Historically Speaking

[velvetpage]

I was reflecting this morning on one of the difficulties of growing up politically aware and interested in history.

In a nutshell, the problem is that my history teachers, with only one exception, were much older than myself. My grade 9 teacher was the right age to fight in Korea, though he didn't. My OAC teacher (grade 13) retired that year - 1994 - and he had not taken early retirement; he was in his sixties. The only exception was my grade 11 Ancient Civilizations teacher, who was fresh out of teachers' college at the time. Every girl in the school had a crush on him. Yes, me too. Because of the branch of history he taught, he doesn't play much of a role in this discussion.

As a result of packed curricula and older teachers, I find that there are huge chunks of the twentieth century that I know almost nothing about. My theory is that for my teachers, these things were current events. They remembered reading them in newspapers and seeing them on TV. So when they were teaching modern history to me in the late eighties and early nineties, they concentrated on what had always been history to them - the Wars and the inter-war years. I remember doing some aspects of life in the Fifties, specifically Korea, and we touched on JFK and similar elements of the sixties. I remember doing the Suez Canal crisis, but that was about the end of the year. For me, history stopped around 1967. The class ran out of time, and besides, we already knew about that, didn't we?

Well, no. We didn't. Many of my classmates didn't care to, of course, but I did. I missed Tommy Douglas and the début of Canadian Medicare; I only learned about that from a documentary a year or two ago. I missed Trudeau, and the FLQ Crisis. Tanks in Quebec City? It was news to me, twenty years later, when I watched another documentary about Trudeau. It happened at some point in the seventies - I'm still not sure when.

I realized this morning that one full-page article, written by a correspondent who had been in Beirut when the Syrians arrived and was still there when they left, had taught me more about that conflict than I had ever known before. This, in spite of the fact that I had a Lebanese friend in grade 10 who told me bits about life in Beirut - how electricity was a luxury based on a functioning home generator, for example.

In my own teaching, I've noticed this phenomenon several times. The first time I taught grade 7 history (during which the American Revolution is covered) I likened the Boston Massacre to the Rodney King riots. It didn't take long to realize that my kids didn't know what I was talking about, so I did the math. The kids in question had been babes in arms when that happened. It was not a part of their cultural and historical framework. More recently, I have talked about the Prime Minister immediately before the current liberal government (that is, before Crétien.) My kids were not even born when Crétien was elected. It was my first federal election where I was eligible to vote. I remarked on how upset I'd been that Canada got a female Prime Minister for the first time, and we didn't get to elect her. These little ten-year-olds stared at my blankly and mentally relegated me to the age of the dinosaurs.

These kids don't know about the first Bush, or his Gulf War - events that shaped my political awareness. Many of them are familiar with the civil war in Yugoslavia, because that's the reason their families are in Canada. But they themselves were almost all born here, and they know what their parents tell them about that conflict.

So what exactly can I do to make sure that current events and recent history -things within my lifetime - are not left out of my kids' education? I'm not sure - other than to talk about these things, draw the connections, watch them absorb information.

Comments

[shavastak.livejournal.com]

I guess ideally a modern history class starts at an appropriate date and follows up to the current year. If it were me, I might collect a series of newspapers - maybe 100 - one from each month for the past decade or so, and have the students read them in reverse order. Maybe that would give them a sense of scale and the feeling that events you discuss weren't all that far away. It's hard to impress that on a kid who has only lived a decade. A decade seems a lot shorter to me now than it did when I was 6, I know that for sure. Even now, my sense of scale is wobbly. Stuff that happened in the 60s happened not that long ago, yet it was ages ago - 40 years! It's hard for the human mind to get a handle on history no matter what age it is.