Tag: reflection

January 2021 will be one of the most memorable months in my lifetime and I wonder ten years from now, what will the textbooks say about this moment in U.S. history? Who will determine the curriculum and who will write the narrative? Questions like these keep me thinking about yesterday, today, and tomorrow all at once for there is not much distinction among these time markers beyond the arrangement of numbers. Today is tomorrow’s yesterday and yesterday’s tomorrow.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.

Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb”

Democracy is an ideal, a social project hundreds of years in the making. It’s alive, and like any being it must be nurtured, care has to be taken. White supremacy is a constant threat to democracy and we must protect against it at all costs. One way this country purports to do this is through public education. The dominant narrative recited today about the purpose of public education is to prepare students for college and career. A historical perspective shows us preparing students for citizenship, and thus leadership, was just, if not more, important (albeit for a select class of people).

As teachers prepare lessons both today and tomorrow, they need to be prepared through the critical lenses of democracy and anti-racism–they the lessons AND they the teachers. An article shared on Facebook, “Wilmington 1898: When white supremacists overthrew a US government,” taught me about another coup led by White supremacists which was much more successful at enacting terror and thwarting democracy. This history is important to know as a singular event as well as part of a pattern of occurrences that brought us to our present. The day that teacher education centers study of history from a critical lens is the day that we’ll be in the position to prepare students to lead this world toward a just society.