by J. Thorn
But Howard added a distinctive element to these arguments by embodying the understanding that the process of struggle, the shared experience of being part of work alongside and for others, is the most rewarding, fulfilling, and meaningful life one can live. The sense of solidarity he had with people in struggle, the sense of joy he had in life, was infectious.—Anthony Argrove
He was a true and constant source of inspiration for myself and countless others. . . . For me, he was the true embodiment of hope . . . and a living reminder to keep that hope alive.—Eddie Vedder
Back in World War II, Mr. Zinn was a bombardier in planes that dropped napalm including during a raid over a town in France called Royan. After the war, his sensitivities horrified, Zinn returned to Royan on the ground and interviewed survivors, which included French civilians.
For sixty years, this Army veteran spoke out against all wars, from Vietnam to Iraq, and others, from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to Indonesian, African and Chinese assaults.
Howard Zinn did not choose his injustices. No matter where they came from, he was in opposition. In a poignant tribute of “thank yous” to his regular columnist, Matthew Rothschild, editor of the Progressive Magazine, wrote “Thank you, Howard Zinn, for being a Jew who dared to criticize Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, early on.”—Ralph Nader
One could fill volumes on the legacy of Howard Zinn and the struggles he accepted as necessary for his fellow citizens. His greatest gift was a new paradigm on the teaching of history.
Zinn believed that history belongs to everyone, not just the wealthy, powerful, and elite. In addition, he preached that being a teacher of history meant something. It was not enough to spew lists of facts and dates and pretend to be an objective bystander, as most of us believe the study of history to be. It seems hard to imagine a lesson on the Holocaust that asks students “how they feel” about what happened. A great evil befell millions of people, and yet historians today, for the most part (I’m looking at you, Iran, and your Holocaust deniers) recognize the horrors of genocide committed against the Jews during World War II. But for some reason, as the past fades through generations, the events of the times become obscured by the cloud of subjectivity. Today there is a strong debate about the role Columbus played in Western history. Historians and nationalists of both the United States and Italy (see “Columbus Day Parade” in any major American city) claim he was a brave, courageous man who helped to establish colonies in North America and the subsequent birth of the United States. Seen from this perspective one might argue that Hitler was a brave, courageous man who played a foil to the modern democratic model of government and gave birth to the American superpower.
Because you have been inundated with the swelling of Columbian pride every October, I will spare you the common perspective taught in most elementary school classrooms. Rather, indulge me as I share other insights into the life of Christopher Columbus.
While it is true that Columbus did not invent slavery, he took slaves from the New World almost as soon as he landed, with the blessing of the Catholic Church. He wrote, “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.” The Europeans did not see the natives as people and therefore treated them like cattle. As it has done throughout history, the Catholic Church turned a blind eye to the practice as their coffers filled with gold. Lest you think I have a burning vendetta against the Church (I do), read an excerpt of “A Brief Account…” by Bartolome Las Casas, a Spanish priest who could no longer be part of the enslavement and killing of the native peoples.
The Spaniards with their Horses, their Speares and lances, began to commit murders, and strange cruelties: they entred into Townes, Borowes, and Villages, sparing neither children nor old men, neither women with childe, neither them that lay in, but that they ripped their bellies, and cut them in peeces, as if they had beene opening of lambes shut up in their fold. They laid wagers with such as with one thrust of a sword would paunch or bowell a man in the middest, or with one blow of a sword would most readily and most deliverly cut off his head, or that would best pierce his entrals at one stroake. They tooke the little soules by the heeles, ramping them from the mothers dugges, and crushed their heads against the clifts. Others they cast into the Rivers laughing and mocking, and when they tumbled into the water, they said, now shift for thy selfe such a ones corpes. They put others, together with their mothers, and all that they met, to the edge of the sword. They made certaine Gibbets long and low, in such sort, that the feete of the hanged on, touched in a manner the ground, every one enough for thirteene, in honour and worship of our Saviour and his twelve Apostles (as they used to speake) and setting to fire, burned them all quicke that were fastened. Unto all others, whom they used to take and reserve alive, cutting off their two hands as neere as might be, and so letting them hang, they said; Get you with these Letters, to carry tydings to those which are fled by the Mountaines. They murdered commonly the Lords and Nobility on this fashion: They made certaine grates of pearches laid on pickforkes, and made a little fire underneath, to the intent, that by little and little yelling and despairing in these torments, they might give up the Ghost.
This was written by a priest, mind you. The idea that bad things are the price of progress is a common facet of the study of history but one that only extends beyond one’s lifetime. For example, the average American considers the genocide of the peoples of the New World as progress towards a new nation, but few would argue that the genocide in Germany during World War II or the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s furthered history in a positive manner.
