American History Z

"Wait, I only get 5 days to teach all of World War II?"

It was the spring of 2007 and yours truly was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed student-teacher at West Forsyth High School in Clemmons, North Carolina. In reviewing my course outline for the semester, I couldn't help but express concern about the aforementioned timeline in question. Five class periods to explain the biggest global conflict the world had ever seen? Five class periods to explain the rise of fascism, the Holocaust, appeasement, neutrality, Pearl Harbor, war mobilization, D-Day, the European Theater, the Pacific Theater, the atomic bombs, and the aftermath of war? Five class periods to cram in an overview of the same information that could easily make up a dozen or more college-level classes? Five class periods to give students what may very well be the only exposure to the material that they will ever have?

And it was all on me.

This was my introduction to the challenges of teaching high school history. Knowing what to teach, how to teach it, and how to do it in a timely fashion were all things that veteran teachers still found challenging. Yet there I was doing the same, all while balancing learning the basics of classroom management while simultaneously taken classes of my own in hopes that I was doing enough to earn my proper class credit to graduate from college in 3 months. While veteran teachers took their spring break to relax and unwind, I was traveling to Montgomery County, Maryland interviewing for what I hoped would be a future teaching position. While my colleagues were falling alseep peacefully at 9 PM, I was getting out of bed at midnight, asking my housemates to turn down the music to their impormpt Wednesday night dance party. Despite all this, there were 22 students in my U.S. history class relying on me to teach them critical information that could and should stay with them for the rest of their lives. It was up to me to make sure they would leave U.S. history knowing the basics and knowing how and why it was important to have a baseline understand of who we were and how we got there. I could only hope that I succeeded in this endeavour.

On Wednesday, The Guardian released a study that revealed the following: 

🧵
Of the millennial & Gen Z adults surveyed:
66% did not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust
11% believe Jews caused the Holocaust
48% could not name a single Holocaust concentration camp or ghetto
23% believe the Holocaust is a mythhttps://t.co/cdNRsjT7Va

— lisa hendricks (@MsLisaHendricks) September 16, 2020

These were my students. And I failed them. 

The truth is our education system is designed to fail them. It is designed to undermine and underfund the teaching of social studies. It is a system where the teaching of social studies goes to football coaches in poor urban schools. It is a system where school districts buy these textbooks in bulk, which creates an unnecessary one-size-fits-all approach where affluent schools pick the book that works for their students leaving schools with struggling readers on the outside looking in. It is a system where there are 50 state education systems with 50 different sets of expectations and standards for student learning. It is that same system which makes it nearly impossible for a child of migrant parents to have any consistency in his or her learning as there is no uniformity across state lines. It is a system that sees the study of history as nothing more than a graduation requirement and no longer sees the values in requiring that all graduating seniors register to vote. 

To read the above Tweet is to acknowledge the systemic failure of American public education. But while those of us on this blog see it as a critical failure, those on the far-right are jumping for joy. This is exactly the America that QAnon wants. They want an America that doubts historical fact. They want an America willfully ignorant of history. They want an America where non-White, straight, Christian groups are blamed for their own genocide. They absolutely love the results of this study because it speaks to their own sick, twisted worldview where Holocaust deniers are not ostricized but are accepted as part of the tribe. Of the 23% who believe that the Holocause is a myth, we can guarantee that nearly 100% of them have parents who support the worldview of Donald Trump. 

This is the reality that we now face. As we rebuild America we must rebuild the way in which we educate our children. We need to stop the constant barrage of standardized testing, starting when kids are 6 years old. We need to create uniform standards across all 50 states so that a student in backcountry Kentucky is learning the same basic facts about the Holocaust as a student in Beverly Hills. We need to stop the bulk purchases to textbook purchases and allow individual schools the ability to select textbooks they feel best reflect their students' reading levels. We need to stop deputizing the social studies department as the dumping ground for unqualified teachers and instead we need to hire well-qualified professionals. And we need to give teachers autonomy as to how they teach material rather than forcing them to teach it on such strict and arbitrary timelines.

When I taught, I always came back to the line that "those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it." This Guardian study can and should be a wakeup call to our 1.5 million teachers. It can and should be a wakeup call to the tens of thousands of local school boards. It can and should be a wakeup call to each of the nation's 50 governors. And it can and should be wakeup call to all 535 members of Congress. Our children, all our children, are entering the workforce without a basic knowledge of world history. Worse than that, they are instead believing conspiracy theories about verifiable historical events. Not only are students not learning the proper history, but instead, they are learning alternative history, a history that never even happened. When our students cannot distinguish fact from fiction, we find ourselves in new, scary, and dangerously uncharted waters.

But there is hope and it is a hope that resides in the goodness of these students' hearts. While their teachers have failed them, their parents and extended families have not. It's how the kids from Parkland can lead a peaceful march in our nation's capitol. It's how their loving acceptance of the LGBTQ community helped move the needle on marriage equality. It's how Gen Z trolled the Trump campaign into thinking they had sold a million tickets to the Tulsa rally. It's how some of the most powerful voices addressing systemic racism have emerged like young rising stars Patrick Mahomes, Naomi Osaka, and Jaylen Brown. History education might be lacking but these younger generations have emerged with a civic consciousness and have put that consciousness into action. American education, which has tradtionally taken place in the classroom, is now very much taking place out in the real world. 

And that is the kind of education one learns and never forgets.