Wisdom on Woe: How to Teach the Worst in World History
From Common Knowledge, Volume 8, Nos. 1/2, Winter/Spring 1995 © 1995 by the Core Knowledge Foundation. Not to be copied or reproduced without permission from the Core Knowledge Foundation, 801 E. High Street, Charlottesville, VA 22902.
Mary Beth Klee holds degrees from Notre Dame (BA), Boston University (EdM), and Brandeis (PhD in the History of American Civilization). After teaching history at the college level for ten years, in 1991 she founded Crossroads Academy, a Core Knowledge school in New Hampshire, where she now teaches history to young children.
Since 1991, I’ve been teaching history in our Core Knowledge program at Crossroads Academy. Those of you in Core Knowledge schools know that, in trying to present the broad sweep of American and World Civilization to elementary school children, we are doing something new and difficult. We have the chance to inspire children with stories of great deeds, of heroic effort to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds, of varied peoples and cultures. At the same time, we face a challenge, for the story of civilization is not all sweetness and light. There is also the dark side of human history: the undeniable record of evil, tragedy, and suffering.
By the end of the sixth grade a child in a Core Knowledge program will have encountered some pretty disturbing stuff: Aztec human sacrifice, Roman gladiator contests, the raids of Attila the Hun, Viking looting and pillaging, Chinese forced labor, American slavery and Indian removal, France’s reign of terror, the carnage of the Civil War, and more.
Let us remember that there is nothing particularly “dark” about the Core Knowledge curriculum. The names and incidents just mentioned are only pieces in a larger picture that includes “the better angels of our nature” as well. Still, the better angels are not the only historical actors. We have to be honest with children about the fact that at times human beings have failed miserably or acted in terribly inhumane ways. The world has seen a great deal of evil and suffering and tragedy, and we cannot be blind to it, nor should we try to hide it from our children till they reach high school: they’re too smart and observant for that. But, can children handle it? I believe they can — if, that is, we as teachers make the effort to be conscious of, and conscientious about, the messages we are sending.
Sometimes, in our zeal to make history “interesting,” we may, in dealing with the dark side, inadvertently send the wrong messages. In the past four years, I have occasionally been troubled by things that I myself have taught and presentations I have seen and read about in other schools. All this has compelled me to address some mistakes we should avoid and suggest some principles to follow in teaching the woeful aspects of history.
My suggestions will, I think, make more sense if we begin with a shared understanding of history as a story. We like to tell stories of famous people and places that have come before us. It is no accident that we have American towns named “Washington” and “Hannibal” and “Athens.” We name our space probes “Magellan” and “Columbia.” We do this not because we think it sounds educated, but because we want one day, one moment, one place in time to connect with the next and to make our story coherent and meaningful.
A Harvard historian, Bernard Bailyn, noted that history “is the necessary, unique way of orienting the present moment, so that you know where you are and where we have come from.” Bailyn was once asked what he believed the goals of pre-college education in history should be, and he replied: first, the pre-college years are a time to provide students “basic information so they know that there was an English Civil War, that Rome follows the great era of Ancient Greece ... so that they get the grid lines of large areas of history.” And secondly, he said, “I assume it is important ... to fascinate students with history — get them excited about it, show the fascination of events, personalities, and outcomes; emphasize the drama and personal interest of it all — so they see that this is something that can be vitally, intrinsically interesting to them.”1
When I began teaching history with our youngest students at Crossroads Academy — Kindergartners and First Graders — I agreed with Bailyn’s two-fold goals: to impart basic information and get students excited about history. And so, imagine you’re a first grade teacher, as I was in 1991. It’s early October. You’ve just finished a unit on the continents and you’re getting ready to introduce your first major unit in history, on early American civilizations. First up: an introduction to the Maya, Aztec, and Inca.
