Simple history
History, truth, myths, nationalism, violence, what to teach the children. It comes up a lot, that set of issues.
These days, Irish history lessons are more sophisticated. They deal happily with facts that have no place in a plain tale of heroes and tyrants…Why the change? First because in the 1980s, some people in Ireland became uneasy about the fact that a crude view of their national history was fuelling a conflict in the north of the island. Then came a fall in the influence of the Catholic church, whose authority had rested on a deft fusion between religion and patriotism. Also at work was an even broader shift: a state that was rich, confident and cosmopolitan saw less need to drum simple ideas into its youth, especially if those ideas risked encouraging violence.
A shift from nationalist religio-patriotic simple ideas to something better; excellent; here’s hoping the rest of the world can make the same trip.
In modern Turkey, classrooms have always been seen as a battleground for young hearts. Every day, children start the day by chanting: “I am a Turk, I am honest, I am industrious”…In such a climate, it is inevitable that “history is considered a sensitive matter, to be managed by the state,” says Taner Akcam, a Turkish-born historian, whose frank views on the fate of Ottoman Armenians in 1915 have exposed him to harassment by Turkish nationalists…
And Hrant Dink’s frank views on the fate of Ottoman Armenians in 1915 exposed him to being murdered.
Greece’s Orthodox leaders, like Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens, are putting up a harder fight to preserve the nationalist spirit…Meanwhile some Greeks retort that 11 or 12 is too young to go looking for facts. In a web-discussion of the new Greek textbook, one participant thunders: “At university, the goal of historical research is the discovery of truth. But in primary schools history teaching has an entirely different aim—to form historical consciousness and social identity!”
Oh right! Good thinking! The discovery of truth is reserved for people who go to university, and has to be postponed; what the people as a whole must have as children is identity-shaping mythology. Great. That’s been doing great things for Japan and India lately…
>”If the past in Ireland is a foreign country,”< then I would class it with a third world country - such as East Timor.
Ireland, too, today is like a healthy healthy robust vigorous, strong, and very tall stature teenager, but if the mother were to tell the child the problems she had at childbirth, she would cringe and be very depressed. As the new-born/mother both screamed, “blue” murder at the very excruciating, agonising, burning and complicated birth. I agree that the mother should quite insistently so be very open and not embarrassed to divest, unchain, and liberate, let loose the pent up throbbing torture and affliction of her past. The teen may get disheartened, but I pledge that she will get over it much more rapidly than if the dear mother allowed it, – to fester. As that only brings in its wake sadness, confusion and distrust and unwanted confliction. Teenagers are albeit very resilient and more attuned to the realities of life than one would sometimes give them acclaim.
By all accounts, it is said, “one should not put a young head on an old shoulder”. However, that precisely is what happened to MOTHER IRELAND; she quite literally had to be all but dragged bawling, snivelling, howling, weeping, and screaming into the 21st Century. Celtic Tiger rules, lordy, lordy quite okay!
last comment should have read: > it is said by me-fein, – “one should not put a modern head on an old shoulder” I tend to write in riddles so hope you get the gist!
Yeah. Actually it’s much like the US that way, Marie-Therese. We certainly have a horrible past to live with – at least two giant bleeding shaming blots on the record, that other prosperous industrial countries don’t have. It’s a wonder we aren’t even more neurotic than we already are. But at least it is out in the open.
Is there any place where teaching history is not contentious and sensitive? Switzerland perhaps?
I have always thought there was a case for only teaching classical history – you can learn all about politics, democracies, republics, hereditary rule, empires, slavery, demagoguery, warfare and genocide without touching on more recent guilts and victims.
I’ve often wondered. I don’t know of any such place. I bet Switzerland is contentious – bound to be, with four language groups, not to mention Calvin leering in the background, and that troublemaker Rousseau, and all those pesky sublime mountains, not to mention Frankenstein. Oh it’s a cauldron.
I suspect the main reason that Ireland is coming out of it, is that finally the death-grip of the “blck crows” (Ms O’Loughlin’s nemeses) has been broken, and the same is happening in the North.
The playing of a rugby international at Croke Park has got to be a good sign.
The dreaded Black-and-Tans were a disgraceful blot on Britain’s record – that’s what happens when you use a miltia, rather than regular troops – a lesson the US still hasn’t learnt in Central America, it seems.
