Soon Is Too Soon

http://www.npr.org/2012/07/30/157604072/ever-growing-past-confounds-history-teachers?utm_source=fp&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=20120731


Since most of the stuff I have been publishing of late has been of a political nature, here are my thoughts on a interesting news story I heard on NPR.  History and Education are both things we are to cover according to our subtitle, so here we go.

Two camps form when it comes to when you should start studying recent history. I fall into the camp of waiting, but there is a point that the market can be saturated with information.  Take the Civil War, and World War II for examples.  There are only so many BAND OF BROTHERS or different aspects of the Civil War you can cover. Yes sometimes you can stumble onto some neat off the wall aspects of Confederate Army strategy, but still. To make matters worse, so many people write simply about wars.  You would think, by looking at the history section of a Barnes and Noble, that all there was to history was war.  Thus we history teachers, have to be as excited about the mass distraction of humans lives as possible.  Hello, there are other things to life besides war.  Many cultural, political, religious, and social aspects be swept aside to write the 999,999th book about George S. Patton published this year.  GEORGE S. PATTON :WARRIOR POET..nah I'll pass. I've got that T-shirt.  The Battle for The Lost State of Franklin..now there is a book I want to read.

I argue that there needs to be a reasonable time for the event to fester..for lack of a better word...or mellow.  Look at 9/11.  Most of the books that came out right after the attacks were narratives of the events and hastily put together information about the war on terror.  These are good, and they are going to be great for historians down the road, but they aren't great from a teaching point of view.  Often times these accounts are biased towards a particular view point (do you think anyone said "gee I feel sorry for those terrorist" in a book published in October of 2011? nor should they).  Bias are easy to see when you read about new events too in the idea that people become more important than they really were.  Take FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS for example.  Those men were not apart of the original raising, but they are the ones that got to go home.  Time cools the tempers and ices the hot.  Richard Nixon isn't all bad in 2012, but he was in 1980.

Secondly, these accounts can sometimes be wrong.  People perceive things differently.  They remember things incorrectly or they simply lie.  If I am at the Selma, Alabama bridge with Martin Luther King, do you think I am going to remember ever detail?  What was Dr. King wearing? Personally, I went to the Rally To Restore Sanity And/ Or Fear.  I can't remember the order in which the guest came on, but if I had to guess I would say Ozzie Osborne was first.  Orders on the battle field get confused, batting orders are reverse. What was said can often times be misheard.  ("Did President Lincoln say "I scored seven years ago?"" someone was overheard saying at Gettysburg) Facts like these need to be ironed out before we teachers going go spouting them off as truths.  What we say sticks..sometimes.. and it best had be right. It is the least we own them

Finally, time weeds out what is important and what is not.  Woodstock was just a music festival three weeks after it happened.  Hank Arron's 755th homerun was a big deal at the time, but he's second on the list now.  "That'll never be reached" many a Braves fan said.  Both events are important to us today, but they have different histories as to how they became important.  We all have events that we say we will remember where we were when they happened, but how many people remember where they were when OJ was acquitted?  I think I was in band class and RNR, but I cannot recall exactly.  I do remember saying "Gosh I had better remember this."  The even was important enough at the time, but it isn't enough for me to remember where I was.

From a teachers point of view I have this to say:
When teaching history, you only have a small amount of time to cover  a lot of information.  You need that information to be as accurate and un-biased as possible. There are certain things that are not open for debate in the history world...The Rally To Restore Sanity took place on October 31st, Jackie Robinson broke into the majors on April 15th 1947.   That goes without saying, and that is what you have to teach your students.  Yes, there is room for teaching them the historical significance, and both sides of issues, but that cannot be done without some time to develop.  Take the death of Osbama Bin Lauden.  We all understand it to be something that will end up in the history books.  What we do not know is just how much of an effect on history it will have.  People 50 years from now will.

Time and sunshine are the best disinfectant.  We are able to see things more clearly, accurately, and better able to teach our students.  There is plenty of history that falls between the cushions that we today can be studying.  We understand that events today are important, but I contend we study what we don't know fully about before we go adding to your slate.