The Real Irish American
Story Not Taught in Schools
By Bill Bigelow
March 17, 2015 "ICH"
- “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..
To support the famine
relief effort, British tax policy
required landlords to pay the local
taxes of their poorest tenant farmers,
leading many landlords to forcibly evict
struggling farmers and destroy their
cottages in order to save money. From
Hunger on Trial Teaching Activity.
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, Oregon—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.
Bill Bigelow taught
high school social studies in Portland, Ore.
for almost 30 years. He is the curriculum
editor of
Rethinking Schools magazine and
co-director of the online Zinn Education
Project,
www.zinnedproject.org. This project,
inspired by the work of historian Howard
Zinn, offers free materials to teach a
fuller “people’s history” than is found in
commercial textbooks. Bigelow is author or
co-editor of numerous books, including
A People’s History for the Classroom.
and
A People’s Curriculum for the Earth:
Teaching About the Environmental Crisis.
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