"Wear green on St. Patrick's Day or get
pinched." That pretty much sums up the Irish American
"curriculum" that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod
to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.
Sadly, today's high school textbooks continue to
largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for
unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants,
and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history.
Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and
present.
Yet there is no shortage of material that can
bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school
social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O'Connor's haunting rendition of
"Skibbereen," which includes the verse:
... Oh it's well I do remember, that bleak
December day,
The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive
Us all away
They set my roof on fire, with their cursed
English spleen
And that's another reason why I left old
Skibbereen.
By contrast, Holt McDougal's U.S. history
textbook The Americans, devotes a flat two sentences to "The Great
Potato Famine." Prentice Hall's America: Pathways to the Present fails
to offer a single quote from the time. The text calls the famine a
"horrible disaster," as if it were a natural calamity like an
earthquake. And in an awful single paragraph, Houghton Mifflin's The
Enduring Vision: A History of the American People blames the "ravages
of famine" simply on "a blight," and the only contemporaneous
quote comes, inappropriately, from a landlord, who describes the surviving
tenants as "famished and ghastly skeletons." Uniformly, social studies
textbooks fail to allow the Irish to speak for themselves, to narrate their own
horror.
These timid slivers of knowledge not only deprive
students of rich lessons in Irish-American history -- they exemplify much of
what is wrong with today's curricular reliance on corporate-produced textbooks.
First, does anyone really think that students
will remember anything from the books' dull and lifeless paragraphs? Today's
textbooks contain no stories of actual people. We meet no one, learn nothing of
anyone's life, encounter no injustice, no resistance. This is a curriculum
bound for boredom. As someone who spent almost 30 years teaching high school
social studies, I can testify that students will be unlikely to seek to learn
more about events so emptied of drama, emotion, and humanity.
Nor do these texts raise any critical questions
for students to consider. For example, it's important for students to learn
that the crop failure in Ireland affected only the potato -- during the
worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes in The
Botany of Desire, "Ireland's was surely the biggest experiment in
monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its
folly." But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed, and
other crops thrived, why did people starve?
Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy's Lament,
that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish
peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain,
cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry -- food that could have prevented those
deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of
food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.
The school curriculum could and should ask
students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the
ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns
persist into our own time.
More than a century and a half after the
"Great Famine," we live with similar, perhaps even more glaring
contradictions. Raj Patel opens his book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets,
Power and the Hidden Battle for the World's Food System: "Today, when
we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are
hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another
historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this
planet who are overweight."
Patel's book sets out to account for "the
rot at the core of the modern food system." This is a curricular journey
that our students should also be on -- reflecting on patterns of poverty,
power, and inequality that stretch from 19th-century Ireland to 21st-century
Africa, India, Appalachia, and Oakland -- that explore what happens when food
and land are regarded purely as commodities in a global system of profit.
But today's corporate textbook-producers are no
more interested in feeding student curiosity about this inequality than were
British landlords interested in feeding Irish peasants. Take Pearson, the
global publishing giant. At its website, the corporation announces
(redundantly) that "we measure our progress against three key measures:
earnings, cash and return on invested capital." The Pearson empire had
2011 worldwide sales of more than $9 billion -- that's nine thousand million
dollars, as I might tell my students. Multinationals like Pearson have no
interest in promoting critical thinking about an economic system whose
profit-first premises they embrace with gusto.
As mentioned, there is no absence of teaching
materials on the Irish famine that can touch head and heart. In a role play,
"Hunger on Trial," that I wrote and taught to my own students in
Portland, Ore. -- included at the Zinn Education Project website -- students
investigate who or what was responsible for the famine. The British landlords,
who demanded rent from the starving poor and exported other food crops? The
British government, which allowed these food exports and offered scant aid to
Irish peasants? The Anglican Church, which failed to denounce selfish landlords
or to act on behalf of the poor? A system of distribution, which sacrificed
Irish peasants to the logic of colonialism and the capitalist market?
These are rich and troubling ethical questions.
They are exactly the kind of issues that fire students to life and allow them
to see that history is not simply a chronology of dead facts stretching through
time.
So go ahead: Have a Guinness, wear a bit of
green, and put on the Chieftains. But let's honor the Irish with our curiosity.
Let's make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the social
forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish -- and that are starving
and uprooting people today.
By Bill Bigelow of Rethinking Schools.
Like this essay on
Huffington Post and give it some credit.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-bigelow/the-real-irish-american-s_1_b_1345521.html
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