There are so many interesting things to learn about the Maya. For example, they built astonishing temple pyramids and left intricate carved pillars to record their past. The pillars tells us much about the people, including the interesting if incidental fact that their concept of beauty was very different from our own. The Maya considered flat foreheads and crossed eyes to be particularly beautiful. You can see this in their art. But how did they accomplish this in real life? They taped boards to the soft skulls of their babies so that the forehead would be flattened. They also suspended beads no more than three inches from the baby’s eyes, which meant there was a good possibility the child would become cross-eyed. As I introduced this unit, I wasn’t planning on making much of the way the Maya achieved their unique cosmetic look. But it struck me as a potentially high interest “hook,” a good way to get the kids “fascinated,” and then to move on to more important matters.
The next thing I knew, the children were riveted on precisely the point I didn’t intend to spend lots of time on. I no sooner introduced the Maya and a word or two about their child-rearing practices than I saw a glint in six-year-old Harry’s eye that told me very clearly he was thinking about trying this forehead flattening technique on his three-month old sister; and before I knew it every kid in the class was holding up a finger and trying to be cross-eyed. This was in some ways amusing, but also a little troubling. What message was I sending about the Maya, about what’s important in history? We’ve all experienced doubts like this, I’m sure. We wonder if we’re doing it “right.” I began to wonder more, and to grow more troubled, as I started to notice how others were doing it.
For example, I saw a videotape of third grade children studying ancient Rome by acting out gladiator contests in a carnival-like environment, with kids in the stands giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on whether the “defeated” student should “live” or “die.” Another day I visited a school where the third grade had been studying the Vikings. I asked one child what his class had done to study the Vikings, and he replied proudly, “We pillaged!” The class had run up and down the halls simulating pillaging! On yet another occasion I visited a fifth grade class studying the French Revolution, specifically the Reign of Terror. These ten- and eleven-year-olds had built a little guillotine and were gleefully beheading in effigy.
Now, as the great philosopher in The Lion King, Timone, says to his companions: “Wait a minute! Are we all OK with this?”
For me these activities — designed, no doubt, to make history “interesting” and “hands-on” and “fun” — raised many questions. Should we be acting out gladiator contests? Should we ask children to dramatize destruction and evil-doing? As I pondered these questions, it became clear that our object in teaching history on the elementary level is more complex than I had thought. It’s not simply to impart information and make it exciting. Our object is, moreover, to do this in a responsible way — a way that is sensitive to our children’s emotional needs, and to our own hopes for their future and the sort of people we hope they will become.
Children’s Emotional Needs
Given what we know of children’s early emotional needs, what should we introduce in our early study of history, and what should we steer clear of? On this subject, I have found some “wisdom on woe” in the writings of William Kilpatrick, a Professor of Education at Boston College. In a recent essay, Kilpatrick affirmed that in the grade school years children are trying to learn the rules, seeking a basic sense of both moral and civic order. This is the time when children instinctively gravitate toward stories that reinforce morals, stories in which “evil is punished, virtue is rewarded ... effort pays off, and riddles are solved.”2
Kilpatrick reminds us that “one of the duties that adults have toward children is to teach them that the world is not a crazy place. A child needs the security of knowing that he lives in an ordered world.” Kilpatrick stresses that this sense of order is all the more necessary for children who may in fact live in a disordered world. “Too many children,” he writes, “already know about the more disastrous facts of life ... broken marriages and domestic quarrels and absent fathers.” What these young navigators need, he contends, are books that become “star maps” for the future. 3
Kilpatrick’s main point, then, is that we need to expose children to stories that offer ideals—stories animated by a sense of moral order. Choose the stories in which virtue is rewarded, evil is punished, good comes from evil, love transforms hate. Help children develop a positive and hopeful handle on the future. Give them the gift of order and meaning.
Kilpatrick is talking about literature, about choosing stories. What does all that have to do with the teaching of history? Am I saying that we should make it a sanitized world? Leave out all the bad stuff? No—though when dealing with young children, “leaving out” does not constitute censorship or lying: on the contrary, it is the responsibility of adults to make well-reasoned choices about what children should be exposed to, and in what fashion.
