President Garfield?? Really??

Brady-Handy photograph of Garfield, taken between 1870 and 1880
Wikipedia.com

It's that time again, time to cram and review for the SAT Subject Tests. I teach at a college prep school; many of the more selective colleges and several state universities require students to submit subject test scores as a part of the college application. Therefore, we/I have to have our students ready for these content focused tests. While running a review session last week, the students took and then we went over a practice test. One of the practice test questions (in the leading test prep book) was about President Garfield. Only one of our bright, eager students even knew we had a President Garfield. What this student knew, was that he was one of four Presidents assassinated. In making choices about what to cover and what to leave out my colleagues and I chose to skip past Garfield, spending time in Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and then jumping to American Imperialism in the late nineteenth century. I have a Ph.D. in History from University of Pennsylvania. I have been teaching US History since 1997! What I know about Garfield is brief--self-made man from Ohio, compromise candidate for the Republican Party in 1880, worked hard to reform the Federal Civil Service. His successor President Arthur actually signed into law legislation establishing the civil service as a merit based system (as opposed to a spoils system). To learn more all I need to do is do a Bing or Google or Wikipedia search.

I don't want to get into an argument about whether or not Garfield was a part of US History, or whether or not the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was a a game changing piece of legislation, the question I want to ask is as follows. What is it we want our students to learn from their US History survey courses? Every state requires high school students to take a US History survey course. Given the shortness of the school year and the increasing body of US History (every year we add another year of events, people, topics) we have to make choices. The SAT Subject Test is one choice, every event, every President, every person of note is of equal importance and of equal likelihood to show up on the test. To make this choice is to commit to moving through the survey text book at a measured pace, constantly committing facts to memory, reviewing them frequently and finishing the year with a head full of facts, a knowledge base a mile wide (or at least 300 years long) and a half inch thick--hopefully some of it will stick past the test date. By using this test in college admissions, colleges are saying, this is what we want our incoming students to have--heads full of facts.

But what can these students do with these facts? If I were a college admissions director I would want an assessment that sought to tease out a young person's sense of what it means to be an engaged citizen. As a baseline, this sort of assessment might begin with geography. Where are the Appalachian Mountains and what do they have to do with the Proclamation of 1763, where is the Grand Coulee Dam and what does it have to do with the Second New Deal, where is the Rio Grande and what was its importance to the Mexican American War? Along with geography, I would want to examine what students know about he evolution of the concepts of liberty and equality from the time of the Puritans and Cavaliers through to the present. How informed are they of the ways in which the Constitution has been interpreted and re-interpreted?  Then I would want to see how much they know of all those times when citizens came together to effect change--all those 19th and 20th century citizen led reform movements including those of reconstruction and the Progressive Era to improve the lives of others or reform the government. For instance, I would want students to compare the Bonus Army with the  Occupy Wall Street Movement. I would want this assessment to measure effective writing and thinking. Then, I would want to know what they could actually do with all of this knowledge. Are they active, critical thinking, citizens or passive receivers of information? That is what I would want to know.

Civic Space: a kinesthetic experience

In both of my history classes we have been examining the expansion of democracy in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In World History we have been asking ourselves whether or not suffrage alone is sufficient to consider a country democratic. Who needs to vote? Who has the vote who doesn't? Is it possible to have universal adult suffrage and not have democracy? We have asked ourselves what else might be required. Some students suggested a written constitution might be a prerequisite, others wanted a legal system that treated everyone the same. Still other students felt guarantees of basic human rights were essential ingredients for a functioning democracy. Interestingly, none of them on came up with the idea of civic space, civic organizations, or civic engagement. Alexis de Tocqueville identified American volunteerism or the tendency to form associations as a defining characteristic of American democracy. My students have grown up with this most basic and necessary ingredient as a part of the air they breath. Every Saturday, these self same students may see this at work when two groups share the public square in West Chester, PA. On one side of the intersection are those carrying flags and signs telling us to  "Support our Troops" or "Thank our military heroes". On the other side of the intersection another group carries flags with the stars arranged in a peace symbol and holding signs telling us that "War is not the answer" or "Support our troops, bring them home".

Occupy Wall Street is back in New York (though you wouldn't know it from the non existent news coverage). Every weekend in the spring groups gather for walks, health festivals, protests and rallies (large and small). This rainy Sunday morning, 17 Westtown students and assorted adults joined several hundred other folks from around Delaware and Chester County to participate in the Walk MS event. With their feet and in the rain these kids engaged in the public discourse around Multiple Sclerosis. They helped to re-create and sustain the civic space so vital to a successful democracy. While not as dramatic as the March on Washington in 1963 or the Bonus Army occupation in 1932, this was civic engagement all the same. These weren't truckers protesting fuel prices or public workers in Wisconsin protesting changes in their pay structure. They were, two girls whose mothers have MS. These two girls wanted to raise awareness of the disease for their peers and take action in a tangible way. Their friends wanted to help. This is how all movements large and small begin. These two girls and their friends now have another experience upon which to build of making change, of being involved. Citizenship is not waiting for good things to be handed down from on high (it never has worked that way-ask Alice Paul) -- waiting versus acting might be the difference between being a subject and being a citizen. These Westtown students have begun to understand through their walking today, that citizenship means action. Whenever we create space for our students to actively engage as opposed to passively receive we insure the health of our democracy.

Empathy and Revolution

Several things intersected for me this past two weeks ago. David Brooks wrote an op-ed on the “Limits of Empathy” NYTimes 9/29/2011, I took my mother to see the “Rembrandt and the Faces of Christ” exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and I worked with several faculty at my school on what our students need from their education in the 21^st century.  The David Brook’s piece was happen stance, I was catching up on the op ed section of the paper over breakfast the morning of my museum trip. Brooks seemed to be tilting at windmills in a way. What educator or even parent would assume that empathy alone is enough to create moral action? Brooks takes issue with what he considers a lopsided embrace of the whole idea of “Walking a mile in another’s shoe” and then points to the myriad research showing how sad people are when they do really horrible things to others. As if to suggest, that empathy –the sense of feeling with someone other—precludes moral judgment. Or even that moral judgment and moral action can and perhaps should operate separate from empathy. John Howard Griffin, certainly had a strong moral code growing out of his Catholic faith but he didn’t have any understanding of how to act in relation to his black neighbors until he assumed a black identity and then wrote about his experiences in the Jim Crow South in his book Black Like Me.  I suspect it was unfair to Brooks to have him in my mind as I went to an exhibit that was all about a search for empathy and a desire by Rembrandt and his students to act and create based upon that newfound empathy.

In this exhibit the process of Rembrandt’s work is what is being depicted, displayed and celebrated. While there are major paintings in the exhibit they are a part of a process not unitary, stand alone works of unique inspiration. The heart of the exhibit is seven paintings –portraits of Christ-- completed by Rembrandt and his students between 1643 and 1655. Each of these paintings is small and each is meant as a study to be used in the studio, not a finished major work of art. Rembrandt wanted to break with the tradition of depicting Christ as a perfect, god in human form who just happened to also have very Roman features. He asked Jewish neighbors to sit for him in his studio as he imagined different moments in Christ’s life—breaking bread with his friends, teaching and preaching, contemplating his death in Gethsemene,  the moments before the horrors of his crucifixion. How would these moments be expressed by a human Christ? In choosing Jewish models, Rembrandt seems to want to assert the otherness—not fair haired, not blue eyed-- of Christ. In choosing his Jewish neighbors, this different looking Christ remains familiar. In choosing human models Rembrandt connects Christ in a much more intimate way with the viewers of the art—his humanness breaks down the divide the divinity in earlier depictions creates. Rembrandt and his students seek to understand Christ’s feelings and translate them through oil paint for the artists’ contemporary audience. In this search for fellow feeling, Rembrandt transforms for all time the way that Jesus is understood.[1]

A second theme in the exhibit is his approach to working with his students. Many of the paintings and sketches in the exhibit are those of his students. Typically, masters had their students create copies, Rembrandt encouraged his students to extend his originals and add their own understanding. This fascinated me as I compared Rembrandt’s work with that of his students. There are numerous sketches of Christ’s appearance on the road to Emmaus. In all of them Rembrandt is exploring all the possible ways for revelation to occur and for the disciples to react. Towards the end of the exhibit is a major painting by one of Rembrandt’s students on this subject. In this painting the light is behind one of the disciples and actually best illuminates the faces of the two servants who are oblivious to what is happening. Jesus has no special glow, no halo. In his hands, he has bread he is in the process of tearing with a very quiet motion, almost absent mindedly. One disciple, with his back mostly to us has his hand to his face as if to say, “This man reminds me of Jesus”. The back lit disciple is more active and his understanding more immediate but still quiet and without alarm.

This continuous exploration, reinterpretation and flat out invention are at the heart of good education. This was our process the last two weeks in my World History class. Students had begun with building basic information on the ways in which human geographers study and understand human interactions with their environment. We asked questions such as “What is Asia?” and "Why were the Thule Inuit successful in settling Greenland while the Scandinavians were not?” We extended our study of the past with readings on famine, hunger and population in the 21^st century. Our resident Earth Literacy teacher joined us to push students to consider their own definitions of success in civilizational terms and whether or not agricultural choices have any meaning for us today. These were wide ranging discussions requiring students to examine their own assumptions about human geography and the choices humans make. They weren’t being asked to act upon their ideas, to make hard moral choices but rather to consider the choices made by others –to limit family size, to have another child in the face of horrible poverty, to bring cattle into an environment never intended for them, to choose agriculture, to interpret history as progress, to devote Muslim scholarship to creating a garden of North Africa.  While there were wrong answers to some of the questions my students asked of each other, there were few single right ones. This first grappling with ambiguity, with dichotomous and opposed “right answers” was unsettling. I suppose Rembrandt’s students and patrons found his new depictions of Christ troubling. (Certainly, one of Rembrandt’s students was censured for breaking with the iconic portrayal of Christ for a portrait not unlike that of several of Rembrandt’s).

Later in the year my students will translate their thought experiments, their analysis and even their empathy seeking into action. Having a better understanding of the forms of expression and thought and having had practice taking those forms and extending them, my students  will make moral choices, but these choices will be shaped by a better understanding of the assumptions and premises upon which their decisions and actions stand. Just as John Howard Griffin knew how to act upon his values because of his experience of empathy, so too will my students.

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[1] All of the above is a very brief summary or what I learned from the exhibit and the many explanations the exhibit provided for the works on display.