Making Citizens of Students

What History Can Teach Us About Democracy, Tragedy, and Ourselves In the weeks just after September 11, Ed. magazine travelled to New York and New Hampshire to observe a group of educators searching for lessons in the wake of the catastrophe; this is the story of some of those lessons learned, and taught. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. —Edmund Burke (1729-1797) [caption id="attachment_9088" align="alignleft" width="185" caption="A student from Satellite Academy High School at Ground Zero (Stella Johnson ©2002)"][/caption] About a month and a half after four hijacked planes distorted our nation's collective notion of security and self, a pungent but invisible cloud still cloaks much of Lower Manhattan. The students at the Satellite Academy High School on the Lower East Side can sometimes smell the burning remains of the towers, depending on the direction of the wind. Many of them witnessed the event firsthand on the way to school the morning of September 11.

Today — regardless of the wind direction or the ashen evidence of terror less than one mile away from her school — Alice Braziller is doing what she always does on any October weekday afternoon: she's teaching. Braziller has spent a decade teaching Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO) — a curriculum that leads students to reflect on themselves through in-depth study of history — and has taught at this public alternative school for 18 years. Given the recent tragedy, however, her lessons hold particular poignancy.

"'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.'" Braziller's voice rises above the din of 27 teenage students as she distributes handouts to the class. The students have has positioned their desks in a large ring that hugs the perimeter of the classroom. "Take a few minutes to think about whether you agree or disagree with the quote, then we will discuss it." One student in a gray-hooded sweatshirt and gold-rimmed glasses looks confused. "Wait a minute," she says. "Is the quote talking about only men, or women, too?" she asks. "Men, in general," says Shirley Wu, who team-teaches the class with Braziller, as she walks across the room to retrieve a dictionary. "That's how they used to refer to people in general."

The student's expression drifts from confusion to befuddlement, as if asking, "How can the word 'men' possibly refer to people in general?" After some discussion over the meaning of the quote, Zohara Candelerio, who commutes from Queens every day, raises her hand. "The quote's right," she says. "What about the first time Bin Laden tried to blow up the World Trade Center? I think good men didn't do enough to try to stop him from doing it again. And now thousands have died."

On the opposite side of the room, a student named Gene'a thrusts her hand toward the ceiling. "I don't buy this 'good men' thing," she says. "Someone please tell me what, exactly, is a good man

"An excellent question," Wu says, looking around the room. "Does anyone have an answer to that question?" Adam Cardona, a quiet 18-year-old whom Braziller calls "the class psychologist" for his remarkable insight into such issues, has decided to speak. "No one is all bad or all good," he says. "It's the choices people make that are bad or good." Ten hands shoot up.

The Disease of Learning History

Braziller and Wu's one o'clock Facing History and Ourselves class starts in the usual fashion: the bell rings, students trickle in and find their seats, slinging backpacks and one-liners around the room. In time, however, the class crescendos in a heated debate over mankind's inherent good and evil. Wu and Braziller have infused lessons about Jim Crow; the Klu Klux Klan; and the stereotyping of gays, Jews, and Japanese into their Facing History program.

"This is what teaching should be," says Wu, who joined Braziller three years ago shortly after completing a Facing History and Ourselves professional development course. "I feel like I'm getting the students to really think." Thinking, her students have found, is seldom easy — or comfortable.

According to Margot Stern Strom, C.A.S.'77, cofounder and president of Facing History and Ourselves, this discomfort is a powerful instructor. "History is uncomfortable. Truth is uncomfortable," Strom often says. "But we have to trust students with the dis-ease of learning about it."

Since Strom cofounded Facing History and Ourselves with fellow social studies teacher Bill Parsons in Brookline, Massachusetts, more than 25 years ago, the organization has branched out to seven regional offices and to a European headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland. Some 15,000 teachers across the country have attended professional development workshops and institutes. In turn, these teachers have guided more than 1 million students through a thorough analysis of some of the most complex events in history: the Civil Rights movement, the "forgotten" Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, apartheid in South Africa.

‘We're educating students to take part in a democracy, to understand how their daily choices really do have great bearing on how our society functions,’ says Strom.

For this reason, Facing History and Ourselves classes spend a lot of time talking about issues of identity, conformity, and ostracism—issues also at the heart of the adolescent experience.

"At an age when young people are dealing with 'in' and 'out' groups and peer pressure, it's a lot easier to address these issues by talking about historical events," says Terry R. Tollefson, Ed.D.,'89, FHAO's director of administration for policy, planning, and evaluation.

