Comparing tragedies and the pain experienced by people of the past is a fool’s errand, there’s no objective gauge to measure loss in the human experience. Yet, such comparisons are a common trap is history classrooms that most skilled teachers can avoid, explaining to their students why human pain in unquantifiable, there’s no math equation that can be used to compare slavery and the Holocaust. There isn’t even a responsible way to add any adjectives or other descriptive language in the references to each of them without making such a judgement.
Yet, when two maritime accidents crashed into our awareness recently, it’s easy to hear lots of judgement and thousands of opinions. Safety concerns about the composite materials of the Titan’s hull went unheeded, the captain of the Andriana refused aid from the Greek Coast guard seemingly capsizing this boat when trying to escape. It’s also impossible to miss the stark disparity of attention directed at each. Although the numbers cited above might change with the search terms, there’s no escaping the fact that the NY Times ran many more stories on a few lives lost at sea in a submersible and ran fewer stories on hundreds of lives lost at sea on an overcrowded boat of migrants. The Times ran a story on this disparity, inexcusably avoiding the first person in their analysis.
It’s heart-wrenching to think even for a moment about the aching loss settling into everyone who knew and loved those lost on both of these vessels. Yet, the people who work at the NY Times and many other “news” companies made choices when reporting them, and each of those decisions reflected value in one story rather than the other. It’s hard to ignore the profit motive dictating these choices. The business model doesn’t show profits when readers and viewers are informed, only when they are “engaged” with the content.
I can’t imagine what it’s like to make these choices that in business model, but I’m familiar with similar choices made in the education model of teaching history. History teachers make them all the time. Although the State standards, district curricula and the fastidiousness of the local Board and building leadership prescribe the parameters of what’s included, and more recently in some states, what can’t be included in a high school US history course, teachers decide which stories make it into their lesson plans.
Just 30 years ago, textbooks, workbooks, a couple of videotapes and whatever books could be found in a local public library marked the limit of perspectives available to the teacher to share with students. The taught narrative canon reflected in these sources had just as broad a disparity of attention as last week’s news reports. Native Americans, women and the enslaved were virtually absent in the American Revolution, as were the Chinese and Irish ignored in the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. LGBTQ and disabled people simply didn’t exist. Even the most ardent educator would be hard pressed to find content to bring any of these people into their lessons before the information revolution.
But today, there is no limit to the resources available to history teachers, There’s no way to exaggerate how much the landscape has changed. I’ve been bookmarking since this began and have more than 10,000 primary and secondary sources within a click’s reach. Diaries, journals, letters, maps, data visualizations, articles, essays, art, images and film across the broad spectrum of human experience of the past. With the content barrier gone, history teachers are only limited by the instructional schedule and the resistance of those who still want these populations marginalized.
At the very least, each class of students should recognize people like themselves in the past. The economic, racial, religious, political, cultural and gender spectrum that people our lessons should be as broad as our students to be relevant and should be broader than our students in order to be instructional and prepare them for the adult world. If the history in our classrooms is going to bear any resemblance to history practiced in the discipline itself, it must draw upon as complete a spectrum of human experience as possible.
Unfortunately, that full spectrum of the human experience has to be crammed into a rotating block schedule of just 137 class periods of 54 minutes each. Tough choices have to be made. Choices made even more difficult tougher by field trips, concert rehearsals, early athletic dismissals, class assemblies and snow days.
Unlike politics, teaching history is the “art of the impossible”, teachers will never meet their lofty goals. Lesson sequences, unit plans and readings may show disparities that rival those the NY Times, but at least the motivations driving those decisions are better than the pure profit motive of the news-entertainers.