Lesson Plan

It happens every year. Awakened by the spring thaw, history teachers everywhere realize they have a matter of weeks to do the trans-continental hustle from the Treaty of Versailles to the fall of Saigon (let alone the thirty years that followed). It's no wonder that history repeats itself; consider how relatively few people know what happened the first time, even among those who thought they were paying attention. There's never time, and there's not always content.

The most recent decades aren't reduced to CNN Headline News in every classroom, of course, but they aren't often taught with the detail accorded the supposedly more glorious past. More recent events are harder to burnish to a pro-American glow, and that means fewer textbook pages, despite the fact that a straight knowledge of the 60s, for example, would help anyone interpret the present. (Read, for example, this RFK speech on Vietnam posted by his son.)

Regardless, American History is necessarily a survey, each day's new headlines being full of potential Terms to Know whether anyone gets to that chapter or not. If integration, for example, is reduced to Brown v. Board of Education and nine Arkansas teenagers, that might just have to do. There's room for little more on the final exam. Luckily, education is not limited to credit-bearing classes; think of all we wouldn't know if it were. Sometimes it's found in the pages of Sports Illustrated.

Gary Smith's story about the football team of Little Rock's Central High is compelling reading, and it also describes an aspect of the integration story that I had either never known or forgotten: that Governor Faubus closed the Little Rock high schools completely for the 1958-59 school year. The Governor. Closed. The schools! While I'll never comprehend the depth of hate and fear generated by the notion of black and white kids in the same classroom, I thought I at least knew the major details of the turmoil that surrounded it. But the fact that a governor shuttered a city's high schools for a year rather than continue integration left me, as an English friend says, gobsmacked.

Part of my shock is the distance between today's prevailing attitudes and those held in certain 1950s minds. As a teacher of minority kids, I have no illusions about the state of public education or race relations, but at least we've come far enough that the notion of a modern day Governor Faubus getting away with educational murder is laughable. (Today, it's the feds that will kill the schools, but that's a different story). Another part of my shock, however, is that I didn't know, and I really should have. I realize that I never gave too much thought to the consequences of integration on the majority of students, and the fact that some of those initially involved kids had no school to go to just makes the depth of that impact all the more clear.

Fifty years is fifty years: before my time, on the one hand, but right smack in my time, all of our times, in the other hand. We're still living out the rest of that history, whether we realize it or not. Awareness trumps ignorance, surely. And so I have to think: what else don't I know?