I suspect the Greeks and Turks would live togather much better if the Cyprus problem were to be resolved – any signs of movement there?
It is very noticeable that there seems to be a mutual pact between the Gk & Tk descendants living in the UK, that they are UK Cypriots, OK, and we are not going to start fighting about it HERE.
“The dreaded Black-and-Tans were a disgraceful blot on Britain’s record “
This is too great a simplification. My great uncle by marriage was a Black and Tan and Dot, his sister, said he looked lovely and had a very smart uniform.
But all of Dot’s family had a robustly cheerful outlook. The photos of her husband (my wife’s grandfather) mock-executing an Indian coolie with a machete would raise a smile from the most stony hearted.
When I went to Dublin in 1994 there was a Gay Film Festival on at some arty filmhouse place and condom dispensers in the loo.
Now that doesn’t sound like it came out of Joyce’s priest-ridden country.
But you should have seen the place ( N & S ) in 1965!
The first thing I saw, coming into Belfast on the baot from Heysham (a service long since gone) was “kick the Pope” on a grotty set of waterfronquay steps……
That and finding that the most prominent thing in front of Inchicore railway works in Dublin was a statue of the unmarried mother with baby …..
It would seem, that in binning all that nonsense, they’ve learnt a lot.
I believe Spain has done the same.
Whereas here, I suspect we “respect” religion far too much.
“Is there any place where teaching history is not contentious and sensitive? Switzerland perhaps”
Not only was there “instability” in the past in Switzerland, there is also tension and “sensitivities” within it to this very day.
“The Bern constitution, like the Treaty of Rome a century later, was the beginning of a process of closer co-operation. It ended a generation of chronic instability and strife within and between the Swiss nation-cities.
The background to Swiss unification was a French invasion, which temporarily toppled the ancient regime in the Swiss states in 1798. The invasion was welcomed by some subject peoples in Switzerland as a long overdue liberation from the ‘tyranny’ of oligarchic city-republics such as Bern which had conquered much of the Swiss plateau in the sixteen century”.
I lived in Switzerland and establish the Swiss to be a hideously embryonic regimental people. From the instant children are born, they have to hold fast to this stringency. Flawlessness, exactitude, and fastidiousness are a way of Swiss life. I felt very inhibited living in that exaggeratedly austere authoritarian almost dictatorial environment. It would have been a big cause of disparity with me coming from Ireland, which was in assessment very wild and unruly; Irish people as a ‘rule’ are by nature very nonconformist. I learned, to my chagrin “the hard way” to adapt to their culture. Irish people are by all accounts also very misunderstood by other cultures because of their intrinsic non-adherence to “rules”
I do have, in saying all this remarkable respect for the Swiss as they call a spade a spade and are very dependable and candid. It is also a very protected and safe country to live in. Despite all, it is also my preferred country in the whole of Europe. The Swiss Alps and glaziers are to die for. Safety and security do come with a an expensive price tag.
There was/is still currently to this day I deem a big drug culture in Zurich, I put this down to the equivalence, and standardization of the young peoples lives. Rich kids who have grown up with only material wealth, which is not the be-and-end-all of happiness, are now learning to emotionally express themselves through painting murals in the cities of Switzerland.
Education is freedom. Art is freedom. Expression on B&W is freedom. Also the teaching of historical contentious and sensitive issues of of one’s own country is in my book a most unqualified and penultimate freedom.
>”The dreaded Black-and-Tans were a disgraceful blot on Britain’s record”< And an even bigger one on the Irish landscape “This is too great a simplification”. Yeah, of course it would be, and unsurprisingly so – for Dot making an allowance for her close family relationship with a Black and Tan.
If the Black and Tans by all accounts had their way, I would not be commenting on butterfliesandwheels because I would not have existed.
My Grandfather was a Sergeant/Inspector with An Garda Siochanna, which came into being in 1922. Prior to that, he had been in the R.I.C. [Royal Irish Constabulary] During the Rising troubles of 1916/22 or thereabouts he had to keep a low profile, as they were targets for not only the Black and Tans but also the Fenians.
