Know History?

“I do think it’s important for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read. The United States Military Academy is a university. It is important that we train and we understand. I want to understand white rage—and I’m white. What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out. I want to maintain an open mind. I do want to analyze it. It’s important that we understand it. Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and guardians—they come from the American people. It’s important that the leaders, now and in the future, understand it. I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with having some situational understanding about the country we are here to defend? I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military—our general officers, our commissioned and non-commissioned—of being ‘woke’ or something else because we’re studying some theories that are out there while calling out those who have criticized military officials as “woke” for entertaining the theory based on the idea that systemic racism exists in America. [Critical race theory] was started at Harvard Law School years ago and proposed that there were laws in the United States prior to the Civil War that led to a power differential with African Americans that were three-quarters of a human being when this country was formed. We had a Civil War and an Emancipation Proclamation to change it. We brought it up in the Civil Rights Act. It took another 100 years to change that. I do want to know.” — General Mark Milley, remarks to the House Armed Services Committee budget hearing on Wednesday, June 23, 2021

 

Back in the day, I had a wonderful history teacher in high school, Miss Simmons, who had taught all four of my older siblings and was a venerable fixture at the school. She was my teacher for three years, from ninth to eleventh grade, and I think we studied European, World, and US history in that order, but my high school years are now a historic time period in and of themselves such that their undocumented memory is a bit of a blur. Miss Simmons, however, is not. Her monolithic pedagogy lives clearly in my mind as does the image of her and her classroom. 

 

Miss Simmons was a medium-height, elderly (to a teenager, at least, so she probably wasn't that old), white-haired, single woman who had high expectations for every student in her classes. Among the students, she was known for a spot of dandruff, a Kleenex rubber-banded up the sleeve, bespectacled but still poor eyesight, and a clearly articulated "don't mess with me" aura. And no one did mess with her—not her students, not her colleagues, not the parents. She often called down-stream students by their older siblings' names—so I got the occasional "Danny" when I needed some refocusing—but there was never any reason to mess with Miss Simmons because she was an exceptional teacher. She was a tough but fair grader, and each year she conscripted a few seniors to read student papers to her—an honor my oldest sister, Joyce, held—and a B on an assignment was a blessing, an A sent one to heaven (and anything below either of these was a trip to purgatory or hell, depending on how low it was).

 

Her room was typical and atypical at the same time. I don't really recall any wall decorations or posters or even student work hanging from bulletin boards, but it looked like this: across the front, there was the entrance door from the hall to the right, a long, dusty rectangle of blackboard across the middle, and finally Miss Simmons' desk; the left side of the room was a line of exterior windows above the metal heater and in the middle of the room stood five parallel rows of individual student desks running six people deep to the back of the room. Hers was a standard public school classroom in most respects, except for the back wall, which was remarkable. From corner to corner and from floor to just below the ceiling 15 feet above stood rows of books and pamphlets, 30+ copies each without a textbook among them. These were the texts of my three years of history education with Miss Simmons, and they included assigned readings of The Prince, The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, the "I Have a Dream" Speech, Sal Is Puedes, and a host of other historic writings. Through a great deal of reading and writing (and a fair number of film strips), Miss Simmons taught her students about political ideologies, movements, people, religions, cultures, and events of historical import; she taught geography and geopolitics; she taught critical thinking, and she taught history so we could know history.

 

More than 40 years later, in 2021, General Milley recalled to me Miss Simmons' educational objectives and her work as a teacher to develop in her students a thirst for knowledge, a desire for lifelong learning so that we could be informed, open-minded, critical thinkers when confronted with new and evolving social, economic, and political issues. Six months later, in 2022, I am seeing the stories of book banning in a Tennessee school district. Their students can no longer read Maus (the first and only graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize Special Award in Letters) and The Bluest Eye (written by Toni Morrison, who 18 years later won the Noble Prize for Literature), and I am very disheartened. While I can only reincarnate Miss Simmons here in writing, we can hope to revive her spirit of education in our classrooms where we can confront reality, teach perspective-taking, read deeply, write forcefully, and know history from every angle it takes to know it well.