Posts from the ‘race’ Category

Feb 22

Agreeing on the facts – why we teach history

I had the chance several years ago to listen to author and historian Sam Wineburg address the joint Kansas / Missouri Councils for the Social Studies annual conference. Sam spent some time talking about the ideas in his book Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past.

Among other things, Wineburg suggested that:

a history class should not be arguing about the facts of history – the most important argument we should be having is how do we interpret the facts. The discussions should focus on questions about meaning, not questions about facts.

His book talks about the ways that experts interpret facts and question meaning. Sam suggests that we need to train our kids to argue meaning and to think historically. Of course, his suggestion relies on the idea that facts are facts. That we don’t spend time in our classrooms “arguing about the facts” but instead what those facts mean.

But a problem begins to emerge when the facts themselves are questioned and when people twist facts, or worse, when they discount the facts completely because the facts fail to support their beliefs.

I was reminded of the problem while reading through Leonard Pitts’ weekly column this morning. A writer for the Miami Herald, Pitts starts his column with

I got an email the other day that depressed me.

Henry Johnson 1918

Pitts had written about a young African American soldier named Henry Johnson who, after singlehandedly fighting off a series of attacks by a group of German soldiers in May 1918, was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French government. Of course, these facts didn’t sit well with at least one reader named Ken Thompson who wrote Pitts. Pitts quotes Thompson verbatim:

Hate to tell you that blacks were not allowed into combat intell 1947, that fact. World War II ended in 1945. So all that feel good, one black man killing two dozen Nazi, is just that, PC bull.

Never mind that blacks have fought in every war in US history, that Nazis didn’t exist in World War One, that Thompson can’t keep his I and II straight and that Johnson’s exploits have been well documented in books by Lerone Bennett Jr and Rayford Logan.

A Pitt’s assistant took the time to write Thompson back and referenced a site honoring Johnson maintained by the Arlington National Cemetery. These facts also didn’t sit well with Thompson:

There is no race on headstones and they didn’t come up with the story in tell 2002.

Mmmm . . . “a history class should not be arguing about the facts of history – the most important argument we should be having is how do we interpret the facts.”

Pitts suggests that Thompson is “not just some isolated eccentric”:

To listen to talk radio, to watch TV pundits, to read a newspaper’s online message board, is to realize that increasingly, we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth. We admit no ideas that do not confirm us, hear no voices that do not echo us, sift out all information that does not validate what we wish to believe.

Some time ago, I mentioned an interesting book that supports Pitts and Wineburg. Titled True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society by Farhad Manjoo, the book documents the impact that the Web has had on our grasp on reality, facts and “truthiness.”

All of this solidifies for me the importance of high quality social studies instruction, of the need to train our kids to think and argue with facts, not feelings. Of the incredibly important place that social studies has in creating truly reflective citizens in a democracy.

It was helpful for me to go back to the American Historical Association article “Why Study History.”

When we study it reasonably well, and so acquire some usable habits of mind, as well as some basic data about the forces that affect our own lives, we emerge with relevant skills and an enhanced capacity for informed citizenship, critical thinking, and simple awareness.

Apparently Ken Thompson somehow missed those skills while in school. And as social studies and history teachers, we need to take responsibility for that. We need to do a better job of creating informed, open-minded citizens.

Jun 8

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Rising above IQ

I need to get this book.

Richard Nisbett has written what seems like a must-read for educators and, more specifically, education leaders titled Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count.

In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, columnist Nicholas D. Kristof talks about Nisbett’s book and what it might mean for our education system.

These three groups (Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks) may help debunk the myth of success as a simple product of intrinsic intellect, for they represent three different races and histories. In the debate over nature and nurture, they suggest the importance of improved nurture — which, from a public policy perspective, means a focus on education. Their success may also offer some lessons for you, me, our children — and for the broader effort to chip away at poverty in this country.

Richard Nisbett cites each of these groups in his superb recent book, “Intelligence and How to Get It.” Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, argues that what we think of as intelligence is quite malleable and owes little or nothing to genetics.

Kristof talks about Nisbett’s research and agrees with Nisbett’s argument that perhaps intelligence is less dependent on genetics and more dependent on culture and hard work.

. . . the evidence is overwhelming that what is distinctive about these three groups is not innate advantage but rather a tendency to get the most out of the firepower they have.

This seems to support some of what Malcolm Gladwell talks about in Outliers. It’s an interesting concept and one that we as educators need to pay more attention to. If it’s not so much about genetics and more about environment / culture, then we as educators (and society) have a responsibility that goes beyond just filling our students heads with content.

What else?

It’s that the most decisive weapons in the war on poverty aren’t transfer payments but education, education, education. For at-risk households, that starts with social workers making visits to encourage such basic practices as talking to children.

