Are we treating history like a Starbucks menu?

Last March, I was in Boston to host a panel on multicultural history at the Kennedy Presidential Library. I was joined by children’s book authors Alma Flor Ada, Tanya Bolden, Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, and Lawrence Yep as part of a conference called “One Country, Many Voices: Cultural Connections to Our History.” The night before, we enjoyed a fine dinner together, and later that evening, I started reading Jacque Le Goff’s Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980). As I read the French historian’s book, I came across a phrase that made me sit up in bed. “History,” he wrote, “supplies the needs of man’s memory.”

Wow, what a revelation.

In America, we relegate history to a far less important role. We treat it as an option or an elective. Every state selects its own history requirements, and every school district determines its own way of teaching the subject. We once staged school pageants and Fourth of July events to establish a national history, a form of collective memory. But those efforts crumbled in the 1960s for precisely the reasons our panel discussed—the stories that were excluded from those events were as important as the ones that were included.

But Le Goff wasn’t making a political point. He wasn’t saying we need to revere one particular version of the past, nor scour it to find role models, nor whitewash it as Japan and Turkey seem to be doing to their own histories. In fact, he wasn’t linking history and nations at all. To Le Goff, history is a way of linking ourselves to who we were and understanding how we became ourselves. In other words, history is our memory. It’s what we stand on; it’s the shadow we cast behind us as we face the future.

Le Goff’s description of what history is and does isn’t merely true, it’s beautiful. In that French way, it’s both precise and poetic. I know that some of you probably flinched at his use of the phrase “man’s memory.” But that’s part of the problem: we treat history as if it were literature. We agonize over our choice of words. Should we say “man” or “humanity,” “black” or “African American,” “Indian” or “Native American”? We act as if our modern awareness has made us superior to the past, as if we no longer need the cultural treasures that have been passed down to us.

Sigmund Freud also appreciated the importance of history. He recognized that if we didn’t fully comprehend our past, we would become two-dimensional people, cut off from our true selves. But these days we tend to treat history like a Starbucks menu, mixing and matching parts of it, rather than viewing it as something we all need to know.

I realized that again the other day, when my six-year-old son was playing Playhouse Disney’s “Great Sky Race,” a wonderful online game that teaches kids musical terms. Since he was listening to Mozart and Beethoven, I decided to play some of their music for him. We listened to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the sound cranked up—way up (my wife was away). Then we listened to Paul Robeson’s recording of “Ode to Joy,” sung in English. Friends, this is an anthem for all of humanity. The lyrics of one of the most powerful pieces of music ever written celebrate that “all mankind are brothers plighted, all for one and one for all.” Beethoven’s composition isn’t a tribute to Marxism or patriotism or nationalism—it’s a song that embraces all of mankind.

Beethoven’s monumental music is the birthright of every child on Earth, and we adults are criminals—thieves—if we deprive even one child of hearing it. When we pass along this kind of knowledge to young people, we’re not merely meeting their curricular needs, we’re fulfilling our obligation as elders. Thank you, Jacques Le Goff, and Playhouse Disney, for giving me a new motto: No Child Deprived of History.