It’s 2025 — have pity on the poor social studies teacher

As 2025 dawns, the mood in Santa Cruz and similarly blue regions of California is blue indeed. You might even say indigo, or whatever the color of the ocean is down on the sea-floor resting place of the Democratic Par … uh, I mean the Titanic. 

At the risk of serving up yet another dopamine hit to the own-the-libs crowd, folks in these parts are taking November’s election results hard and walking around like there’s a root canal appointment on the calendar, a root canal that lasts four years.

I’m old enough to have experienced these periodic lurches rightward over and over again, dating back to a former B-movie actor whose name I can’t quite recall right now. In those cases, however much it triggered my particular political gag reflex, I vented into the dashboard a few times, eventually cast myself with the this-too-shall-pass crowd, and then carried on with my life.

But 2024 landed differently. For some, I suppose, it feels like just another swerve, albeit an extreme one, in a frustratingly serpentine path toward a more-or-less predictable future. This time, though, I’m with the other bunch, those who feel like we’re on the lip of a new phase of history, a moment that marks another before/after dividing line, like the fall of the Berlin Wall, or 9/11. 

In this bizarre interregnum between the election and inauguration, we’re at the moment in the horror movie when the lights have gone out and we hear something downstairs. Our imagination is filling the space where soon enough the killer/monster/zombie will appear and we have to run for our lives.

If we all now live in a different country, a country no longer immune to wild swings into extremism like other parts of the world, where stable constitutional democracy can no longer be taken for granted, I’ve begun to wonder, where does that leave our teachers? For generations, fundamental to civics/history education has been the notion that, with its independent judiciary and legislature, the U.S. was above the cheesy dictatorship that held sway in so many parts of the world. 

That kind of American exceptionalism has been discredited for a while now. But now that 2024 has completely ransacked it, where does that leave those brave souls charged with teaching our young people about American history? 

Since the election, I have, for the first time in decades, been thinking quite a bit of two important, even pivotal figures in my life — people, I should add, whose first names are unknown and probably unknowable to me, nor could I tell you where they are now, or whether they’re even still alive. It’s possible, even probable, that they’re not.

They are — or were — teachers at the elementary school in suburban Atlanta that I attended more than 50 years ago. Meet Miss Craven (sorry, no one outside Gloria Steinem’s household used “Ms.” in those days) and Mr. Collins.

Miss Craven was a cheerful, moon-faced young woman with long, blond Joni Mitchell hair to whom my 8-year-old self secretly wanted to be adopted. She had a singing voice as clear and bracing as a mountain stream in winter. Mr. Collins was a courtly African American man, always dressed in suit and tie and a ringer for Martin Luther King Jr. in looks, manner and voice.

Miss Craven used her position babysitting restless second graders mostly to sing to us and teach us songs, almost of all of which were from the Pete Seeger/Weavers folk tradition — “If I Had a Hammer,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” “This Land is Your Land.” Mr. Collins I encountered a couple of years later in my first social studies class, where he would regularly unspool long, sermon-like stories about Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, often with a twinkle in his eye that betrayed a kind of dark and ironical sense of humor.

Separately, these two memorable teachers instilled within me — and, I imagine, many other students under their charge — an idea that became a core belief about the United States of America that I’ve carried with me right up to the doorstep of 2025. Put simply, that belief is that although America is a country founded in the bosom of monstrous injustice — yes, I can imagine Mr. Collins using a phrase just like that — constitutional democracy was a guarantee that freedom and opportunity, peace and justice were coming to this mighty land as inevitably as the sun coming up in the morning. Time was freedom’s most dependable ally. Of course, ignorance and greed weren’t going to just roll over; there would be plenty of sacrifice, pain, even violence ahead. But the story of the future — at least as I interpreted it as a tow-headed prepubescent under the sway of these two remarkable teachers — was a story of light eventually overtaking darkness.

We are talking here about a liberal’s version of American exceptionalism, internalized by millions of Americans, and it’s bred a kind of complacency that has delivered us to 2025. Inherent in that view is the idea that America is a noble experiment in self-government. That part, Miss Craven and Mr. Collins, turned out to be true, but in a different way than you might have expected it. America is, in fact, now an experiment of a different kind — what happens when you let social media and income inequality run amok on the playground of grotesque capitalist excess? 

We’re in the process of finding that out, and have pity on the poor social studies teacher who has to make a lesson plan out of that new reality.

Are you a history teacher in public or private school? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the perilous task of teaching history in this moment. Reach out to wallace@lookoutlocal.com.

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