The next step is intensive early childhood programs, followed by improved elementary and high schools and programs to defray college costs.

Perhaps the larger lesson is a very empowering one: success depends less on intellectual endowment than on perseverance and drive. As Professor Nisbett puts it, “Intelligence and academic achievement are very much under people’s control.”

One more book added to the summer reading list!

Apr 13

We Shall Remain starts today

The PBS series, We Shall Remain, starts later this evening and ends, five episodes later on May 11. It seems like a very ambitious undertaking – document four centuries of interaction between North American natives and those who came later from Europe.

Each 90 minute episode covers a specific period of time by focusing on specific individuals and events. As the Los Angeles Times reviewer states:

Of the many elephants occupying the room that is the history of the United States, none is larger than the official mistreatment of the Native American by the new neighbors from over the water. Like slavery, it is a subject at once much discussed and somehow fundamentally ignored, and because the story has been so sensationalized on the one hand and romanticized on the other, there is a continual desire to tell it right.

The latest attempt is “We Shall Remain,” an ambitious, largely gratifying series of five feature-length documentaries that begins airing weekly tonight on PBS as part of “American Experience.” They do not attempt to encompass the whole of that history, a task for which many more documentaries than five would be needed, but pick signal stories, beginning with Thanksgiving 1621 and ending with the 1973 Indian takeover of a small town on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

I’ve seen just bits and pieces of trailers but like what I see. Some of the earlier segments rely on re-enactments which can seem a bit cheesy at times. But the overall feel of the series is typical of PBS projects – high quality and historically accurate.

What I like is the attempt to be truthful to both sides of the story:

What all their stories have in common is the White Man: The series is not an exploration of the way Indians lived among themselves but rather the way their way of life was put under stress by white interests and attendant, imported ideas about land, money, humanity and God — and the various ways the natives accommodated or resisted new political realities and continually rewritten rules.

There is plenty of nuance to the telling: This is not a story of heroes and villains but of ordinary flawed humans, most of them doomed to failure.

And like all PBS stuff, they have created a useful Educators page with post-viewing questions, discussion starters and student activities. Things are aligned to standards, you can check out bibliographies and there is an extensive Resources page.

Feb 12

Lincoln, Taney and 2009

We all know that President Obama specifically asked for the Lincoln Bible to be used during his swearing-in ceremony in January. But not until browsing through an old copy of Newsweek magazine was I reminded of the true historical significance of that little tidbit.

Okay, let’s walk through this. Lincoln was sworn in by then Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney. The same Chief Justice who, four years earlier, in 1857 wrote the majority opinion in the Dred Scott v. Sandford court case.

Drift back to history class . . . this was the case that determined that Africans imported into the United States as slaves and their descendants – whether free or not – were not legal persons and so could never be US citizens. The court’s decision also said that Congress could not prohibit slavery in federal land. The case in which, among other things, Taney wrote that African Americans were

beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

Remember?

Lincoln’s resistance to the Dred Scott case was already very evident in 1858 during his debates with Stephen Douglas. And by his swearing-in ceremony in 1861, it had become clear that Taney and Lincoln were on opposite sides of the issue.

(Ask your kids what might have been going through the minds of those two during that ceremony and I will guarantee a powerful conversation.)

Now fast forward 148 years to January 20, 2009.

We’ve got an African American woman holding a bible last used at Lincoln’s first inauguration, who was sworn in by the author of the Dred Scott decision – a decision that clearly stated that she and her husband, also an African American, had no rights as people, let alone American citizens. A decision that left absolutely no room for the woman’s husband to become President.

(Ask your kids another question – What would be going through Taney’s mind if he were the current Supreme Court justice?)

Lincoln’s thoughts on slavery and the rights of African Americans clearly evolved over time. But his efforts, along with those of thousands of others throughout our history, made Michelle Obama’s simple act of holding a bible not just a possibility but a reality.

Happy Birthday, Abe.

Dec 20

Do kids see race differently?

I was over at a site called the Tempered Radical whose author, Bill Ferriter, has decided to create what he calls TWITs – This is Why I Teach. Just simple little snippets that reinforce the reasons why we all work with kids.

And I know I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about the whole Obama / McCain / election thing but this just really made my day. Bill found an interesting image representing the 44 US presidents and showed it to his 6th grade kids.

And he asked his students a simple question:

“What point do you think the artist was trying to make with this image?”

My students’ answer: “Well, that’s pretty obvious, Mr. Ferriter. He’s trying to say that the United States has never had a woman president.”

Okay . . . as an old guy, what I see is a pretty incredible shift in American culture. What his kids saw was gender. And while we have a lot of work still do in the US, it makes me feel kinda warm and fuzzy that the conversation is different, perhaps, with kids than with people my age.