There are a group of somewhat crazy black veterans in Ellison’s Invisible Man, and the difference between the treatment of blacks in Europe and in the American South in the first half of the 20th Century, as well as the political and cultural influence of that difference, were important subjects in my honors English class at several times this year. And now we’re reading Death of a Salesman, for which the subject of post-war America has come up. I discovered in all of this that most of my honors students know the name Hitler, but don’t know who he was, what he did, or what war or movement he was associated with.
Another time I learned that a majority of that, the honors, class believed that there are more blacks than whites in America today.
Last week, helping a student with a question in the grammar text book, I found that this student (this one not in the honors class) had no particular associations with the name Christopher Columbus. It didn’t ring a bell.
Where do you even begin?
Some years ago, when my daughter was ten years old or so, I discovered that she didn’t know who Franklin Roosevelt was, much less Winston Churchill. On the other hand, she not only knew the name Mahatma Gandhi, but could trot out a skeletal version of his life mission.
Any time you see a book or article where the word History is prefaced by the article “the” and not “a,” you may be sure you are in for a doctrinaire read. “The History of ….” derives from pretensions of authority — not to say that a considerable portion of the facts selected for relating are in and of themselves incorrect. The standard of “historical correctness” lies not in a straight up-and-down judgment as to the correctness of the facts, but rather in which particular facts are included in the first place, and which excluded on the grounds of irrelevancy. A second standard would be somewhat more nuanced: how those facts are described, and how they are placed in relation to each other so as to present a picture, favorable or unfavorable, approving or disapproving, of the protagonists.
A little more than a year after my September 1962 arrival in Taiwan and shortly after John Kennedy was shot, I was told by a patriotic Chinese (today she probably calls herself a Taiwanese, not Chinese) that this would never happen to “our leader” in Free China (another term now on the historical trash heap). Why not? Because there was not a soul here who did not love him. Today, I am told that school children know the name, but can’t tell you the first thing about him, beyond the fact that Chiang Kai-shek was a dictator (hardly knowing what the word means).
Christopher Columbus or Hitler is one thing, but Chiang Kai-shek, I submit, is another, for I am not only talking about someone who was walking this earth (hobbling is more like it) a mere generation ago, but someone who was the president of a country in which even in the countryside you could rarely walk a hundred yards without seeing a banner or signboard praising his virtues. (On the American side, only Benito Mussolini rated more Time Magazine covers.)
I wonder if American school kids can do any better. How many among them could tell you the first thing about Lyndon Johnson?
Anyway, for most students history ranks right up there with economics, “the dismal science.” When I was in junior and senior high, I too detested history. Mommy, why do I have to study all this, it’s nothing but one war after another. Today I hear my daughters asking the same question, and I find myself at a loss for an answer. The easy aphorism that those who refuse to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it just doesn’t cut it — doomed to repeat what? How can that be taken seriously, if one doesn’t know the nature of the threat?