Obama inauguration offers living history lesson

Many Georgia educators let the opportunity slide

On a Sunday afternoon, I watched via Internet as Barack Obama roared toward Washington, D.C. to the take the oath of office. Styling himself as a modern Abraham Lincoln, our new president retraced the pre-inauguration train journey traveled in 1861. At every stop, huge crowds braved sub-zero temperatures to catch a glimpse of the new leader of the free world, or to shout “Yes, We Can!” as the train rolls by.

As I watched that train roll toward the capitol, I thought of my friend Martha Archie. At birth she was named Martha Moss, and she grew up here in Ringgold, where her family is well-known and well-respected in the community. She graduated in 1964, the same year as both my parents. Yet even in this small town, my parents never met Martha Moss when they were teens. As an African-American, Martha Moss could not attend Ringgold High School.

Wilson High School was the school designated for students with darker skin. Situated down the hill from Ringgold High School (now the Middle School), Wilson offered education that was supposed to be “separate but equal.”

We were decorating a float for the Christmas parade the first time I heard of Wilson High School. Martha pointed out where Wilson High was housed, in what is now the ROTC building. Standing in the frigid wind with balloons in both hands, I cast my gaze from one school toward the other, and tried to imagine how two worlds could be so close and yet so segregated.

I should have realized there would have been two schools in my hometown, just as there were all across the South. I knew my parents lived through segregation and desegregation. My mother had told me about the separate drinking fountains in public places. As a child too young to understand, my mother had begged to drink from the fountain labeled “COLORED.” She thought the water would be tinted all the colors of the rainbow.

It is easier to imagine those things happened in Chattanooga, or down in Atlanta, or somewhere off in Alabama or Mississippi. We tend to downplay the history of racial tensions in our own hometowns. Certainly we would rather focus on the positive, like the gymnasium at Ringgold High School which is named after a black athlete. Neither do we like to remember that the KKK marched these streets not so long ago, and that black families in Ringgold were threatened in the 1960’s and even subjected to domestic terrorism that killed a mother in her bed.

We thirty-somethings do not go back that far. It’s difficult for us to comprehend how bad things really were. Today students of every skin tone mingle in the school yards. We have a city council that cares about all citizens, enough to remove a symbol that offends the black community. Then we see Barack Obama waving from the train car, and placing his hand on Lincoln’s inaugural Bible.

“Young people don’t understand how significant this is,” Martha told me the night of the parade. “They don’t remember what it was like, when you couldn’t even walk into a place and eat dinner.”

One reason young people don’t remember is because we, as a society, do not teach them. During all my years in Ringgold High School, no one ever spoke of Wilson High School. It was as if the black school had never existed, never left any imprint on this community, and did not even deserve acknowledgement.

No wonder American education lacks relevancy. We focus on the distant past that can be sanitized and analyzed, while ignoring the messy situations and overlapping voices that form real human history.

Students learn about Columbus every single year, but rarely are they taught about Clinton or Bush. Other powerful political figures like Nancy Pelosi, Karl Rove, Jesse Jackson and Dick Cheney hardly enter the classroom conversation, even though they have an enormous impact on our society and our world. Students learn how to calculate the height of a flag pole by measuring its shadow, but not how the World Trade Towers could have been protected from terrorism. They learn that the Civil War was about states’ rights and not just slavery, but they do not learn how to articulate both sides of the Iraq controversy.

Individual teachers cannot be blamed for a problem that is systematic. Georgia public education requires that every student in Georgia pass the same end-of-course tests. The advantage of the testing is that it standardizes Georgia education so that a diploma from one school is roughly equal to a diploma from another. The disadvantage is that it pressures teachers to neglect creativity and relevancy in favor of homogeny and “teaching to the test.” Standardization seeks to make all students the same, not better.

Students need to learn what is going on in the world right now. They need to read newspapers in the classroom. They need to have sources like National Geographic at their disposal –not just buried in the library, but open on their desks. NPR and CNN should be played in the classroom from time to time.

The inauguration of Barack Obama was a watershed moment in American history. Whether you love him or hate him, he has changed the face of American politics forever. In Washington, millions gathered to experience it.

Around the country, many homeschool parents seized the opportunity to teach their children about the political process all year long. They printed maps for their children to color as the state-by-state election results came in. They took their children on the campaign trail for one of the candidates. Not constrained by having to board a school bus at dawn, many homeschooled students stayed up to watch the election results rolling in at midnight. On January 20th, most of those families turned on the TV to witness America once again transfer power without violence.

Likewise, in a few public and private school classrooms, resourceful teachers do make a point of teaching students about politics without indoctrinating them. On Tuesday, some of those teachers recognized the importance of the moment, and turned on the TV. Sadly, others did not. In fact, some Georgia schools were forced by parents to offer an alternative activity, because parents protested that the inauguration was not educational. Other schools just failed to see the significance of the event and did not plan accordingly.

Nothing else that happened on Tuesday, January 20, 2009, held more educational significance than the inauguration of a new American President. How could printed words in a textbook compare to watching history unfold before us? The speeches delivered at the inauguration contained compelling history lessons, even as they became part of that recorded history. Art, music, poetry, prose and architecture were on display. Most of the important political figures whose names are not being taught at these schools were standing in the audience with their families. The event presented a massive array of teaching opportunities on politics, history, culture, literature, science and math.

Of my six children, only one attends public school. She is the only one who was prevented from watching the inauguration. Next election, I will be keeping my children home so they can learn.

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