I was at the Vietnam Memorial a couple weeks ago. If you haven’t been, or don’t remember what it is like, it is a series of giant slabs of shiny black marble with the names of all of the American soldiers who died in that particular war etched into the stone.
It is sort of like a large reflecting pool, standing on its side. I love reflection pictures, and the memorial gave plenty of opportunities. It was spooky, though, seeing them in person, and now seeing them in pictures.
It is like looking at ghosts. Ghosts of the people who died. The Vietnamese people, the American soldiers, the people who maybe never were, but could have been if that war hadn’t happened.
We grow up with a biased history taught to us, and we somehow aren’t given the analytical tools to examine our own history to actually see that bias. I don’t recall actual words telling me, but I do recall a bone-deep understanding, that history was without bias. Looking back, it is obvious how ludicrous that is.
It is impossible to tell a story without bias. Reporters are biased, judges are biased, historians are biased. Even scientists are often biased. What is truth? Truth is many things, but never absolute.
So looking at the black reflecting pool, reflecting the memory of lives cut short, lives forever changed, and lives that never were, I thought about this memorial, and what it must be like to visit it when you are a person from Vietnam. What do you think, as you examine a monument to the American version of history? What do you think, looking at the thousands of American names, of American deaths, glorified and iconified, knowing all the while that the number of Vietnamese people killed were so many more. I don’t even have a clue what that number would be – in American schools it is never discussed.
That’s the thing about war, the thing that is never admitted. There are never any winners in wars (unless you count weapon manufacturers and the companies who make a killing on the rebuilding), only losers. Death. Destruction. There is no glory. There is only people killing people.
May 19, 2007 at 10:38 am
I’ve seen the first picture, but not the second. One thing that is great for progressive educators is a move towards using original documents to teach history. Instead of using traditional textbooks, teachers are encouraged to use copies of original documents to teach history. I took a class in grad school on teaching social studies and we had a copy of a log from a concentration camp that showed the population over a year and the nationality of the detainees. It was scary how they would show new prisoners come in and the population would remain pretty constant but no one was released.
A hardworking educator could go out and find original documents showing the deaths of Vietnamese during the war and use them in a classroom, of course finding sources that are non-U.S. biased are another story.
But the trend towards eliminating textbooks might help eliminate some bias in the future.
May 19, 2007 at 10:47 am
I think that is awesome. I almost wish I could go back to grade school and get re-educated.
There is always going to be bias, I think understanding and accepting that gives you one tool to be able to cut through the bias and make your own judgement on what is close to an accurate representation. But in order to do that, you need sources from different perspectives. And that is something I fault my own education for never providing.
I need to read Howard Zinn’s “people’s history” for starters. And you know, listening to Utah Phillips has been quite a learning experience for me. He gathers stories from the people who lived them, and he never hides the fact that there is an automatic bias. We see the events in our lives through our own filters. That’s just how it is.
Still, eliminating textbooks would definitely help. If nothing else, it would help kids not assume that there is a definitive authority on interpreting the “facts”, and hopefully they would then figure out how to interpret them themselves.
you need to go to that teacher’s bookclub at bluestockings!
May 19, 2007 at 11:37 am
Yes the children and all of us are exposed to biasness everyday. Next week I start to teach nutrition to the 5th graders it is my favorite unit of study, and I start off telling them how biased I am and that all the information they receive is biased.
I want my students to know they are drilled with biased info everywhere they go.
Bluestockings didn’t list it on their last schedule, I’ll stop by tomorrow if I am in the area and ask.
May 19, 2007 at 9:44 pm
I wish I’d had a teacher like you when I was in school.
May 21, 2007 at 12:51 pm
I’ve had some great teachers in my day, but one of the best classes I had was strictly a class that examined the United States between 1860-1870. The best part about it? It was taught from a Southern point of view. The professor was from the South and she did it that way on purpose. She had taken a poll and most of were from the North. I remember her talking about oral history, the complete dissatisfaction with textbooks, and then really figuring out how to best to study and teach history—and it was mostly through original documentation and first hand accounts. One thing she hammered into our heads was bias. That it colored everything. We looked at newspaper articles and government reports from across the world that discussed what was happening in the US during that time. One of the essay questions we had during that class was to pick the view of someone else in another country that was affected by what was going on in the US–and then we had to write “our” story and how we viewed the time period.
Being a history buff, I’ve often thought about the war memorials and the (lack of the) same memorials in various other countries for the same war. However, I never had an educator say the same thing to me. Sadly, I think it wasn’t until this one professor that I actually had a teacher direct me to think of things in this manner.
May 21, 2007 at 9:21 pm
Yeah, that’s what bugs me, is that it took many years before it really sunk in for me that the history I’d been taught all those years wasn’t unbiased.
If you get a chance to listen to some Utah Phillips (ani has some of his stuff on her label), he sings about history, and while I can’t guarantee you’d like his singing/music (folky, all the way), I think what he has to say is really powerful.
Hopefully Rich (teaching 1-6, i believe) is a sign that teaching styles are changing, and that kids now will grow up with a more realistic view of biases and how to research and dig down for the best approximation of “the truth”.