In the end, FHAO seeks to show students how the weight of their individual choices and actions impacts their communities and, in the end, their world. "We're educating students to take part in a democracy, to understand how their daily choices really do have great bearing on how our society functions," says Strom.

At Satellite Academy, Adam Cardona and his classmantes seem to understand this point well. The class discusses Edmund Burke's quote for an hour, and then spends another hour working in small groups creating campaigns to end racism against Muslim students. Although the school has few Muslim students, accounts of violence and racism against Muslim students abound in a nearby school. Zohara Candelerio's work group grapples over a slogan for its campus campaign. They settle on a short rhyme: Hate and discrimination are not the way, so fill your heart with love every day.

"Like a lot of people, I felt really angry with Muslim people after September 11," Candelerio explains. "But I started to realize that I can't judge people without knowing them just because of their religion. I've been talking about that with my family, and I'm trying to teach them about stereotyping." She says this with mock disbelief as if the idea of "playing the teacher" to anyone is beyond what she has expected of herself. "It's so important though," she says. "Because of this class, I feel like I can teach my son what the world is really like."

Unspoken Histories

Margot Stern Strom never learned about "bad history" in her high school. Growing up in the 1960s in Memphis, Tennessee, Strom says she never even learned that the Confederacy had lost the Civil War.

"We learned how the South had won the major battles," she says. "Exactly who won the entire war, well, that detail was left vague." Strom's teachers did not try to explain the "Colored" water fountains in town or the seating arrangements on city buses. Their silence about any number of difficult subjects — including the Holocaust — piqued Strom's curiosity.

Most students of Strom's generation shared her experience. The first two nationally recognized history curricula that included an in-depth analysis of the Holocaust did not appear until the early 1980s — and Strom wrote one of them.

Stephen A. Feinberg, M.A.T. '72, director of national outreach in the education division of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., says a complex combination of societal forces accounts for why it took more than three decades for that history to reach the classroom. Historians needed time to develop a scholarly foundation about it, he explains. At the same time, many survivors felt reluctant to speak. In the early 1960s, the widely publicized trials of Adolf Eichmann, chief organizer of the "Final Solution," brought knowledge of the Holocaust into more mainstream awareness, and the Civil Rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War pushed society's moral consciousness further into the world of politics.

What Strom did not learn about the Holocaust in school, she learned at home. Strom inherited an insatiable — and contagious — appetite for learning from her parents. She remembers how her mother led a Great Books course at the local library, convening a group of passionate learners every week to discuss the ethical, political, and moral implications of Plato or St. Augustine. Strom recalls a scrapbook her father made for her about successful women, and a disturbing article he clipped from the New Yorker about "Hiroshima Maidens," young Japanese women disfigured by radiation from the nuclear bombs the United States had dropped there.

In the early 1970s, when Strom was teaching eighth-grade language arts and social studies in Brookline, Massachusetts, community residents approached school administrators, asking if the district taught students about the Holocaust. The query prompted administrators to hold a conference on the Holocaust for teachers and school leaders. Bill Parsons, also a Brookline social studies teacher, attended.

"I turned to Bill at the break, and we discovered that although we both had master's degrees in history, we were almost totally ignorant of this history," says Strom. Working with local scholars, the two started writing the program's primary text, titled "The Holocaust and Human Behavior," that summer. They began piloting the curriculum in a number of Brookline schools that fall. Then in 1976, they founded Facing History and Ourselves. By 1980, the U.S. Department of Education's National Diffusion Network had disseminated the program across the country.

"The question of what to do about follow-up arose," says Terry Tollefson. "How could we support teachers across the country from one office in Brookline?"

When Tollefson came on board in 1990, he set up regional offices in Chicago and Memphis, then in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and, most recently, in New York and Cleveland, in addition to the regional office already in New England. Each office provides every trained FHAO teacher with individualized support. At the same time, FHAO started training teachers throughout Europe to use the curriculum. South African educators recently initiated a collaboration with Facing History and Ourselves staff to create a new democratic education curriculum. All the while, FHAO's curriculum and professional development models have steadily evolved-the result of ongoing evaluation and feedback.

In 1996, the Carnegie Corporation funded a two-year study-the most comprehensive yet-of FHAO methodologies and curriculum. Dennis J. Barr, Ed.M.'87, Ed.D.'93, the study's primary investigator, who is now a program evaluator at FHAO, says the researchers considered students' intellectual, social, and emotional development.

"We looked at head and heart-the linchpin in making history mean something to students," he explains. "When students find personal meaning in their work, they start to engage."