As I pointed out earlier, history is a form of story-telling. History in its most basic form is simply the disordered record of many stories, some of them astonishing and elevating, some of them horrifying and tragic. The question is, given the child’s developmental need for order and meaning and hope, which stories shall we tell? What shall we choose to emphasize or downplay in our attempt to give meaningful shape to the disordered record? Or, more specifically, given that we have a coherent outline of historical topics in the form of the Core Knowledge Sequence, how shall we tell a story that could be told in many different ways?
To answer that, let’s think about the sort of people we want our children to become. When we think about our hopes for our children, what is troubling about children pretending to pillage? Or indulging in gladiator contests? It is the obliviousness to human dignity, the gleeful dramatization of disrespect for basic human rights.
This obliviousness and disrespect go against a basic function of schooling. Historically, in American elementary schools we have been called on to teach with an eye toward raising well educated, responsible citizens, citizens who will continue to uphold democratic principles. Because children in elementary schools are in their formative years, we have a responsibility to teach history in a way that is respectful of a child’s developmental need for meaning and order, and in a way that reflects our commitment to the ongoing democratic life of the nation.
If we expect our children to be considerate of the rights of others and responsible to their community, then we should not inadvertently showcase or glorify historical events that will undermine those values. Our job is to open the window on the past, mindful of where our students are in the present, and conscious of how to help them live fruitfully in the future. With this in mind, what principles should guide us in dealing with the dark side of history?
Guiding Principles for Teaching the "Dark Side"
For the most part, history in the elementary to middle grades (K-8) should be horizon-broadening and intriguing, not threatening or appalling. History in the early grades does not always have to inspire but, for significant developmental reasons, it should not introduce large doses of chaos, cynicism or despair.
We have a choice about how we present most things in history. You can present the Maya as master builders and astronomers or as child mutilators. You can present the Aztecs as fierce warriors and expert craftsmen or as wholesale human sacrificers. You can present Hammurabi as the first fellow to think about protecting the weak from the strong through laws, or you can dwell on the particular laws that strike us as grotesque. Which leads me to advise:
(1) When in doubt, do not go for the gore.
In our Saturday morning cartoon world, we sometimes unthinkingly regard the gory or bizarre as the high-interest hook. For example, I read a Kindergarten lesson on Van Gogh, in which the class, after talking about the fact that in a moment of passion Van Gogh had chopped off his ear, played a game of “Pin the Ear on Van Gogh”! You have a choice: you can go for the gore and present Van Gogh as a guy who chopped off his ear, which will no doubt fascinate children in a macabre way. Or you can trust the children’s better judgment and focus on Van Gogh as a great artist, whose achievements are in themselves sufficient to fascinate and inspire.
(2) Design activities with an eye toward the lessons children will take from them.
Professor Kilpatrick (in a speech at last year’s Core Knowledge National Conference) said, “Children are always acting out the dramas that are taking place in the theaters of their imaginations." The question for us as teachers is, what sort of drama shall we put there? If we have children making a guillotine and gleefully beheading in effigy; if they play-act Viking pillaging and looting, then what sort of drama is taking place in the theaters of their imaginations?
Again, we as teachers must be conscious of the messages we are sending. The messages we send in the study of history on the elementary level should be consistent with the messages we want to send our children as they mature into responsible citizens and young people. Does an activity we’ve designed inadvertently glorify evil or glamorize tragedy? Does it turn terror, brutality, or suffering into “fun”? If it does, we need to switch gears.
(3) Design activities that introduce children to basic and important categories of historical thought.
Let me discuss this by way of example. At the beginning of this year, when I introduced the Ancient Rome unit to our third grade, I asked the children to think about their study of previous civilizations and hypothesize about what they would expect to find in Ancient Rome. Many hands shot up. The first child said: “I’m just betting there’s a flooding river around here someplace!” Another said: “I hope they’ve got some good stories of their gods and goddesses, and I bet they probably had lots of gods “cause it was ancient times.” And a third said: “I’m wondering if they’re gonna have kings, like the pharaoh in Egypt, or if maybe it’ll be a democracy like Greece.”
