Children and our Present History

November 3, 2010

Tonight I went to see Amy Goodman, a journalist for Democracy Now and the independent press, speak at the Unity Church. Next time she is in town, I want to take the older children, including the ones who have graduated and moved on, who I took to Washington DC last year. They need to hear people speak live, with passion and dedication. They need to see that history isn’t just the past, it is happening right now, and we have a part to play in it.

Children need to see real life heroes. They need models for living life with a burning inside to help people, or help the planet, in whatever way they are called to do. There is a real feeling to these people that is different, that moves the heart, that is a call to action. Amy’s message is the same as Jane Goodalls: that every person counts, that what you do matters, and nothing is too small. She talked about the magic moment. She used Rosa Parks as an example. When she sat down on that bus in 1955 and didn’t get up for a white person, it wasn’t the first time she had done that. But it was that time that something different happened, and her action ignited the Civil Rights movement.

Amy told other stories, of people who took risks standing up for what they believe in and how that moved history. These are stories that we aren’t taught in school, that we don’t know the full depth and breadth of. One such story was the story of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. I was in school when that happened, but tonight I found out more about it than I was ever taught or even read in all my hours of reading history. She also spoke eloquently and with great passion about the wars and the magnitude of their tolls, on soldiers, on civilians and on our economy. But the thing that stood out to me the most was her heart. When you see her, experience her, listen to her, you don’t feel her liberal opinion; you feel the depth of her caring and commitment to freedom and democracy. I feel this is what the kids need to experience. This breathes real life into history lessons.

What do kids need to understand this time in history, their place in it, and why we study history in the first place? They need experience. They need to be exposed to real people talking about real issues, in a language they can understand. They need to be shown documentaries. They need to hear real stories about real people and what it was like and is like to live in conditions that are outside our sheltered lives. They need to be taught how to find information outside the mainstream media, and how to find out all they can about a subject until they have a broad understanding that is not just one sided. And they need to question long and deeply enough to find answers that make sense and aren’t just what their parents or peers or even their school teachers might have told them.

One of our greatest issues as a society is ignorance of complete information. The media has us mesmerized so much that many of us don’t bother to ask if we might be missing something. If children are educated to ask questions and not just accept answers that don’t give a big enough picture, then we are educating children to think and not just be automatic machines that believe anything they hear.