Storytelling #2

When one listens closely and critically to what is being said around them, it starts to become easier to understand that that story is being told to shape how we feel and think. What is sometimes not as easy to understand is who is shaping the narrative or why.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of stories that are happening around the world; stories that we should know about, stories that would be important for anyone to have a world view that was close to being comprehensive. When one considers how little we know, we should all be afraid.  How can we possibly make informed decisions when not only do we not know all of the information but we don’t even know that we need to learn more? It is hard to fault the voter/student when they are not told that there is additional information available.

Who decides what I need to learn? Who limits my access to information? And most importantly why would anyone do that?

Most recently I have been reading Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary which in great detail traces the history of Muslins. As Ansary so accurately describes in his opening pages, the Muslin world was a highly sophisticated, complex place long before the Western countries had seen their way out of the Dark Ages. It is a rich history, as enjoyable to read as any portion of Western European history. Why don’t schools teach this? Why when high school students study ancient history do they look at Rome and Greece but not that portion of the globe that includes Persia to Afghanistan? And for the matter why don’t we teach at least a little bit of the history of China? 

The easy answer is that the folks who decide what kids need to learn to be “good” citizens – and that means citizens who are both consumers and supporters of their culture, see little value in learning about any other culture, especially a culture that may have been more effective, more just, more accepting and lasted longer. But I suspect the answer is more complex than that. I am not at all sure that the administrators and academics who design elementary and high school history courses are themselves aware that they were not taught the histories of that huge land mass just east of the Mediterranean Sea. Perhaps their indoctrination into Eurocentric history was so complete that any other history is impossible to conceive. Which is a pity.

 It also make it so much easier to hate or abuse or ignore people when we see them as people who have no history.