It’s time to make history unsafe for kids

Want to read a statement about history that’s startling and dead-on accurate? Curious? Well, I’ll tease you for just a moment longer. The sentence I have in mind encapsulates both the problem with history as we practice it and the promise of what history should be, and this statement doesn’t appear in an essay or a history book, but in a novel. Here goes, straight from Philip Roth’s pen in The Plot Against America (Houghton, 2004): “…history, harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.” Wow. We authors, parents, teachers, editors, and textbook publishers all conspire to make history safe and “inevitable.” So if it’s 1491, then the following year Columbus will surely sail the ocean blue. If it’s 1776, then John Hancock will soon be signing the Declaration of Independence and George Washington will cross the Delaware. Ho-hum, what a snooze. There isn’t the slightest bit of suspense in how we read, write, and teach about these fundamentally dramatic moments. Instead, we sift through the past like a dull cleric going through the Bible—the exact same stories, in the exact same order, year after dreary, safe year. Students never get a sense of the unknown or the “might have been.” They experience the past as a rerun, not as live action. Roth not only nails what we’ve gotten wrong, he sees precisely what we’ve avoided sharing with our young students: “the terror of the unforeseen.” During the fall of 2001, I often had to fly. Every time I boarded a plane, I had nightmarish visions: Would I have to leap up, along with the grandmother beside me, to subdue a terrorist? Would I have as much courage as the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93, who prevented their plane from being used as a guided missile? Every night in my family’s Manhattan apartment, I wondered if the planes I heard passing overhead were about to crash. And those weren’t my only anxieties. Even though I don’t own stocks, when the stock market went into a tailspin, I wondered: Is the world sliding into a serious depression, like in 1929? And when Hezbollah launched missiles against the villages in Israel where my relatives live, I couldn’t wait to get an email from them telling me everyone was safe. In real life, we all experience deep emotions when we think about what may happen next—and yet that completely evaporates when we portray the past. Sure, there are plenty of biographies, poems, plays, and interview collections in which young people can hear what previous generations thought. But learning about what someone else felt long ago is very different than experiencing those emotions firsthand. We’ve managed to entirely remove the contingent, the present tense, from the past. As Roth points out, we’ve gotten just what we wanted: we’ve turned history into something harmless and bland. And the more we portray the past as having progressed on its inevitable course, the more assured we are about the present and the future, the more we feel as if we’re in control of our destinies. Making good decisions, charting the best course to follow, requires that we understand history’s often terrifying nature. Don’t we want to make sure our children are more alert, more astute about their world, more determined to improve it? If we let history remain dull, we numb young people. If we give them a sense of the terror of the past, we inspire them to create a better future. Surely that’s better than putting an entire class to sleep.