It Isn't All That Difficult: Just Ask the Kids

Of all the students I taught in 30 years, I liked freshmen the best. I taught them for about eighty percent of that time, so I think I know the genre.

9th graders enter a four-year high school pretty humble with all those upperclassmen staring at how dorky they look (and conveniently forgetting their own dorkiness had been just a finger snap before). They have energy, though, born of puberty addiction. The boys act about 12; the girls about 15, but they think it's 16. It's pretty bonkers sometimes.

But they have things figured out more often than not. The jadedness that comes with later stages of high school hasn't affected most of them quite yet. If they aren't paying attention, it isn't because of cynicism. They giggle and they get goofy, but they can take things seriously, too.

They're not as reluctant to enter discussions as the older kids are, either. Many juniors and seniors want to be considered "cool," so they can't appear to be all that smart, even though they are. Either way, they know they're getting dissed by others (though I always did my best to discourage that). It becomes tougher to get much out of them.

Freshmen aren't like that. They've been doing some thinking, so they're going to share it with you. Some of the most fun discussions I had in teaching history and government were with freshmen, because they could get lost in the moment. They're not concerned with posturing.

I thought about that when I saw what was happening in a San Francisco high school: George Washington High, built in 1936, at the height of the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" delivered it, another of hundreds of public-use buildings (some of which are still standing and still in use today, such as a football stadium in Kenosha) that were built with dollars issued from the Works Progress Administration program, or WPA.

The WPA was designed not only to help brick and mortar workers, but those of whom who would clearly be out of money because they did artistic work, things which mostly discretionary income would otherwise purchase. A whole bunch of people had next to no money for anything, much less for buying books and sculpture and paintings.

A Russian immigrant, Victor Arnautoff, was hired to paint a mural on one of the school walls, writes Bari Weiss in the Sunday New York Times. Fittingly, he decided to include Washington on it.

Less than fittingly, at least according to some, he also included images of Washington's slaves picking cotton--he had a large number of them--and pioneers forging the American frontier but making their way past a dead Native, just lying there. Washington is depicted apparently signing the Constitution and pointing in the direction of all the rest of it.

Few, if anyone, made a big deal of it at the time. They neglected to consider, as so many of us have also done, the irony of building a great nation on the backs of minorities not particularly willing but forced to help or step aside--at least those of whom were left.

Arnautoff failed in his work, at least back then. "[His] purpose (her emphasis) was to unsettle the viewer, to provide young people into looking at American history from a different, darker perspective," Weiss writes. Who would do such a radical (Honest?) work for thousands of children to consider? A communist, that's who.

It was a time of deep passion. With so many millions out of work, radical proposals were discussed. Some labor strikes led to violence. It fed the rise of some right-wing radio demagogues, not unlike what we have today. Give someone like Arnautoff the chance, and he was more than ready to make a statement about what America had really been, instead of the sanitized version of Washington standing in the boat while crossing the Delaware River at 4 a.m. the morning after Christmas, for instance, an act of incredible stupidity that he undoubtedly never did, lest he become one of the earliest popsicles on record.

Considering the widespread poverty in the country, too, it was a time for a polarization of politics. Socialism was not the hot button it is today, but a serious concept and potential answer for getting us out of the ditch of depression. It became a kind of vogue for writers and intellectuals--again, those making a living from largely secondary income spending--to embrace that idea and those surrounding it. Jack London, one of the better-known writers of the era, was a socialist, for instance, as was Upton Sinclair, author of the famous book The Jungle. Some even embraced what they called Stalinism, the severe disciplining of an agrarian economy under the term "collectivism," through which Joseph Stalin dragged the Soviet Union in that era. (What the American intellectuals didn't know, though, was that millions of Soviet citizens were dying of starvation or conditions in gulag internment camps during an era of intense paranoia. I mean, I can't imagine the USA being a place where people were just thrown into camps, can you?)

