It’s sort of strange, if you think about it. Human history is dark. It’s full of evil and hypocrisy. It’s full of toxic and terrible ideas—from racism and colonialism to communism and eugenics. History is a catalog of persecution and murder, crime and injustice, cruelty and stupidity, corruption and more corruption.
And this is what we send our kids to school to learn about? This is what we expose them to at a very young age? Won’t it make them cynical? Won’t it destroy their faith in their country? Won’t it make them feel bad or guilty?
We’ve talked a few times about Wright Thompson’s incredible and haunting book The Barn, which is about the horrific and senseless murder of Emmett Till. Isn’t that precisely the kind of thing of no redeeming value to teach children about? Certainly that’s what some people thought and why Thompson, despite growing up down the road from where it happened, was not taught much about it in school.
But in the book he speaks to Gloria Dickerson, who was born and raised in Drew, Mississippi—just miles from where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955—and who was one of the first Black students to integrate the public schools in Sunflower County. She went on to be a successful executive before moving back to her hometown and has made it her cause to teach and talk about what happened to that teenage boy on that August 28 night. Why? Her mission, as Wright explains, was not dwelling on darkness but instead to “teach [kids] about the past so they might understand how their world came to be, so their knowledge might render the past powerless.” The point, as Dickerson explained, was. “To remember and to do better,” she says, “Remember and make it better.”
That’s why we teach history. That’s the point of all this. Not to burden young people with guilt, but to empower them with truth. Not to shame them, but to prepare them—to help them see clearly, choose wisely, and build something better.
P.S. You can grab copies of Wright Thompson’s The Barn—which we really couldn’t recommend more highly—over at the Painted Porch. You should also check out our Daily Stoic podcast episode with Wright—watch here, or listen over at Spotify and Apple—who discussed untangling myth from history in America and reckoning with the South’s secrets as a native Southerner.
