I’d like to share a theory. I haven’t done thorough research. I don’t have citations to back up my claims. I’m going with information I’ve gathered experientially and I’m allowing myself to be guided by intuition.
According to many an article, Germany is Europe’s Eco-leader. Their citizens’ and institutions’ behaviors are greener than the rest. I think I have an inkling as to at least part of the reason why.
In my brief experience working within (or let’s say, in collaboration with) Germany’s public education system, I became aware that most German students spend a considerable length of focus during their later high school years learning about the atrocities of the Holocaust, the events that led to it and the historic and present-day repercussions. Now, I realize, the German public school system doesn’t advance many of its students to the later high school years, and that is another meaty topic for discussion, but for the sake of my current theory, I’ll move on.
As a teaching artist leading a cultural exchange arts program, I had the pleasure of getting to know some gymnasium students from Ludwigsburg, Germany (a city north of Stuttgart) a few years back. I have a vivid recollection of the students sharing the emotional, depressing as well as cathartic, experience of the Holocaust-focused curriculum they were studying in school at the time of our workshop. I remember that they used the expressive opportunity of our workshop to process some of what they were going through. I would like to posit, that these young German adults, who are forced to face the truth of their country’s history, in fact, the choices and actions of some of their still living relatives, are actively participating in healing from their pasts. They are coming to terms with their inherited truth and in doing so they are looking for ways to improve themselves, their country and their environment. I am linking healing from the history of the persecution and genocide of the Jewish people, to the German nation’s progress with leading the Green movement in Europe. I believe that people who are in touch with their past, the damage and hurts that their ancestors may have caused, are more likely to participate in the act of healing and protecting themselves and the environment. People who are taking care of their own evolutionary progress are natural participants in the planet’s evolution.
With this theory in mind, I cast an eye on my own nation. A country that has committed numerous atrocities on a variety of peoples; the natives who inhabited and lived attuned with this gorgeous land mass before the European ‘discoverers’ arrived; and, the Africans who were shipped here like cargo, brutalized and enslaved to achieve an unmatched wealth/power status that could only be built on an exploitative free-labor system. There are more American horror stories, both past as well as current events.
If we do not address the way we learn about ourselves, our history, our actions and their repercussions, if we do not take healing from the vicious wounds of what America as a nation has done in order to achieve its place in the world, how can we expect anything to change?
I would love to see the public education curriculum around American History shift to reflect my theory; to teaching a non-sugarcoated version of the truth, where perhaps we don’t look at ourselves as victors and heroes; to helping young students cope with any emotional reactions they might have to this hard to swallow material; and to moving forward as a people with new information, a commitment to not repeating the errors of our past and a greater investment in the common good of all people and the planet.