Don't Know Much About History...

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana

I have to admit I have never been a student of history.  It never appealed to me as much as science and technology.  I am mostly a future-oriented person when it comes to the field of education:  How can I help students prepare for their future careers?  What skills do students need to make them productive citizens?  What are the important learning outcomes that will be beneficial to students when they leave high school and go to college?

However, in recent months I have begun doing a lot of reading about the past.  Specifically, I have been reading accounts of African Americans and how they dealt with slavery and post-Civil War society.  The main authors I have read are Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois.  One thing I am learning to appreciate about history is that people in the past times made mistakes. Sometimes these mistakes were huge.  There were life-changing attitudes that enslaved an entire race and made them blind to the possibilities of other men being equal to them.  They believed lies and stereotypes and let fear rule their communications with those that were different than themselves.  Some proposed that one race was superior to others and used “scientific” evidence to back up those beliefs. 

It is clear that many had good intentions and believe they were good people who were doing the right action at the time.  In hindsight we see their mistakes and it is easy to judge them.  Then it hit me.  Will future generations look back at us 100 years from now and say the same thing about us?  “What were they thinking?” “Can you believe they thought that to be true?” “How could any rational person propose such a solution to that problem?”  For that reason, I am learning to understand people in the past in light of the time, the culture, and the surroundings.  This by no means excuses their behavior.  How can you say a man is good when he owns slaves and uses racial slurs when speaking about them? But I am trying to understand the reasons for their actions.

I also realized my own imperfections, biases, and prejudices (yes we all have them) and I began to wonder how I would have acted in the same situation.  It is easy for us to be pious and say “I would never have done what they did.” But we have no idea how we would have reacted at the time.  The key, I am learning, is to try and understand the heart of mankind.  The heart of man is imperfect; full of frailties and hatred and misunderstandings and, most of all, fear.  Fear of the unknown.  Fear of stretching out a hand to help those who are different according to society’s standards.  I want to understand all perspectives; not to excuse the behavior but to understand how it could have happened.  

Racism is not all about black and white, it is about knowing and understanding your fellow man, as W.E.B DuBois said well in 1903 and it still rings true today, "Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor--all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked--who is good? not that men are ignorant--what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men." I am learning more about the heart of racism and discrimination to help understand the perspective of underrepresented groups, such as African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and women.  In the area of education, these groups have experienced profound changes in the past century. Learning about the way they navigated these changes, and still navigate them today, helps me to understand how we can show them a brighter future and help them catch up in the world of education.

There are also a number of people who based their theories and actions on, what we now know, to be faulty information.  One of those individuals was Lewis Terman.  The famous Stanford psychologist is responsible for the IQ Test and the majority of the standardized testing protocol used in modern educational psychology testing.  He refined the idea of a longitudinal study. But under the surface of his success was a belief in eugenics.  He felt the white race was superior in intellect and breeding to all other races.  He used scientific analysis and research to prove his point. Even today we see differences in IQ scores between the races.  But what amazes me even more is that we take for granted that the whole system of intelligence testing could be flawed because of his untrue beliefs.  As a society and as individuals, we cannot just accept the research of the past and continue to build a system of education based on the lessons of individuals that came before us.  We must not accept their beliefs as “gospel” and the status quo.  The main factor that attracted me to stereotype threat research is because it gives possible explanation to the differences in academic success between Whites and African Americans.  It may not be the whole solution, but it is a start.

I guess what I have learned from history is that we are making history right now.  We have the power to change it for the future.  We have the power to change our thinking and understand a race different than our own.  We have the power to rewrite some of the past historical failures that have haunted us.  Will it be easy?  Of course not.  But change is never easy.  As Frederick Douglass said “Without a struggle, there can be no progress.” 

We make the changes that are necessary.  We write and rewrite history every day.  Make it memorable.