From three years of sequenced study of World Civilization, these eight-year-olds had learned some basic critical concepts: that civilizations are often related to geography; that people are always looking for the answers to questions about origins and larger meanings; that human beings come up with different answers to the question, “Who should rule?”
These are basic categories of historical thought. In these early years, we teach a great deal of “information,” in part because the specific information is the best way to establish important general categories of thought. In historical thought, when we teach children what to look for when they examine the past, we want them to begin to notice:
- the relationship of civilization to geography;
- humanity’s quest to record great deeds (stellae, hieroglyphics, etc.);
- the human quest to understand where we came from (religion);
- the ongoing human drive to tell stories that in some way explain the world (mythology);
- the human need to create or build things that mattered;
- our drive to form community in family, in society;
- how people are governed or govern themselves.
When designing activities to teach history, then, choose a high-interest hook in a major historical category of thought: location, writing, building, religion, mythology, governance. When studying the Aztecs, instead of drawing pictures of human sacrifice, have students recreate the beautiful Aztec codex, the pictographic volume that records stories of their gods. When studying Rome, instead of dramatizing gladiator fights, have the children dramatize a session in the Roman Senate. When it’s time for the Vikings, instead of pillaging, have children construct and paint a cardboard Viking ship.
But there are times, you may say, when history is just plain appalling and we can’t avoid it. What are we to do in such cases, for example, when we teach about slavery or the Trail of Tears or the Holocaust? When history is appalling and we must address it, then I suggest these principles: Let tragedy be tragedy, and let bad guys be bad guys, but set tragedy and evil in the context of hope. Let’s break that down.
(4) Let tragedy be tragedy.
In teaching about some of the great tragedies of human history — the horror of the slave trade, the carnage of war, the sacking of civilizations — it is important that we do not inadvertently trivialize or glamorize what were horrific events. The message — yes, there have been moments when human beings have failed and done awful things to each other — should not be diluted by activities that diminish the real tragedy of some chapters in the story we are telling our children.
For example, one school I visited was studying the slave trade, including the Middle Passage, the awful journey in which African captives were crammed into ships on their unwilling trans-Atlantic voyage. After reading about the Middle Passage, the students participated in an activity designed to let the children “experience” what those conditions would be like. The teacher asked six of the children to attempt to lie together underneath a table. Now, if you’ve taught fourth grade, you know well that if you try to squeeze six fourth graders under a table, you’re not going to have a profound academic or emotional experience so much as a lot of giggling and wriggling.
Another class was studying the antebellum period and the Underground Railroad. They had read a biography of Harriet Tubman and learned about safe houses and life on the run. They had learned (among other things) that some runaway slaves traveled with biscuits as food between safe houses. And so, in a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to give a “hands-on” dimension to this history lesson, the teacher decided upon the following class activity: making biscuits. The result, of course, was absolutely mouthwatering, helped by lots of melted butter and jam. But the activity undermined the historical message the teacher was trying to send. “Mmm, great biscuits . . . hey, it wasn’t all that bad on the Underground Railroad.”
Such activities do not allow tragedy to be tragedy. They make it “cute.” When we do deal with tragedy as part of the curriculum, it should be abundantly clear to the students that tragedy is exactly that. A dreadful time. A time that we remember with sadness, regret, outrage, and the resolution to avoid repeating, if it is on our power. The tragic in history will elicit powerful emotions in children. We shouldn’t try to circumvent these emotions through “fun,” but deal with them in responsible and sensitive ways.
For example, I’ve seen a teacher deal with the children’s responses to the slave trade by asking the class to paint an abstract of how they might have felt. The teacher showed the children Edvard Munch’s expressive work, “The Scream,” and asked them to paint their feelings. I saw one teacher, focusing on the Underground Railroad, play “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” and ask the children to make up the words to their own song about longing for freedom.
Let tragedy be tragedy. Similarly,
(5) Let bad guys be bad guys.