The study found that FHAO students surpassed their peers in relationship maturity measures and reported less fighting behavior and racist attitudes.

The Legacy of Remembering

In 1943, Rena Finder, age 14, stepped exhausted from a train car into the fall night and looked, for the first time, on Auschwitz-Birkenau. Once in open air, flood lights blinded her eyes. An acrid stench forced her hand to her nose. She remembers thousands of dogs, miles of barbed wire. The workers at the camp, "walking skeletons," approached the new arrivals. Falling snowflakes covered her hair and shoulders. She brushed the snow from her sleeve only to find that it was not snow at all, but the ash of mass cremation.

"We walked out of the car into a nightmare," Finder says. Her voice wavers with the last word. She takes a breath. "I said to my mother, 'We are already dead.'"

Finder, now 72, tells her story to a room of transfixed seniors at Bishop Guertin High School, a parochial school in Nashua, New Hampshire. Her gentle, high-pitched voice, her air of grandmotherly benevolence, her neatly coiffed brown hair — everything about Finder — contrasts bitterly with her words. Speaking from memory, she describes in detail how Nazi soldiers invaded Krakow, Poland, in September of 1939, and began systematically imprisoning, enslaving, and, ultimately, murdering the Jewish people there. Of her family, only she and her mother survived. Oskar Schindler, the famous German businessman who rescued more than 1,200 Jewish men and women during the Holocaust, had bribed Nazi officers to release 300 women from Auschwitz. Finder and her mother were on Schindler's list.

‘As a survivor of the Holocaust, I've seen the good that one person can do. If there were more Oskar Schindler's, more of us would have survived,’ Finder tells the students as she concludes her talk.

"As a survivor of the Holocaust, I've seen the good that one person can do. If there were more Oskar Schindlers, more of us would have survived," Finder tells the students as she concludes her talk. A few students timidly raise their hands to ask questions. They want to know how she made it on to Schindler's list; when she arrived in America.

The wife of a teacher who has come to hear Finder speak, asks, "How do you live with this? How can you possibly find it in your heart to forgive those who did these terrible things?" Finder reflects for a moment. "I don't forgive them. But I don't hate their children or their grandchildren," she says. "Generally speaking, I do not hate at all. I've seen what hate can do."

For nearly 40 years, Rena Finder kept her memories locked in the recesses of her mind. Then in the late 1970s, the writings of a famous Holocaust revisionist, challenging the mass exterminations of Jewish people in concentration camps captured media attention. Finder decided it was time to speak out, and in the early 1980s she started telling her story at schools and at teacher workshops through Facing History and Ourselves. Since then, she has told it more times than she can count.

Dimitry Y. Anselme, Ed.M.'97, spends a lot of time with Finder, driving her to presentations at schools all over New Hampshire and western Massachusetts. As a program associate with FHAO, it's Anselme's job to make certain that all of the teachers in his region, which also includes Maine, have the support they need. Anselme counsels teachers through lesson plans on the phone, suggests activities, faxes readings, sends video resources, and organizes speakers for special assemblies. He started working with Bishop Guertin teachers about two years ago, and his rapport with teachers there has earned him the honorary title "Brother Anselme."

"I really view my job as friendship building," he says. "I have to be able to talk about some sensitive issues openly and freely with the teachers. To feel comfortable doing that there has to be trust on both sides."

On the surface, the classrooms at Bishop Guertin look a lot different than Wu and Braziller's Lower East Side classroom. A statue of Jesus in long robes, with arms outstretched, presides over the foyer of the New Hampshire school. Under the statue's gaze, uniformed students move through the halls in a more-or-less orderly fashion. Most faces are white. In both schools, however, students engage history with emotional and deeply considered personal conviction.

After the assembly, five girls queue up to talk to Finder. The first blushes as her tear-stained eyes meet Finder's. "Thank you so much," the girl says. "My grandparents survived the Holocaust, too." Finder takes the girl's hands, then encircles her in a warm hug. She proceeds to hug each of the students who have stayed behind to ask questions. A wide smile rests on her face.

Just after three o'clock, Finder and Anselme stroll arm and arm back to the parking lot of the school. After a long day spent with the terror of history, their conversation holds optimism.

"Those students were wonderful," Finder says into the cold breeze. "Things can seem so hard. But when you see good teachers and students, it really gives you great hope for the future."

For More Information More information about Facing History and Ourselves is available on their web site. Visit the Opportunities for Constructive Action web site for online resources and information from HGSE faculty members in response to the events of September 11.