But What About the Donner Party?:
What’s Important to Know?

Teaching American History in the School for Children
by Stanlee Brimberg, SFC 12s Core and Graduate Faculty

In a role-play that reconsidered a debate that took place in the British Parliament following the French and Indian War, students decided almost unanimously that the most fair and benign way to raise the money Britain had borrowed to finance that war (which, after all, had protected American settlements against the French and the Huron Indians) was to levy a virtually insignificant tax on everyday items on the colonists—the Stamp Tax.

In a discussion that compared the difficulty some students had forgiving a student teacher for a mistake he’d made, with Benjamin Franklin’s failed appeal to England for American representatives in Parliament, students realized that in both cases, sometimes plaintiffs actually prefer the conflict to continue.

Students heard the narrative of an enslaved African after his emancipation. He told about a slave trader who himself was a free black man. "How could a black man participate in the slave trade?" one student asked. "I continue to wear Nike sneakers," another answered, "even though I know about the conditions in some of those factories in Asia."

Learning about history, in the best of circumstances, involves developing an appreciation for the complexities of being human, and how those complexities have played out over time. Learning how to teach history in a place like the School for Children is at least as complex. The expectation of the school is that teachers will present developmentally appropriate curriculum in ways that will engage children, have them exercise their minds and senses by using words as well as other ways to represent their experiences, and in general, prepare them to go on to high school and to live happily and productively in this country and the world. Related, but maybe thornier and equally persistent concerns with which to grapple are these: In a discipline wherein there is inherently too much information to bring to the table, what knowledge do children need most? Why do we believe with an almost religious fervor that the Bank Street way is the methodology of choice to present that knowledge? And, what are the consequences of these choices on children in our school and on their families?

Continued

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