I’m concerned by a growing tendency in history textbooks, particularly for middle and high school, to let bad guys off the hook—to humanize them and attempt to “understand” their bad practices. Consider, for example, this passage from a middle-school world history textbook recently published by Houghton Mifflin. The passage is about Attila the Hun. You remember Attila. He was the man who consolidated his power by murdering his own brother, who then proceeded to unite the Huns and ravage eastern and central Europe, who stormed south and destroyed civilization as he encountered it, who killed many and engaged in looting, extortion and bribery. That is the record. But here is what the Houghton Mifflin textbook says:
The Romans called him “the scourge of God.” ... Yet one Roman had a different view... After one dinner with Attila and his captains, the Roman historian Priscus wrote the following: [Throughout the dinner] “Attila remained impassive without any change of expression, and neither by word or gesture did he seem to share in the merriment except that when his youngest son, Ernas, came in and stood by him, he drew the boy towards him and looked at him with gentle eyes.”
After quoting Priscus, the textbook continues:
Think about the portrait of Attila that Priscus presents.... Think about the way he looked at his son. Can’t you almost see the tender expression on his face? The Romans saw Attila as a fierce warrior, but ... he was more than that. He was also a man with a unique personality and a family, just like people today.4
So, beneath that tough surface of a brutal conqueror you’ll find a warm family man with a “unique personality,” “just like people today.” Wait a minute! Are we all OK with this?! One wonders who’s next — Hitler and Mussolini as nice grampas and misunderstood fellas? Stalin as “Jolly Joe”?
What is the reason for this revisionist approach, this tendency to go soft on evil? I think it could be a trickle-down effect from our universities. On the university level, academic historians are in the business of elucidating context—trying very hard to see situations from within and to explain them from all angles. But in doing this, the historian faces some intellectual risks.
As Bernard Bailyn has noted, if you succeed in recovering the historical context, then, in some situations “you can find yourself facing a moral problem, because to explain — in depth and with sympathy — is, implicitly at least, to excuse.” One could, for example, spend quite some time explaining why Hitler hated the Jews and why the vast majority of the German people agreed with him. “You run into a moral problem,” noted Bailyn, “because you are not merely explaining, you are also ... excusing what people did in the past.”5
Bailyn was talking about the moral dilemma of a professional historian. What about our obligation as elementary school teachers? We have children in their formative years. Do we want them to walk away from their study of Aztec human sacrifice, or the ravages of Attila the Hun, saying, “Hey, lighten up, it’s OK, things are different for different people in different times and places”?
Such moral relativism is irresponsible in teaching the young. Our position as teachers ought to be much more straightforward. If in our historical studies with children we encounter principles and practices that blatantly violate human rights and dignity, and clearly oppose the moral principles that undergird democracies, then we can and should convey that we understand why they did this, but we think it’s wrong!
Take a stand. Let bad guys be bad guys. Finally, even as you deal with tragedy and even as you speak to evil, don’t forget to
(6) Set tragedy and evil in the context of hope.
Not every historian you encounter believes that history moves forward. But I believe that no one can spend lots of time looking at the record of the past without noticing the dramatic strides we as a species have made over time. We have come a long way since the days when leaders like Qin Shi Huang Di, Nebuchadnezzar, or Ramses II could force two-thirds of the male population into building Great Walls or Hanging Gardens or pyramids. We have come a long way from the time when gladiators killed each other for sport and people applauded. We have come a long way from the time when slitting nostrils and branding faces was the standard English punishment for theft.
Our course we have not moved irrevocably forward — there is all too much current evidence of continuing inhumanity, inequality, and injustice. But despite the still vast gaps between our ideals and our reality, the historical record shows, I believe, that our world today is qualitatively better than the world our ancestors knew. Responsible and committed people will continue to work to make this country and the world better still. But if we want our children to grow up to be such responsible and committed people, then we must give them the gift of hope.
When we expose our children to the dark side of human history, we must not convert tragedy into comedy, but we must also take care not too place too great an emphasis on the horribly graphic or unremittingly bleak. We need to situate the darkness in a context of hope. I stress this because of a disturbing current market trend in educational publishing, a trend toward a new literature, for young readers, of social shock, a “GET REAL” literature that in my view leaves children focused on cruelty or suffering and bereft of hope.
