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by Polly Mann, WAMM
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There is nothing like the two-day annual conference of the Minnesota Council for the Social Studies to dissipate doldrums brought on by the long, cold winter. For seven years I’ve been attending these conferences, sitting at the WAMM table, handing out information and conversing with teachers coming from all over the state .
Social studies were called civics during my high school years and along with American history must have been the basis for the views I held for too many years that the United States was a country whose government was close to Heavenly Perfection. Oh yes, I knew about slavery and the mistreatment of indigenous people, but that was all in the past. World War II made me question my education and seek a deeper truth as I looked for the causes of war. Along the way I discovered that my view of the U.S. government was seriously flawed.
Today I believe that the president should make a formal statement of apology to the peoples this country has seriously abused and ask them for forgiveness. Of course, it isn’t going to happen anytime soon. But according to Alcoholic Anonymous it’s an important step for an individual seeking relief from wrongs he or she has committed. If that is true for an individual, why should it not also apply to a country? Just recently the prime minister of Australia did just this, apologizing to the Aborigines for the abuses heaped upon them over the years by the Australian government.
During the years when my children were in high school, my evaluation of social studies teachers would have been very low. Too many of them were coaches whose first love was athletics and who taught social studies because their contracts demanded some hours of teaching. They made the study of what should be very exciting knowledge extremely boring.
I doubt that any of those teachers would have been present at a conference of social studies teachers. The quality shared by all those I talked to at this recent one was excitement, even passion, about current issues. The WAMM banner identifying our table says “Middle East Committee,” and the table was covered with leaflets, postcards, petitions, quizzes, and an excellent primer for which we were supposed to charge a dollar but didn’t.
Conversations were usually held between sessions or at lunchtime. The WAMM table, staffed by Sarah Martin and myself, was in one of the two large halls used by vendors of textbooks and school materials and representatives of nonprofit organizations. Next to the WAMM table was a young black man selling books he had written about ancestors he had discovered in Africa. We discussed with him Bayard Rustin, who taught Martin Luther King the principles of nonviolence. I came home via the library and checked out the book Lost Prophet. The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D’Emilio.
At one of the tables across from ours sat a member of the Teatro del Pueblo, promoting this Latina women’s theater group and its upcoming production, “Real Women Have Curves.” Sarah discovered that she is a relative of Jane Reagan, a WAMM member now residing in Alaska. We all exchanged cards and promised each other that we would see how we could serve each other’s cause.
Facing our table stood a cardboard standing exhibit of colored photographs of Native Americans and Africans, staffed by a man who works at the 3M Company. He uses his weekends to carry the exhibit promoting diversity to various sites. As author Paul Hawken points out in his most inspiring book, Blessed Unrest, the country is filled with people like this working on issues dedicated to creating a better world. Hawken’s book is another antidote to the winter doldrums and the despair that tends to overcome us as we look at the injustices and killings perpetrated by this diabolical government of ours.
The social studies conference, always held on the first weekend in March, is to me reminiscent of the crocuses and tulips that, after a bleak winter, herald summer and better things to come. Such occasions are what keeps me going. They provide an opportunity to talk to teachers concerned about building a better world, as they offer truth and love to the children who, we hope, will do far better than their elders. |
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© 2008 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete April 2008 Index - click here
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