Microwunderkammer

 Parental Artifact #5–some homework from ~1915.

News stories from the last week have brought a sickening spate of stories about educators having to deal with a new and angry wave of censorship. This attack on education has come from above and below. It has come from state and local elected officials who prostrate themselves before the altar of Trump, and who live Orwell’s dictum that “Who controls the past controls the future; and who controls the present controls the past.” It has come from parents who have consumed too much Fox News and think that Critical Race Theory is going to turn their proud, white, Christianist children into self-hating Marxist trans lesbians.

From above, we have legislation, actual laws, saying that teachers can’t teach lessons that might make any student feel “discomfort, guilt, or anguish” about themselves based on race. Like grandfather clauses and literacy tests, this is ostensibly neutral language, but designed entirely to make sure that White parents don’t have to confront the existence of America’s congenital racism. If a teacher were to suggest that American slavery was unambiguously bad and unambiguously racist, that might make a White kid, who had been raised to believe that great-great-grandpa Jeb was a saint, start to have some doubts.

From below, we have parents who act to get award-winning educators disciplined or fired for even having anti-racist materials available for their students. Because of the threat of parental complaint, teachers are having to purge or even eliminate their classroom libraries. Heck, we even have lists of forbidden words!

At least one of my great-grandparents, three of my grandparents, and both of my parents were professionally involved in education, from the elementary to postgraduate level. They came from wildly different backgrounds, from full-on WASP to the child of German immigrants to an immigrant Jew from Belarus. I didn’t know them all personally, but from their records it’s pretty clear that they none of them liked being told what to think.

However, that is not to say that they were all perfect people by modern standards. They were all humans. They had good character traits, they had…less good character traits. I am comfortable with that. Though I owe them all so much, I am not going to put any of them on a pedestal and insist that they, like “all people who contributed to American Society will be recognized and presented as reformists, innovators and heroes to our culture,” to quote an actual, real school board policy from South Carolina.

My grandparents’ education is reflective of the cultural norms of the time and place. They were all, as academics, prone to saving all sorts of papers. So it is that there was a drawer of a file cabinet in my parents’ garage that was all papers from my maternal grandmother—manuscripts, drafts, college notebooks, homework from a graphic design class, and going further back, homework from possibly high school or junior high school, in San Diego, sometime in the nineteen-teens. In a folder labeled “Spanish book” was an assignment to take pictures from magazines other media, and give them legends in elementary Spanish. There were scenes of families, of animals, of foreign lands, and some of foreign peoples. The translation is left to the interested reader.

I don’t think this is in any way defining of my grandmother. It’s not her finest or characteristic work, and I have no idea why she saved it in particular. It’s just a thing from her school days, and I would be unhappy if my personality were judged based on the asshole I was in high school. But it IS how she was educated, and it shows the poison flowing freely in the water everyone drank at the time. She was a good person but I wouldn’t say that she was entirely free of some of the attitudes reflected in her homework.

It would be stupid and dishonest to deny that past. Anyone who believes their parents and grandparents were absolutely, purely good and only “reformists, innovators, and heroes to our culture” is an idiot worshipping an idol. Anyone who believes that anything good comes from believing there is nothing bad in our past is a damn fool. This voice of a teenage girl a hundred years ago speaks to our time, from only two generations remove. Her innocent voice is telling me that we have a lot of work yet to do and I shouldn’t pretend otherwise.