He was, on one gorgeous fine summer Kilkenny day lazing in a knee-deep field of barleycorn on his neighbouring cousin’s land. He was with friends playing a sombre game of cards. Whilst they were basking in the luxuriant copious midday sun not too far in the distance, had a band of twenty Black and Tans delimited his mother’s homestead? They booted in the farm door, and cried out his name, “where is Edward O’ Loughlin”? His blessed mother would have died first rather than have told them, he was the youngest son of eight and she was comprehensively swollen with pride – of her well beloved son. Sadly, to say there is a sad twist of fate as a few years later the hardship he endured in the line of his duties hiding in the Wicklow hills as an R.I.C finally took its toll and he died when he was only a young man. His wife whom he was blissfully married to was at the time six months pregnant. I surmise that my life would have taken a diverse turn had he survived .
I hope and think that Ireland is finaly becoming a fully grown up nation,the recognition that history should not mean blame the brits is a huge step!
No I am not saying the brits are blameless.
“Literally, in German, the name Frankenstein means stone of the Franks. The word “frank” means also “free” in the sense of “not being subject to”.
Frankenstein is also a common name in Germany.
My point being;
Mary Shelley has Victor “Frankenstein” leaving his beloved family in Geneva, Switzerland to study in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Germany. Nonetheless, if Victor derives originally from Geneva what the ‘cauldron’ blazes was she thinking when she gave him a Swiss/German surname. Swiss/French is after-all the lingo of Geneva. Can anyone enlighten me?
From what I have read up on [Wiki] Mary Shelley always maintained that she derived the name “Frankenstein” from a dream-vision, yet despite these public claims of originality, the name and what it means has been a source of many speculations?
I understand that Shelley sees Victor as playing God by creating life.
I escaped to England to get away from the black ‘cra’s’ past [as opposed to Tingey’s ‘crows’] Although, having a insubordinate unruly rebellious spirit, I was always treated very well by the English,. The best friends I ever made came from there. I learned so much from them having suffered starvation of every type of knowledge for a whole childhood. My first introduction to classical music was that of Enigma Variations, by Elgar, Handel’s Messiah, Mozart. And Gilbert/Sullivan. I blaringly played all this music on my toaster type record player in the London hostel cubicle. Newly arrived Irish girls from both North/South who had come at the height of the troubles were playing songs such as:
“Armoured cars and tanks and guns
Came to take away our sons!
But every man must stand
Behind the men behind the wire!
In the little streets of Belfast,
In the dark of early morn,
British soldiers came a-running,
Wrecking little homes with scorn.
Hear the sobs of crying children,
Dragging fathers from their beds;
Watch the scenes as helpless mothers
Watch the blood fall from their heads.
Chorus:
2. Not for them a judge or jury,
Nor for them a crime at all,
Being Irish means, they’re guilty,
So they’re guilty one and all.
Around the world, the truth will echo:
Cromwell’s men are here again!
England’s name again is sullied
In the eyes of honest men.
3. Proudly march behind our banner;
Proudly march behind our men!
We will have them free to help us
Build a nation once again!
Come the people, step together,
Proudly, firmly on your way;
Never fear and never falter,
Till the boys come home to stay!
I WAS BETWEEN TWO WORLDS AND RAW RED LIKE A NEW BORN BABY – I KNEW NOTHING
ABOUT MY HISTORY
I soon learned pretty fast though as
amidst all of this assortment of music there were frequent bombs going off at nearby Victoria Station.
I ALSO LEARNED ANOTHER TYPE OF HISTORY
It, too, like a bombshell landed on me one fine summer August day in Victoria Station. It came in the guise of “a phoenix rising from the ashes” Mother Ireland and mother nature were both vying for my attention. Blimey, this is becoming autobiographical, had better call a halt.
Joan Baez/Bob Dylan too were my favourite singers at the time. They too through the medium of their folk music were expressing succinctly American justice and freedom issues.
If ye came to Dublin today not only would ye find hidden fee-yaying condom dispensers in the loos; you would also find them – being openly, like baloons, handed out; or placed for free beside/within public telephone boxes. The Celtic Tiger has, whatsoever, no inihibitions. It also wants to carry no Aid carriers
The Film Institute in Temple Bar is dirt cheap and it shows fantastic, unusual foreign films, as well as controversial ones such as the one about Father Oliver O’Grady. It would surely do to have condoms freely distributed in that establishment. Deliver us from evil, should soon be in the mainstream cinemas.
Spell check > “paying,” “balloon”. <