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During my time in South America, it became blatantly obvious how much I was not taught in history class from elementary school through high school. We learned a somewhat white-washed version of United States history, as well as a lot of European history. In terms of African history, we learned about Egypt. We had a unit on the Mayans and the Aztecs, and that about covered South America. We learned that the Chinese invented fireworks and about how the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and that just about covered the entire history of the entire continent of Asia. Right? I mean what else could we possibly learn? At least I had the preamble memorized.
As the United States curriculum is right now, it is designed to portray the government and history of the country in a fairly positive light. It does talk about slavery, but for the most part the impression that students receive is that anything negative, either politically or socially, ended in the 1960’s. I agree that building confidence amongst students in the government is important, but sacrificing students’ willingness to question power and the current state of affairs is not acceptable. History curriculum needs to start providing students with a wider perspective on the world, along with a more critical eye. It wasn’t until college that I was even able to take a history of Africa class and learn about the United States’ aid in South American civil wars and military coups. If I had decided not to go to college, I, as a United States citizen of European descent, would have graduated high school knowing nothing about the history of any culture other than my own. Yet even in college, my elective United States history class spent only a half of a lecture on slavery and did not even make it to the Civil Rights Movement. Forget about Second Wave Feminism. However, I’m not here to whine. I’m here to state: the history curriculum in this country has political and ideological implications and ramifications. The history curriculum in this country needs to change, and as an educator, I can make this change for my students.
The common core standards in Wisconsin state that, by the end of twelfth grade, students should have knowledge about:
· prehistory to 2000 BC
· early pastoral civilizations, nonwestern empires, and tropical civilizations
· classical civilizations including China, India, Egypt, Greece, and Rome
· multiple religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism) and civilizations to 1100
· expansion and centralization of power, including the decline of feudalism
· the early modern world
· global unrest, change, and revolution from 1750-1850
· global encounters, industrialization, urbanization, and imperialism (1859-1914)
· wars, revolutions, and ideologies (1900-1945)
· post-industrialism, global interdependence, and fragmentation in the contemporary world (1945-present)
(Standards taken from Wisconsin DPI website)
These standards are vague and thus easily evaded. Learning about “tropical cultures” becomes learning about the Mayans for a day. There is no mention of learning about Africa other than talking about Egypt as a classical civilization. Standards about modern history, like “wars, revolutions, and ideologies” and “post-industrialism,” are not country specific and thus are often times focused on the United States and European powers. Students are left with only an equivocal and ancient concept of the history of contexts other than their own. It is no wonder that xenophobia is rampant in the country today; people tend to fear the other when “the other” is never talked about, when there is no understanding or desire to understand the culture of “the other.” I would argue that, if we taught our students more about other cultures and their histories, the fear and paranoia plaguing our country today would decrease as understanding increases.
I know that this is a tall order; teachers already scramble to teach the amount of curriculum they are required to. I do know, however, that high school students are required to take a world history class. I believe that the teachers of these classes should branch out from teaching about just Europe; after leaving North America for the first time, I have come to realize that the world is so much larger than what we learn about in school. It took me until I was twenty-years-old to learn about the history of South America, about the military coup in Peru in 1968, about the United States invasion of Panama in 1989. When talking to people in South America, they felt they needed to explain their history in-depth because they told me that they knew I hadn’t learned about it in school. And they were right. People from the United States hate when foreigners assume that they know nothing about the rest of the world, and yet they expect everyone to speak English and to cater to our culture/way of life. There is a reason that everyone in the world knows our language and our culture and we remain ignorant of theirs: a Eurocentric curriculum. Learning about the USA and Europe is important, but those are not the only places in the world with important history.
Californian educators Ivan Santos and Joe Ku’e won the 2016 NEA Social Justice Activists of the Year Award last year for teaching a curriculum to their students that combatted xenophobia and racism. They infused lessons about global human rights, social justice, what they call “ethnic studies” (studies of non-European cultures,) and studies about gender into their every-day curriculum. They did so in a way that managed to fulfill state requirements at the same time. They said that their hope for their students is that they learn “the Civil Rights Movement isn’t history; it’s still happening, and we’re in the middle of it.” They want their students to feel connected and knowledgeable about the world and past/current global issues. These are the educators I admire, and these are the educators that prove a global education is possible. If education in the US became less about what political image the government would like to portray to students and more about giving students a truly global perspective, every teacher would be like these two men. They are the kinds of educators every history teacher should strive to be, and that I will strive to be.