As a high school history teacher lectures her students with George Santayana's "Those who forget history..." some wisenheimer asks, "Will this be on the test?" The teacher invites questions, and another kid asks, "What time is lunch?"
Even on the best teaching days, impressing students with the gravitas of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address can be the equivalent of herding cats when engaging 30 adolescent brains that default to impulse and daydream on more prosaic thoughts such as sex and lunch. Yet our children are also distracted by soaring rates of depression and anxiety caused by pandemic-fueled disruptions and social media.
The best teachers till the oft-intractable soil of young minds composting with lessons that may fertilize student imagination and curiosity. The most fruitful harvest is a child inspired to learn. Yet with the chilling climate of COVID and acerbic culture wars, teaching can be a Sisyphean task. Like Job, teachers are the believers who persevere even when others doubt.
As we mature and achieve a balance between the hormonal, the cerebral and the insatiable Siren seductions of commerce and our incomes, we may ask ourselves, like the Peggy Lee song, "Is That All There Is?" Aristotle taught that once we have acquired modest material security, we naturally thirst for intellectual edification. Central to this quest was knowing human nature.
Usually we learn about human nature through experience. We can live long, but such evidence remains anecdotal. While the internet has broadened our experience, it has also wrought an insular tribalism and carnival mirror distortions of reality. We can, however, contextualize and expand our understanding of our shared timeless nature through the study of literature and history.
We read Shakespeare, Tolstoy or Gwendolyn Brooks because their characters reflect our rectitudes and foibles. Consider the human proclivity for power: It tragically corrupts in Macbeth, while, conversely, impotence causes Lear's raging madness. Or how patriarchy suffocates women's power in Anna Karenina, Ibsen's Doll's House and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Or how racism emasculates Black men in Raisin in the Sun.
And recall the ethically ambiguous characters who confound our yearning for a Manichaean moral universe in The Tempest's Prospero, Prince Hamlet, Victor Frankenstein and Jay Gatsby.
While literature offers fictive exemplars of human nature, history recalls the realities of our nature — a little lower than angels and prone to Shakespeare's "foul deeds" — of which literature is an imitator, art imitating life.
Some contend that the past is irrelevant to our seemingly unprecedented present or that exhortations to listen to the past are the banal platitudes of teacher homilies and bumper stickers. Others may use the past as an escape from the present — history as opiate. And some are chained to the amnesia of exceptionalist fairy tales. Yet as Jawaharlal Nehru cautioned, "You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall."
While ostensibly history changes — its actors, settings, cultures, costumes — our basic nature is unchanging. Our sometimes fatally flawed predecessors beckon us to learn from their crucibles and thereby perhaps avoid or mitigate civilization's crushing crises. If we fail to heed their counsel, we are night driving without rear vision or headlights, blindly careening into the future.
History is the guide for us, the presently perplexed — the Virgil to our Dante. Our democracy imperiled, weary and wary about forever wars? Thucydides' Peloponnesian War recounts how Athenian democracy perished and its military was squandered in imperial hubris. Exhausted by our fractured, polarized politics? Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals tells how despite violent, sanctimonious partisanship, Lincoln improbably gathered his political adversaries in his Cabinet to restore the Union. Despairing that our tribulations are insurmountable? Consider Tim Egan's The Worst Hard Time for inspiration.
Our most enduring documents are marinated in history. Our Founding Fathers modeled government on the Roman Republic, constructing a constitution that might avert Rome's fate. Our checks and balances are derived from Newton's Third Law of Motion. Lincoln's template for his homage to the Union's dead in Gettysburg was Pericles' Funeral Oration to the Athenian warriors who perished in the Peloponnesian War.
Many high school students may never read historical nonfiction, apart from expurgated, stultifying Texas-sanitized textbooks, even if their schools are able to resist the latest inquisition by the freedom-for-me-but-not-for-thee crowd. High schools and colleges have become supplicants to market gospel, prioritizing jobs rather than literate, well-versed, critically thinking citizens. Another closing of the American mind as the study of history is left behind in STEM-driven curriculums. Education's place in our democracy's social contract to produce a "well-rounded" electorate now can seem quaintly archaic.
Alas, despite these herculean obstacles, the goddess of history, Clio, has graced us with teachers who heroically coax us from the dark of Plato's cave into the light of the past. And like ourselves, teachers are not gods but mortals endowed with the same beautifully flawed natures. ♦
John Hagney is a retired history teacher, spending 45 years at Lewis and Clark High School. He was named a U.S. Presidential Scholar Distinguished Teacher and published an oral history of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms that has been translated into six languages.
