History Will Stick to Your Feet, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise

March 19, 2010 Martha Thomases 13 Comments

Once again, Facebook has made my life collapse in upon itself, like one of those cups you take camping.  In this case, the trigger was finding my high school American History teacher.  As you’ll remember from last week’s column, my high school was kind of intense.  As a student at an all-girls’ boarding school affiliated with an all-boys school, I didn’t have any classes with boys until my junior year.

While this didn’t help my social maturity in any way, shape or form (I’m still nervous talking to teenage boys), it was terrific academically.  All kinds of studies show that girls (in general) do better in single-gender classrooms, because they don’t worry that boys will find them to be too smart.  My classes were small – usually fewer than 15 students – and we weren’t afraid to speak up.

My teacher wrote on my Facebook wall, “Hello Martha – I remember teaching you at Kent as a very gifted, argumentative and pleasing student.”  This thrilled me, and I wanted to write back, “We prefer the term ‘Talmudic'” but I was afraid he wouldn’t understand that I was making fun of political correctness, not enforcing it.

It’s true that I was someone who enjoyed a good argument.  In fact, I started out his class that way.  We had been assigned to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X over the summer.  For a Jewish girl from Ohio, the book was a revelation.  I had no idea what life was like for black people in Harlem.

So, we arrive in class that first day, dressed in our blue-and-gray uniforms, knee socks, the whole works.  Mr. Morse comes in, and starts talking about the book.  Why should Malcolm X complain about the lack of opportunities available to black people when slavery had been abolished more than a hundred years ago?  Why didn’t they take responsibility for themselves?  Over the course of the hour, everyone in class – except me – started to agree with him.

Mr. Morse then informed us that this was not acceptable.  He said that to do well in his class, we had to be able to take a position and defend it.

(Maybe it didn’t really happen that way.  Maybe I didn’t defend my position until the end.  However, this is my column, and if I my memory is going to fail, I’m going to adapt in the most self aggrandizing manner possible.)

Anyway, I bring this up because it’s the antithesis of the way they plan to go about teaching American History in Texas (and, because Texas is such a big market for textbooks, possibly in the rest of the country as well).  According to several recent news stories (including this one), a small group of radical conservatives is dictating the curriculum for social studies in the public schools.  Among the changes they want:

• Reduce the amount of time spent studying Thomas Jefferson, because he championed the separation of Church and State

• Increase the amount of time spent studying Jefferson Davis while diminishing Lincoln.

• Tell students that Joseph McCarthy was correct and there really were Communists spies in our government during the 1950s.

Anyone who has talked with a group of American school children knows that they are not among the world’s best critical thinkers.  They are not, for the most part, curious about the rest of the world.  Limiting discussion in the classroom is not the way to improve this situation.

If we want our kids to really learn, we should get rid of a curriculum that includes only one textbook, and expose our kids to many different points of view.  Let them read accounts written by slave-owners and slaves and abolitionists.  Let them read books about Hitler, Marx and Gandhi.  Let them have passionate debates, in the classroom and over the dinner table, with their families.

If Mom and Dad disagree with what their kids say, they can explain their different perspectives.  And if their perspectives don’t stand up to intellectual scrutiny from their children, perhaps they could change their minds.  That would teach their kids the power of informed discussion.

And if the parents don’t change their minds, they can agree to respectfully disagree.  That would be a refreshing change to our current stupid discourse.

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, got her hair cut this week, so she’s ready to go to Florida on Wednesday to see her father, who is also a god.