Rant! How Do I Fix the Past?

I was glad when Dr. Shutkin talked today about historians judging the past through the lens of the present. That has crossed my mind from time to time while reading Spring's book. He seems critical that people ever taught religion in school. (I understand that fear nowadays:  if I had kids, I wouldn't want them being indoctrinated by someone during school hours.) But the pilgrims risked their lives crossing the ocean to make their own settlement in the New World. Why wouldn't they teach what they wanted to in their schools?



BUT I'm almost physically sickened by the injustice and inhumanity shown by the early Americans to the groups against whom they discriminated. Hating the Irish. Disparaging immigrants. Dehumanizing the free Blacks and slaves. Purposefully destroying the Native American cultures and the populations themselves.  My soul cries out to fix it and make it right. But there's nothing to be done. I can help people now, but I can't change the past.

How about, for starters, giving blankets infected with smallpox to the Native Americans and wiping out whole villages?  Then as we read the history of American education, the list of arrogant wrongdoings just gets longer and longer. The whole attitude of people traveling from somewhere else and thinking they have the right to take over is founded on the belief that they're superior and deserve to do whatever they want. Kicking the Native Americans off their sacred homelands. Killing with wild abandon. Deciding their cultures didn't matter. Sending them from rich forests to inhospitable, arid western territory. Using deceitful tactics to steal the land. Breaking their hearts. (Have you read Chief Joseph's brief speech that includes the famous line, "I will fight no more forever"? So grief-stricken!) And soon we'll read about the boarding schools where the Native American youth were virtually brainwashed against their culture. (Regarding Native American students, Spring quotes Commissioner of Education Harris that the boarding schools will make an “effort  ‘to obtain control of the Indian at an early age, and to seclude him as much as possible from the tribal influences.’”  p. 182.) Those tribal influences only happen to include his or her heritage and family!

Brainwashing kids. 'Reminds me of the Hitler Youth.

And the African Americans. I hadn't realized the reach of segregated schools, even up in the north. I thought, with so many abolitionists, the North had at least been a little more enlightened. But no. And then there's Boston, where the law said Blacks could be educated in the regular common schools, but they were treated so poorly by the Whites that the Black parents wanted a segregated school. How's that for irony? Most places segregated to discriminate. In one place that didn't legally discriminate, the parents chose segregation in self-defense. However, even with help from philanthropists, the schools were still substandard (p. 119). How many times did the Black schools receive worse teachers or out of date cast off books from the White schools? Just as the Southern landowners put their consciences on "hibernate" so they could be in denial about their own brutality to the kidnapped slaves--their fellow human beings-- likewise, the educators and government officials shut down their consciences and did whatever was expedient to keep slaves and ex-slaves in submission.

Maybe I'm looking through history's lens too. I never lived in fear of a war with Native Americans like the pioneers did. Maybe our contemporary expanded sense of tolerance is coloring my view.

Or maybe not. When I was in elementary school and still living in a fog because my dad had died, I remember hearing racist names directed at an older African American student at my school. I knew nothing of politics. I barely knew what was going on at all. But I saw the pained look on that girl's face. She must have only been 8 or 9. I didn't know her personally. We were passing on the stairs, but I saw her recoil from one ugly word. If it was obvious to a child, how could all these other public officials blind themselves to the pain and inhumanity they were inflicting? Because they convinced themselves that the people of other races weren't human? That's part of it. It makes me ashamed. But how do I fix a culture? How do I fix the past?  Practically speaking, I can’t return my piece of land to the Native Americans. What would they do with one plot in South Euclid?

All I can come up with is to help people now. I am. I do. I have. But I wish I could do more.

In his book Spring talks about three religious groups who worked with the Native Americans. He refers to the three dominations. (“All three religious dominations emphasized the importance of changing the traditional customs of Native Americans while teaching reading and writing.” p. 130.)  Didn't he mean “denominations”? Or maybe it was a Freudian Slip. I'm learning that, unfortunately, domination has hit epidemic proportions in the American education system.

Spring, Joel. The American School: A Global Context from the Puritans to the
     Obama Era. 8th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2011. Print.