History

I’ve complained before about how history was taught to me in school. Most of the time it was extremely dull. I didn’t want to memorize the dates of battles far away in time and space that had no clear significance to my life. Surely there is a better use of everyone’s time.

I don’t recall anyone attempting to teach me about residential schools. A field trip in grade 7 or 8 to la ville de Québec was presumably intended to teach about la Bataille des plaines d’Abraham but I mainly retained that the phones au Château Frontenac were fun.

The closest I ever got to actually learning history involved a mandatory independent study resulting in a presentation and q&a. I was assigned Stalin, and my recollection is I paid more attention to the psychology than to the “history” per se. Because why are we learning about monsters if not to understand how to spot and avoid them in future?

Where I think the education system really failed me (us?) is re: what exactly it is we’re supposed to have collectively learned re: authoritarians and human rights. I think about this every November, as people put on poppies and attend elaborate ceremonies where everyone agrees “Never Again.”

I don’t understand what it is many people are remembering. How fun it is to persecute people? That genocide is a topic for debate?

Maybe we’d have gotten here anyway if more history teachers had been more explicit about how fascism sneaks up and is bad, actually.

But an apparently legitimate vote, for a second term? When a smart and well-funded woman was the alternative?

It’s hard to go through. Again.