Next month will mark the 128th year since my paternal great grandfather first met Oscar Wilde on his lecture tour in America at the Comstock Opera House in Columbus, Ohio. It was May 3, 1882. Six days later he sat in Oscar’s audience again in Newark, New Jersey. It was at that time he heard Oscar say to his listeners, “You give the criminal calendar of Europe to your children under the name of history.”
That line got passed down in the family, so that when it came time for me to attend school… I had a real attitude. Certainly, when it came to History.
I wonder how many school teachers feel the way Oscar did about the curriculum… which remains essentially the same today with regard to History. Attitudinally.
I wonder how many teachers would even understand the line.
I wonder how many teachers know who Oscar was. How many know more than the sound bites which have been sanctioned. And among those who do know a bit about him, I wonder how what percentage think that he was too wild.
I also can’t help wondering how many on our Great Collective National Faculty have ever had a real belly laugh courtesy of Oscar. How many have cried uncontrollably from reading his serious stuff. How many know about his socialist schtick. (I don’t remember any of that being in Gilbert’s Wilde (1997) movie. Certainly there wasn’t a trace of it in Ratoff’s 1959 biopic.)
But why belabor anything about Oscar? He’s not important here. What he said to my great grandfather’s audience is the issue at hand. Its message.
Let’s ask, rather, if any school teachers know what Raoul Vaneigem is talking about below.
Most of the great men we were brought up to worship were nothing more than cynical or sly murderers. History as taught in schools and peddled by an overflowing and hagiographic literature is a model of falsehood; to borrow a fashionable term, it is negationist. It might not deny the reality of gas chambers, it might no longer erect monuments to the glory of Stalin, Mao or Hitler, but it persists in celebrating the brutish conqueror: Alexander, called the Great whose mentor was Aristotle, it is proudly intoned — Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Napoleon, the throngs of generals, slaughterers of peoples, petty tyrants of the city or the state, torturer — judges, Javerts of every ilk, conniving diplomats, rapists and killers contracted by religions and ideologies; so much high renown carved from baseness, wickedness, and abjection. I am not suggesting we should unpave the avenues of official history and pave the side alleys instead. We are not in need of a purged history, but of a knowledge that scoops out into broad daylight facts that have been obscured, generation after generation, by the unceasing stratification of prejudice. I am not calling for a tribunal of the mind to begin condemning a bunch of undesirables who have been bizarrely put up on pedestals and celebrated in the motley pantheons of official memory. I just want to see the list of their crimes, the mention of their victims, the recollection of those who confronted them added to the inventory of their unsavory eulogies. I am not suggesting that the name of Francisco Ferrer wipe out that of his murderer, Alfonso XIII, but that at the very least everything be known of both. How dare textbooks still cultivate any respect for Bonaparte, responsible for the death of millions, for Louis XIV, slaughterer of peasants and persecutor of Protestants and freethinkers? For Calvin, murderer of Jacques Gruet and Michel Servet and dictator of Geneva, whose citizens, in tribute to Sébastien Castellion, would one day resolve to destroy the emblems and signs of such an unworthy worship? While Spain has now toppled the effigies of Francoism and rescinded the street names imposed by fascism, we somehow tolerate, towering in the sky of Paris, that Sacré-Coeur whose execrable architecture glorifies the crushing of the Commune. In Belgium there are still avenues and monuments honoring King Leopold II, one of the most cynical criminals of the nineteenth century, whose “red rubber” policy — denounced by Mark Twain, by Roger Casement (who paid for this with his life), by Edward Dene Morel, and more recently by Adam Hochschild — has so far bothered nary a conscience. This is a not a call to blow up his statues or to chisel away the inscriptions that celebrate him. This is a call to Belgian and Congolese citizens to cleanse and disinfect public places of this stain, the stain of one of the worst sponsors of colonial savagery. Paradoxically, I do tend to believe that forgetting can be productive, when it comes to the perpetrators of inhumanity. A forgetting that does not eradicate remembering, that does not blue-pencil memory, that is not an enforceable judgment, but that proceeds rather from a spontaneous feeling of revulsion, like a last-minute pivot to avoid dog droppings on the sidewalk. Once they have been exposed for their inhumanity, I wish for the instigators of past brutalities to be buried in the shroud of their wrongs. Let the memory of the crime obliterate the memory of the criminal.
Raoul is talking about the same thing Oscar was talking about
I wonder how many unionized teachers know that what Raoul is underscoring is true. How many who do know think it’s important. And what percentage of those put any of that into practice. Meaning, what number of them discuss it with students, pupils.
Oh yes, I wonder the same about teachers who are not members of a union. Of course. I’m just inserting the union schtick to make a point… which I hope you get. Which I do not want to spell out.
(But which I will upon request.)
For now, let’s just think about whether or not teachers generally know a thing about, say, Raoul. He was quite an important figure in history. Oh yes, I know, we can’t include everyone in our classes. (See the P.S. below.)
Well, on that point, I can’t help but wonder how many teachers have a clue about who decides (and with what criteria) WHO gets included. And, of those, how many care. And, of those, how many say anything to anyone in positions of influence about it. Or say anything to anyone at all.
I can’t help but wonder too how many readers think this is important. And, of those, how many think it’s important enough to DO something about it. This problem.
Teachers, unionized or not, wield lots of power, don’t they? And they’re making a mess of things, aren’t they? I mean, they’re contributing to compounding ignorance with ignorance, yes?
Well, my final question has to do with why citizens, parents are primarily (or exclusively) concerned with whether or not teachers get a fair shake financially, in terms of benefits. Whether or not they’re taken care of in terms of job security. Certainly that latter issue was what was spotlighted in the recent campus protests, not any discussion about what Oscar and Raoul touch upon above.
It really is absolutely wild what teachers wield, what power. Wild what indifference and/or ignorance is floating around in their realm. While lots of energy is expended to expand personal profit.
What happens to our children? Do we applaud them if they decide to become teachers? Should we?
Oops. I said that I was asking my last question awhile ago.
P.S. The author’s great grandfather, just before he died, asked him why The Cynics, Spartacus, The Bagaudi, The Norman Peasant War, The English Peasants’ Revolt, Los Rmensas, The Haudenosaunee, the Levellers, Diggers and Ranters, The Ormee, The Cempuis Orphanage, La Ruche, The Makhnovschchina, Spartakus, The Rio Gallegos Workers’ Association, The Durruti Column and so many others were relegated to footnotes in schools, if mentioned at all.