Our friend and mentor Robert Kuttner wrote this week in the American Prospect about the death on March 28 of Margot Stern Strom, the Brookline teacher who in 1975 created Facing History and Ourselves, a curriculum that has been used in thousands of middle and high schools to teach students about hatred and its consequences. It started as a study of the Nazi Holocaust and in later years grew to incorporate lessons about slavery, Jim Crow, the Armenian genocide, the slaughter of Native Americans, apartheid in South Africa, and the murder of George Floyd.
“Good education has to talk about prejudice and racism and conflict,” Strom told the Boston Globe in 1978, “but it is easier not to.”
“The Facing History curriculum won awards,” writes Kuttner. “But lately, Facing History and far tamer curricula have been banished in large chunks of the country that do not want to face history. On the contrary, they explicitly want to deny history.”
He is referring, of course, to the “Stop WOKE Act” that was approved by the Florida legislature last month with the enthusiastic support of Gov. Ron DeSantis. The law forbids teaching that would “cause someone to feel guilty or ashamed about the past collective actions of their race or sex,” reported the Washington Post.
“This bill is about fear,” said state Sen. Audrey Gibson, who voted against it. “Not fear of someone feeling guilt, but fear of our young people coming together to tear down walls of division that some people want to keep up … The bill makes it okay to talk about Pilgrims coming over on ships, but not a race of people who came over on slave ships.”
Because of the new law, an elementary school in St. Petersburg halted the showing of a film — made by Disney — based on the true story of six-year-old Ruby Bridges, the Black girl who integrated a public school in New Orleans in 1960. A parent complained that the movie might make white people feel bad.
To choose not to learn history because of the feelings it can bring is a truly remarkable mistake. History is a minefield of brutality and cruelty — but that is exactly why sensitive and well-trained educators must teach it and not surrender the field to YouTube algorithms and “Ancient Aliens” programs.
On our front page this week is a story about Lisa Brown, a respected Nauset Regional High School teacher whose creative and original curriculum, Exploring and Respecting Differences, helps her students navigate America’s most difficult subjects. They come away with the skills to mediate conflict or teach empathy to middle schoolers.
I cannot help but wonder how such a curriculum could ever be created again, even in Massachusetts. Many people in America are more free than they were 23 years ago, when Brown began teaching these classes. I am pretty sure educators are not.