In 1998, Howard Zinn gave an interview to the Revolutionary Worker that appeared in issue 987 on December 20.
I got into history not to be a historian, not to be a scholar, not to be an academic, not to write scholarly articles for scholarly journals, not to go to academic conferences to deliver papers to bored fellow historians. I got into history because I was already an activist at the age of 18.
I was working in a shipyard. I was organizing young shipyard workers. And I was introduced to radical ideas. I was reading Marx, I was reading Upton Sinclair, I was reading Jack London, I was reading The Grapes of Wrath. So I was a politically aware young man working in the shipyard. I was there for three years. Then I enlisted in the Air Force. I was a bombardier in the United States Air Force, and came out and worked at various jobs. All of these influences: I came from a working class family . . . my upbringing—I have a chapter in my memoir called ‘Growing Up Class Conscious,’ and I guess, yes, I grew up class conscious, a phrase not too often used in the United States . . . my class consciousness .. . my experience in the war (World War II), my complicated reactions to the war, the so-called ‘best war,’ ‘the good war’ . . . living in a working class neighborhood with my wife, raising two kids, having a tough time . . . going to school under the GI Bill while working in a warehouse . . . being a member of a number of different unions from time to time, interested in the labor movement, reading the history of labor struggles.
So when I began to study history and began to think about being a teacher and writing history, I already understood that I was not going to be a neutral teacher. I was not going to simply be a scholar.
Zinn’s denial of neutrality is essential in understanding his defined role as an educator. In his biographical documentary, titled You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, Zinn paints a picture of the world being in constant motion, where you cannot stand still. Adopting this tenet in teaching can result in heavy criticism from parents who do not want their children influenced by different ideas. These same parents allow their kids to spend an average of four hours a night in front of the television (documented national average of daily viewing by American children as of early 2010) and countless more on one mobile device or another, and somehow they are not being “influenced” by the aspects of society constructed to do just that: advertising. Later in the interview, Howard Zinn expresses this idea in his own words.
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br /> I wanted my writing of history and my teaching of history to be a part of social struggle. I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching. From the very first moment I stepped into a classroom, I knew that I was not going to be one of those teachers that at the end of the semester, at the end of the year, the students wanted to know where does this teacher stand. They were going to know where I stood from the very beginning! That’s been my attitude all the way through, and still is.
The responsibility of intellectuals is to discard the notion of ‘objectivity’ and the notion of ‘disinterested scholarship.’ With ‘disinterested scholarship’ you’re saying everyone else is interested except me. Become engaged. Another thing I would say is: you know you will be a better teacher, you will be a more interesting teacher if you connect your students with what is going on in the world and if your students see that you are connected with what is going on in the world.
The notion of children taking a stand in the classroom creates a culture of fear with many parents who do not want to take a stand. They are afraid their children are being corrupted, somehow manipulated into a revolutionary fervor. The problem with this mentality is that it is not education. Learning is discovering, and that cannot be done with subjective conditions or filters. Humans crave truth. You will find this idea scripted in iron across many university thresholds and used commonly as school mottos. But as they (I say fuck them, whoever “they” are) say, the truth hurts. Most of us will continue to take the red pill and live a life of glitzy emptiness punctuated by an occasional job promotion or two-week vacation to the beach of some distant country whose citizens earn three hundred dollars a year.
***
Once I remedied my zipper malfunction (I did not catch this on video, unfortunately. You’ll have to settle for Janet Jackson’s instead), I began to craft a Back-to-School Night that prepared parents for the journey their children were about to take. I told them that I would not be objective, the vessel for dumping safe information into their little skulls. I also explained that the children and the parents would not always agree with my stand, and that was fine. In fact, it was encouraged. I routinely asked my students to challenge everything, even what I stood for. However, I fear for newer teachers and those in parochial or public institutions, where this could cost them their jobs. Children get bombarded with subjective messaging thousands of times a day, mostly from advertising and the media, and this is accepted by parents. However, give them a teacher who asks kids to think, and things get dicey.
Howard Zinn is the teacher I wish I had. He inspired generations of young people to do the unthinkable. When he began marching in the South, nobody expected anything to change. However, within a few short years, the Civil Rights movement exploded. He taught us that history does not move at an even, orderly pace. The events that forever change the evolution of the species happen without warning, sparked by the will of the Common Man, not from the wisdom of those in power. You are either taking a stand on that train or being run over by it.
***
Mr. Penshian taught eighth-grade science at my junior high school and also coached the high school soccer team. He was a quirky guy with a beard, beady eyes, and no sense of humor. And despite that, we loved him. He treated us like young adults instead of children. During an illness, Mr. Penshian had an elderly gentlemen come in as a long-term substitute. This guy wielded detention slips like the executioner’s blade. When he gave my friends and me one for talking, we marched down to the principal’s office and refused to serve it. The vice principal called our parents, and we spent the afternoon in detention.
Mr. Gillenhall was most likely gay, but you could not possibly be an openly gay public high school teacher in the late 1980s. This was a time when Sebastian Bach thought it would be funny to wear a shirt that said, “AIDS kills fags dead.” In a bitter, ironic twist, that same disease took a number of his hair metal brethren to an early grave. Mr. Gillenhall taught computer class. At the time, that meant making a stupid fucking turtle move across the screen, sometimes turning at ninety-degree angles. Yeah, programming class.
My most beloved teacher had to be Professor John Henry Smith (no, not his real name, duh) at the University of Pittsburgh. The archetype for the “crazy professor,” the man became a legend amongst the undergraduate history students. For starters, he had the coolest three-name name since Alexander Graham Bell. Professor clocked in at about two-sixty and stood no more than five-foot ten. He had a potbelly, a big laugh, and a beard. Imagine a collegiate Santa Claus. My buddies and I never missed a John Henry Smith lecture. He would scribble and dash on the chalkboard as if drawing up the Manhattan Project. We laughed and drank and laughed some more (and drank some more) recalling his lectures. John’s most astounding superpower was the ability to return papers faster than a locomotive. Imagine a lecture hall of sixty or seventy students. We would turn in a five- to ten-page paper on a Tuesday, and he would return it on a Thursday! Not only did he grade them, but he provided a typed sheet of comments and edits with every paper. My good friend invited Smith to his wedding, and he showed up. As far as I know, he is still teaching at Pitt and no doubt still hammering away comments on his typewriter.
***
I have decided to create my own past and my own future, like Ricky Gervais’ character in The Invention of Lying. When you get down to it, this is what happens anyway. The study of history is bullshit. We learn stories that have been created by the winners, often used to further an agenda that would need to be hidden from the general public and that changes with each generation, mostly for the better. The most important thing to remember about teaching history is to make sure your zipper is up.
How to Avoid Conflict Avoidance
Rob Evans is a world-class educational consultant who has written several books. In the early 2000s I saw Rob Evans present in Nashville, where he discussed the phenomenon of conflict avoidance in education. He began his talk by telling a story of two businessmen sitting behind him on his flight. I will do my best to recall the exchange, according to Dr. Evans.
“Did you see the numbers on the latest account?”
“No. How’d we do?”
“You blew it, Johnson. You really dropped the ball on that. It’s going to cause us a real shitstorm.”
“It’s not like you were much help, you son of a bitch. You left the office early last Friday and expected me to clean up your mess.”
“Fair enough. Get that bastard Willis on the phone and have him contact the head office and mend some fences. We’re going to need to kiss some serious ass to get this deal back on track.”
I doubt I have used the exact phrasings of this conversation that I am relaying third-hand and a decade later, but I think I have captured the essence of the exchange. Here is how a similar conversation involving conflict might go amongst teachers, especially at a private school.
“I know you’re really busy, Fred, but I was wondering if we could talk for a moment.”
“I always have time for you, Betty. What’s on your mind?”
“Well, I have to tell you how impressed I was with the assembly your kids put on last week. It was so age-appropriate and let the kids display their various talents. Well done!”
“Thanks, Betty. I couldn’t have done it without your support. The faculty is so helpful and positive.”
“So true. . . . Listen, Fred. I know that we all have so much to do here and that this is not a high priority, but I was wondering if you might consider mentioning something to your students for me?”
“Don’t see why not. Go ahead.”
“Lately, some of your advisees have been streaking past my room. Normally I can turn my head and ignore their natural state. However, they’ve been stopping in front of my room and jumping up and down, you know, their things bouncing and such.”
“Oh, I see, Betty.”
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“Do you think you can ask them to consider their options when they decide to strip and share their nakedness, if you have time for the discussion, of course?”
***
We are all infants. We spit up awkward phrases and stumble through a rambling justification of the “reply all” insult that was inadvertently sent. The lack of etiquette in digital communications can work as a barrier against efficiency and productivity, the two things digital communication is supposed to improve.
I went to see the Supersuckers (“world’s greatest rock band,” according to the Supersuckers’ website) with a friend, and at the show we joked about the fact that teachers are responsible for teaching character, and yet they abuse digital communications themselves. Take a moment to set your email client to offline and put the CrackBerry down. Here is a short list of helpful guidelines, especially for those in education.
Don’t String Me Along
When a person takes the time to email you a question, they expect an answer. Don’t be an asshole and only answer their first question. If there is more than one, this will almost always mean two more exchanges, which, in the long run, eat up more of your time. Read your reply twice, and make sure you have answered all questions, possibly anticipating follow-up questions and answering those as well.