This set of murals wasn't meant to be worth a glimpse, either. It was 1,600 square feet over 13 frames. The school district heard about it and put together The Reflection and Action Working Group. It recommended taking down the mural because of its depiction of "slavery, genocide, colonization, Manifest Destiny (the idea that America was destined to take over inferior peoples), white supremacy, oppression, etc." It wanted a mural that reflects "the experience of the students."

Suddenly, there's a cultural showdown in one high school in San Francisco. Do we respect the artist and utilize his mural, now very much noticed, as a history-based springboard for larger discussions about how far we have come but also how far we must go? Or do we dismiss the mural as a radical comment during a time when such comments were more common, and now we should address the America as it now is?

Hmmmm. Who should we consult?

A teacher had an idea: Let's ask the kids. Not just any kids, either. Freshmen. They'd been doing some thinking.

49 of them were asked to write about the mural. Four, less than ten percent, felt it should be eliminated. They recognized its controversial nature, but they didn't think it should be torn down, though.

Would it be too soon to call them racist, as were many of those adults who felt the work should be kept? Should they be written off as too young to have an informed opinion? I don't think so. High school freshmen are, sometimes, very thoughtful people. And, still sensitized, they no doubt grasped the impact of their views.

But the school board's vice-president, Mark Sanchez, called the mural "a grave mistake....without Native American or African-American input...It's an aggressive thing. It's hurtful and I don't think our students need to bear that burden."

Well, okay. Not unreasonable. But there's this picture that's just been taken. A father, desperate to save his family, has washed up on our shores of the Rio Grande River, trying to find asylum here. With him, also drowned, is his two-year-old daughter, who he tried to save because he left her there, safe, while he re-crossed the river to get his wife when the little girl panicked and jumped back in.

That's the story, background and all. How many high school freshmen have already seen it? We can't get them to look away any longer. They bear that burden, too. So do we.

Doesn't the school or the district want to discuss this, either? Mistreatment of minorities is happening right now, in real time, by an administration committing emotional blackmail besides kidnapping and child abuse. San Francisco is as multicultural as any major city in America. In a way, it's what America surely will be in not too many decades now. All you have to do is walk the Embarcadero. You'll see.

Think those kids' minds aren't spinning right now? What a teachable moment. Or not. Isn't the point of education to confront the uncomfortable? To open minds that are closed? That isn't always an easy thing. And it isn't politically correct, either. The students of George Washington High had something with which to compare it, too: in their own real time, right in front of them.

Had. But the school board voted to destroy it. It's going to cost Six. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. That much to take away something that is itself a piece of history, utilized to explain part of our history that isn't nice and neat and pristine, as we wish it could be--wish it so much, in fact, that that's the way we're creating it.

It's a robbery of the mind, in a way. That school board is spending more than half a million dollars to erase real education based on real events, not varnished fantasies of patriotic comportment.

If we can't face the past, we can't arrange a better future. I wonder if the San Francisco school board prevented George Washington High students from succeeding in that.

Ten years ago, Diane Ravitch, one of the best contemporary educational philosophers, said in a commentary that probably the most difficult issue facing American education is the simple fact that we can't agree on why we educate children. In San Francisco, the adults heard some of those children tell them not to tear down an important historical commentary created for the walls of their own school. And they tore it down anyhow.

It was too much trouble, I guess, to take on that challenge. But real learning is a challenge. I wonder what those freshmen think now that they've been consulted and overwhelmingly reacted in a certain way, except it's become clear that nobody heard them anyhow.

A different kind of realistic lesson? Could be. Here's another one: Just before Arnautoff's work, in 1932-33, Diego Rivera, a Mexican artist, was commissioned by the Ford Motor Company to create murals for the Detroit Institute of Arts. He depicted working class people and what they were creating, but never took the attention off of the people: they are prominently displayed within the landscape of all he painted. They were of different races, working at factory and office jobs. There were even nudes celebrating fertility, and--gasp!--it also depicted vaccinations. The Detroit News called them "coarse" and "vulgar" and, of course, pointed out that Rivera, too, had communist connections.

The News demanded that the murals be taken down. Nope. You can see them today, open to the public. Just google "Detroit Institute of Arts".

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark