School-trip problems are a lesson in history
How quickly, how easily it happens — the descent of a proud nation from democracy into quasi-totalitarianism.
How and with what little objection from elected representatives right across the U.S. political spectrum did our once-welcoming neighbour to the south become a country to which we are now reluctant to allow our kids and teachers to travel on field trips. It’s an object lesson in history. Looking back, it does not seem so long ago that, as high-school wrestling coaches, head coach Barry Callaghan and I would take our mixed-nationality team across the line to dual meets in whistle-stop towns such as Ferndale, Washington. There, our kids would be met with unmitigated hospitality from a gymnasium full of the parents and friends of the Ferndale team.
Without a trace of concern, we’d take a bus across the border, where a friendly border guard would come onto the bus, take a quick look at the collection of white faces and brown faces on our team and greet them with: “Everybody Canadian?”
Then he’d smile and wave us through.
And our kids were Canadian — born of parents who were Italian, Portuguese, Greek, First Nations and Anglo-Saxon, they had their heritage written all over their faces, but they were all Canadian.
There was no hint of suspicion or fear from the border authorities, no apprehension from the kids.
Having travelled in Europe in the 1970s, I found crossing borders was never a problem — not with a Canadian or Australian passport, anyway. Crossing into countries whose history still bore the scars once inflicted by a bitter history of racist, ultranationalist leadership was easy.
It was as though countries such as Italy, Germany, even France, had determined “never again” as they struggled to outlive the lessons of their own histories.
In rural southern France, we came across a roadside memorial on the spot where five young men, brothers, had died defending their country as the Wehrmacht marched up the road. The family farmhouse was still there, just across the road.
I shivered as I stood there, thinking about what cruelty had been wrought on those farm boys by extremist leadership.
Every week, the local municipality still places fresh flowers on the memorial.
“Nous n’oublierons pas,” read the placard with the flowers.
But that was then and this is now, and we do forget, and here we are in 2017 when literally in a matter of months the sleeping monster of racism and far-right xenophobia has awakened again, sometimes in the most unexpected places and so close to home.
So should school districts be prohibiting school trips to that other country just a few kilometres away?
On the one hand, trustees are right in not wanting to subject our kids to the kind of personal searches and interrogations, possibly even temporary detentions, that so quickly have become, for some people, part of entry into the United States.
It is simply the exercise of responsibility for trustees and administrators to decide that Canadian kids who are Muslim, Sikh, African, of visible Middle Eastern heritage or just not “white” should not be placed in such a threatening circumstance.
Nor should Canadian teachers be placed in the same position as Canadian teacher Fadwa Alaoui, who reported to the CBC that she was denied entry to the U.S. after border officials asked probing questions about her Muslim faith and her views on President Donald Trump.
There is a powerful lesson here for Canadian kids, many of whom are nearing voting age. When political aspirants in our own country campaign on a platform of cultural, racial and religious division, when the message is to fear anybody “not like me,” life in Canada could potentially “pivot” just as quickly.
Discussions in classrooms should not be political, but history is almost always the story of political power run amok, and if kids are to learn anything from history beyond names, dates and places, it should be that history is not about a past that has no relevance to us, but is about lessons for now and the future.
Teaching history is pointless unless it leads children to an understanding of how and why “now” can so easily parallel the worst excesses of the past.
So when a school district decides not to allow field trips to today’s U.S., it is because history is not just some “fake news” about things that happened back then but could never happen again. That would be “fake history.” Just ask teacher Fadwa Alaoui.