Giving the Nutrition of Truth and the Inspiration of Visionaries

By Lauren Smith, 8th Grade Class Teacher

“You cannot stop the call of history,” said the late John Lewis. This statement has never felt so true and urgent. The question to ponder is what does this mean for my Grade Eight curriculum for the Class of 2021? The veil has been lifted and teachers everywhere know that classroom conversations that may have seemed impossible before seem necessary and urgent now. Based on the conferences and preparation classes in which I have participated in the last few years, and especially the last two months, I can tell you that Waldorf teachers are considering their curricula for all grades with diversity and equity issues in mind. How can we teach our students to talk about race? How can we equip them to see, hear and understand different points of view? How can we help our students create a future that brings the promise of the United States Declaration of Independence to fruition for all?

As the eighth grade teacher, I have the mandate to address this directly. My history theme and scope is Revolutions (political, industrial, and technological), American History and Current Events. As a Waldorf teacher, I have the freedom and responsibility to create this history curriculum for the students whom I have here and now, so I know I can't rely on what I taught in 8th grade before. (Though I glow with warmth and pride to remember those stimulating class discussions and think of those accomplished individuals now graduating from college.) 

Back to the present: Many of my students I have known and taught since they were six or seven years old. The trusting relationship and learning community that we have built through the years is one of the foundational strengths that reassures me as I think about the best way to serve these students and their futures. I also have the responsibility to give them a moral education and to speak to them in a way that respects their particular position on the arc of human development. This gives me access to a highly significant process: these students feel things deeply and demand the truth. As their years of Waldorf learning ripen, they will also have the imagination to picture something new and the initiative to help create it. 

I have the mandate, I have the freedom, I know the significance, but do I have the courage? Since we witnessed the murder of George Floyd and the meaning and significance of the Black Lives Matter movement has crystalized, discussions about race and inequity have become more urgent but not necessarily any easier. Many of us have been furiously reading authors like Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning) or books like Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson to catch up on the facts that our black and brown fellow citizens have known from their lived experience. This reading and thinking requires introspection and recognition of our roles in this racist system. I have to think about my role in this system and what it means for me to be truly anti-racist, in my life and in my classroom. I have to be willing to recognize a racist thought or infraction and apologize for it if I recognize it too late. 

This is the lens through which I must consider and write my curriculum be it history, social studies or sciences. As I teach the period of colonization, I will select primary sources that reflect the integrity of the indigenous peoples and the beauty and accomplishments of their cultures...cultures that Europeans regarded as resources and divided amongst themselves like toys on the playroom floor. 

This is the lens I wear as I teach the American Revolution and choose biographies to represent this impulse of breaking away from the old and familiar and founding something new based on undeveloped ideals. (The righteous passion of this soul mood is of utmost significance to the teenager and must find feeling and expression through this academic rigor!) Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson played a role, and wrote the words that inspired a democracy that still has the mechanisms to create such a UNION, but what about the contradictions of his ownership of enslaved people and the un-equal rights that came from such words? What was the role of economics in the formation of this union? Why did slavery and the triangle trade persist even after England and European countries recognized the immorality of denying another’s humanity? 

Who else built this country? Which biographies will reflect their strength, courage, creativity and ingenuity? Biographies like Frederick Douglass, Phyllis Wheatley and George Washington Carver surely, but also 20th Century heroes like Ruby Bridges, Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis. Their individual stories are compelling but we also require an honest look at the sanctioned forces working against them. Why did John Lewis die after a lifetime of dedicated effort and personal risk, still calling for the substance of the Equal Rights Amendment and the Voting Rights Act, to be codified and genuinely offered to disenfranchised communities? This is the truth I must confront with the thirteen-year-olds who, by necessity, will greet me wearing a mask with a distant nod (instead of a handshake) just a month from now. 

Again, I think of John Lewis when I make these choices. When he prepared himself for the walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on what would become known as Bloody Sunday, he packed a backpack with the essentials to maintain and sustain himself. Expecting to face physical abuse and jail, he looked after his health with an apple, an orange and toothbrush. But John Lewis knew he would need more than sustenance. He took two books, not just any leisure reading. One book was a political science text by a Harvard professor. The other was the writing of Thomas Merton, a monk and proponent of interfaith understanding. John Lewis brought reading that would inspire him. No doubt in his young life he had already learned what it takes to get through something really hard. Surely it takes the qualities of integrity and determination, but also the breath of inspiration. 

As I plan for my eighth grade class, whether it is history, geography, literature or chemistry, I am thinking of my students and packing their backpacks. In this culminating year of their Waldorf elementary, I will give them the nutrition of truth and the inspiration of visionaries. Visionaries who will reflect their own identities and whose words and actions will inspire the students as they meet their futures.