January 2, 2006
Shampoo and Conditioner Posted by Ellen Feldman at 07:40 AM EST According to a recent study, America is not currently living through a golden age of historical teaching, or at least historical knowledge among young people. When asked to choose who on a list of famous generals was at the Battle of Yorktown, an alarming number of students at leading universities picked either Eisenhower or MacArthur. (Unfortunately, I did not clip the news article and cannot recall the actual numbers, but fewer than half chose Washington.) A few days after reading about the study, I gave a talk to undergraduates at a major urban university. Only two in the class knew what McCarthyism was. Thanks to that study, the sea of fresh but blank faces when I mentioned McCarthyism, and three days spent in San Diego working with middle and high school students, I have been thinking a great deal about the difficulties of teaching the past in a world of accelerating history, technological blitz, and the mania for new-and-improved. I went to San Diego to speak about Anne Frank and the life her diary took on in this country after her death. The experience was less daunting than I, a non-teacher, had feared. The kids were, for the most part, well-behaved, interested, and sympathetic. Several of the girls shed tears during a video prepared for the occasion. I'm fairly certain most of the students learned something. But despite the occasional tear, I did not have the feeling the newfound knowledge meant much to them. After the video and a brief talk, I took groups of students through a beautifully wrought model of two of the rooms in the secret annex. The intention was to force the kids into an essential historical experience, to make them feel what it was like to live in another time and place under other conditions. I cannot say I was particularly successful. I spoke of the constant hunger. It was no match for the latest fad diet sweeping the school or the obesity headlines in the day's paper. I told them about being locked up with their parents for 25 months. I could see them mentally closing the doors to their well-equipped rooms or merely turning up their iPods. I reminded them they would have had no contact with their friends. It was a meaningless threat to a generation brought up on instant messaging. Then, on the afternoon of the third day, as I was taking the last group of students through the rooms and talking about the grueling shortages under the Occupation, I inadvertently hit on something
that got their attention. They yawned when I spoke of living on rotten potatoes and beans. They looked bored when I told them about outgrowing clothes and shoes and not being able to replace them. Doing without soap left them cold. “And don't even think about shampoo or conditioner,” I added. I will never forget the look of horror that went from face to face, and not only among the girls. I am not sure what the moral of this story is. I doubt we can stimulate historical curiosity or improve historical awareness by product placement. But I keep thinking there must be a way to make our past more relevant to those who will fashion our future.
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