For example, Hiroshima No Pika is a picture book that introduces very young children to nuclear war and the bombing of Hiroshima. A young child watches his family incinerated before his eyes in vaporous watercolor. A more contemporary work, I Dream of Peace, offers a child’s image of war in the former Yugoslavia: the book includes a nine-year-old’s description of what it is like to see carnage all about you and your parents die.
In one of my local elementary schools, Gary Paulsen’s Nightjohn was read aloud to sixth graders. This book deals with slave struggles in the antebellum period, and includes scenes of dismemberment (chopping off the toes of slaves), flogging of naked women, rubbing salt in the wounds of the flogged, castration, and a runaway slave girl being eaten by dogs. This was the after-lunch read-aloud for the same children who were told that if they wished, they could bring their stuffed animals to the California Achievement Tests the following weekend.
What distinguishes these books and others like them are the graphic horror and the endings, which are devastatingly bleak, devoid of hope. This is “reality,” we are told. The idea is that by reading this sort of material at an early age, we will raise a generation so acutely sensitive to the dangers of war or social injustice that as adults they will ensure peace and justice. The question is: will the children’s spirit survive this kind of darkness?
To dwell on details of the macabre, the perverse, the appalling is to overburden a child, with one of two possible results: (1)despair and loss of hope; or, (2) cynicism and coarsening of sensibilities. You will have sensitive children who will go home with nightmares, trauma, and profound insecurity. Or you will encourage callousness: the eighth graders, for example, who will visit the Holocaust Museum, look at the medical experiment section and say, “Awesome! Let’s get to the gas chamber part!” Neither of those possibilities bodes well for their future as individuals or the future of our country.
On the elementary school level we need to be particularly sensitive to the child’s quest for order, meaning, hope, and to our own quite legitimate aspiration to instill in children a sense of the dignity of human life. While history has more than its share of chapters full of suffering and tragedy, it also has an inspiring cast of characters who have acted to right deep historical wrongs, who have persisted in the face of suffering and tragedy: people like FDR or Martin Luther King or Mother Theresa.
Our children too can be people of action and hope. Give them literature, projects, and activities that celebrate a life of action and hope in the face of tragedy. Give them Dear Benjamin Banneker by Andrea Pinckney or The Ruby Bridges Story by Robert Coles. These are lives of extraordinary perseverance and hope in the face of daunting obstacles. Give them Anne Frank or North to Freedom to teach them about personal integrity in the face of the horror of the Holocaust. Give them any number of superb stories of immigrants, such as Klara’s Gift or Molly’s Pilgrim. Give them the life of Lincoln. Above all, give them the gift of hope.
Hope is the reason we want one moment in the human story to connect with the next. Because we suspect that the next step just may be a step forward. And yet that is up to us. FDR had it right when he said, “We Americans today — all of us — are characters in the living book of democracy. But we are also its author. It falls upon us . . . to say whether the chapters that are still to come will tell a story of retreat or a story of continued advance.”
We study the past in order to commit ourselves to the future, in order to advance. We need to tell our children the truth, but in ways that are attentive to their inner strivings. We need to nurture our children’s joy and their hope. We need to make them strong of mind and heart — so that in time they will be ready to confront the daunting task of life with undaunted spirits.
References
- Bernard Bailyn, On the Teaching and Writing of History (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994), pp.12, 17, 19.
- William Kilpatrick, "Worlds of Meaning," in Books that Build Character (New York : Simon and Schuster), p. 49.
- Ibid., pp. 49, 48, 51.
- Beverly Armento, et.al., A Message of Ancient Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), pp.4-5.
- Bailyn, op.cit., pp. 59-60.
- Joy Hakim, A History of US: War, Peace, and All that Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 105, 107.
 |
 |
 |
|
||
 |
|
 |
|
||
Last updated: Fri, March 14 2008
