A student’s comment after class recently reminded me of both the joy and the importance of our teaching what we do. Following our reading of a chapter from Sandy Tollan’s book The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, the students and I discussed the actions of the people of Bulgaria during The Holocaust. Bulgaria and Denmark were the only countries that refused to deport their Jewish population to the Nazi death camps, and it was due to the actions of many righteous Gentiles that forty-nine thousand Bulgarian Jews survived World War II. As opposed to the people in other Eastern European countries who all too readily collaborated with the Nazis in the actions of genocide, the Bulgarians committed to acting humanely, and in the process lives were saved.
Later that day, one of the students thanked me for showing what to her was a different side of the Holocaust. She said that she had learned how awful the concentration camps were, but she had not known nearly enough about the people who had stood up and refused to cooperate. She said that while our class discussion in no way minimized the horrors of the Holocaust, it did give her some hope in knowing that not everyone acquiesced.
As educators, it is imperative that we teach our students the good and the bad that has happened in the past. We dis-serve them if we only teach the great things that occurred and do not help them understand the mistakes that have happened or the crimes that have been perpetrated. However, if we neglect to teach them that even in our darkest times, there have been people who have been willing to stand against evil, we also serve them poorly in more than one way.
First of all, it is historically inaccurate. We must help students see the courage of those who have rebelled when wrong prevailed. Maybe we should require every child to read Adam Hochschild’s book Bury The Chains on the early abolitionist movement or study Mark Twain’s pamphlet against King Leopold’s actions in the Congo. To sanitize the past is wrong, but to omit actions of bravery can be equally damaging.
Second of all, it deprives students of a sense of hope as had happened with my
student. To show adolescents that others have stood against tyrants enables them to believe that it can occur again. I remember many years ago when many students complained to me that a class on prejudice, oppression, and genocide depressed them and made them want to stop living. They figured “why bother.” The truth can and may be depressing, but their ignorance of those brave souls only worsened their sense of helplessness and made them tune out.
Perhaps most dangerously, when students lack hope, they eventually lose their will and their sense of purpose. The precursor to will is hope, and without the faith that things can improve, one feels like she is tilting at windmills and that her actions will bear no fruit. In this situation, one ultimately surrenders and our students become participants rather than actors on the stage of life.
We want our students to know their past, but we want them to know all of it. We want them to internalize that they stand on the shoulders of giants who have struggled to realize what is true and good in their world. When we teach them both of these lessons, we give them the information they need and the power to be the change we all hope that they become.
