time (but could have been) or have plain gotten wrong. Were I to be tested even on the facts of my own lifetime, I could be easily embarrassed (and this without resort to the sly tricks teachers (I among them) employ with multiple choice questions.)
Still, you guys, there is something that I didn't have at your age but do have now. Acquired over decades of much reading of the news and in history, it's a feel for the 'worldiness' of the various eras of the past; that then was a place where people lived and strove and feared and hoped as we do now. My mind has been furnished with atlases, timelines, sweeping narratives, stories of individuals, pivotal moments, menus of great themes, upon which I reflect. Not everything I believe is coherent or resolved, much less organized, but I do have upstairs a framework within which to begin making sense of the human story of different places and times, and within which also to slot various bits (or hunks) of information as I come across them inadvertently or by design.
In fact, I'm still in the middle of world history in the age of Me, since I actively participate in the goings-on of the society, economic, political, intellectual. I contribute to history happening today as did any who lived in the past that you students are getting ready to be tested on.
So too, you two, who now were this A.M. swatting up on names and dates and terms to survive the trials designed for you by your teacher, will be bundled in an age which will be summarized, simplified, approximated,and stereotyped by the students of tomorrow, even though your experience will be of hard travail through the intricate and perplexing dramas.
Some people of the future, though, will seek to construct a kind of framework by which they can begin to encounter history by making sense of the details by reference to the generalizations and experiencing the generalizations in the character of the particulars, all connections extending, deepening, multiplying and evolving as more information incorporated, more thought applied and more investment made.
You two may be among these. You may get beyond the puerile complaints about history as just 'names and dates' and see it as the most rich, fascinating, fantastic, tragi-comic story ever told or conceived, and see your uncertainties concerning the Great Depression as just part of the story of a bus on its way to Forest Hills on a particular late spring school day.
No comments:
Post a Comment