Long way still to go

Teaching is tougher work than most who’ve never done it can imagine. Good teachers have mastered their subject matter. They’ve also learned, most likely through experience, to try to reach past every imaginable personal problem and touch the minds, hearts, and intentions of hundreds of unique individuals.

We’ve given teachers one more burden lately. They have to pick their way through inflamed, mostly uninformed, political arguments over how to teach young people about the ways we humans have treated one another throughout our shared history. Some say students are made to feel guilty when they learn that their ancestors may have owned slaves. Teachers foster understanding, not guilt.

No longer up to the job because of age, I am not still in the classroom teaching history, civics, and communications skills. But here’s something I would do if I were.

I would begin my next semester with a unit helping students discover that every known civilization in human history practiced some form of slavery, serfdom, caste, or peonage. A better historian than I am may point out some exceptional subset; I’d appreciate knowing if one existed. All around the globe, some forms and remnants of slavery still exist.

Any student who understood this would have no reason to feel singled out as belonging to a “bad” race, ethnicity, nationality, or such. With that out of the way and political sensitivities soothed, teaching about this difficult but necessary subject could take place.

Then—imagine it—teachers and students could find themselves realizing that we have come a long way toward coming together. Next could come envisioning the long way we still have to go.

CHARLEY SANDAGE Mountain View