All too often, when middle and high school students study history, they tend to view events as inevitable. Looking through the eyes of the present when they already know what happens, students fail to see that the people of the past faced varying alternatives among which they had to choose. These choices may have entailed major consequences for individuals or countries, and the people in the position of having to make choices may have agonized over their decision in the same way that people do in today's crises. However, it is very hard for adolescents in today's world to remember when history is taught as names, dates, and facts that are divorced from the human element.
I considered the place of choice in history and the manner in which we teach students about this concept as I listened to a recent podcast on the secession crisis of 1860-61. As we commemorate the beginning of the Civil War one hundred and fifty years ago this month, we are reminded again that none of the states that seceded were forced to do so; people in places ranging from Richmond to Montgomery to New Orleans made the choice to leave the Union.
Similarly, people in the North had to figure out how to proceed in the face of the possible dissolution of their country. As President Barack Obama must decide what to do regarding today's rebellion in Libya, so Abraham Lincoln wrestled with how to handle an incipient insurrection in the South. Harold Holzer's book, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Secession Winter, 1860-61, recounts the period between Abraham Lincoln's election and his inauguration and the many decisions the incoming President faced as he prepared to assume office.
Although we study the road to war as if it were foreordained, there was nothing inexorable about the choices made by ordinary people in Washington, D. C. and Charleston, South Carolina. People may have been swept up in the course of events, but they still had the opportunity to choose among compelling options. A historian on the weekly public radio show Backstory with the American History Guys said that the most important lesson young people can learn about the beginning of America's bloodiest war was the role that contingency plays in history, and that students need to learn that people's actions in the past were no more pre-determined than ours.
The recent film The Adjustment Bureau asks us to consider what role fate or destiny plays in our lives even when we don't know that we're headed in a direction that has been decided for us. Our freshmen consider this concept as they read and discuss Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, and ask themselves how much say they have in their lives. They know that they have many, many choices regarding the music to which they listen and the way they listen to it, and they know that they can shape the various forms of media they receive. Unfortunately, they may still feel that much of their lives is determined by others besides themselves.
If we can encourage students to understand that in the same way that people in the past had difficult choices in front of them, so do they and the choice is theirs to make, we will have served them well. As part of a unit on leadership in my class, I recently showed my students the movie Invictus after reading an article on Nelson Mandela's 8 Lessons on Leadership. If they learned nothing else from our discussions, I hope they take to heart the lines of the William Henly poem Invictus, and in particular the final stanza, from which the title of the movie comes.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the soul.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
