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LITR 4326 Early American Literature Model Assignments |
Final Exam Essays 2017 Sample answers
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2c.
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Tanner House
Whose America?
I was immediately drawn to Lauren Weatherly’s essay “Which America do we
Teach?” (2012) as it directly addresses a topic I often find myself thinking
about. I intend to pursue a career in education, and I firmly believe that
discerning the truth of a matter should be one of the primary concerns of
education and educators. But the truth of history is not such a simple matter.
If the idioms are to be believed, then the perspective of history is inherently
corrupted, as the values, perspectives, beliefs and practices of now defunct
civilizations are often discarded in favor of the narrative promoted by the
dominant culture. This phenomenon is problematic, as we begin to lose sight of
the truth of past cultures in favor of the myth of current ones. I learned more
blatantly incorrect things about the native people of the Americas while I was
in public school than I did true things, and this is not an uncommon trend.
This sentiment is reflected in Jill Norris’s essay “Finding the Truth in
Origins” (2012). As Jill put it, “Ask any elementary school student in America
who Christopher Columbus is and they will tell you “he’s the guy that discovered
America, of course!” and even though you know that this is incorrect you nod and
give them a pat on the head anyway because hey—they’re just reciting what they
were taught. But it raises the question of whether it is okay to teach kids such
an embellished version of the true story simply because it’s more “family
friendly”. I know that when I finally learned the true story of Thanksgiving I
had a really hard time accepting it because it just didn’t coincide with the
story that I had grown up with. I couldn’t believe that Christopher Columbus
wasn’t the peaceful hero that I had learned about as a kid and this made me
start to question what other important moments in history that my teachers had
falsified.” Lying underneath Jill’s casual tone and witty response is a very
serious, very concerning problem. Misinformation has been spread to such an
alarming degree that blatantly untrue stories have been normalized in the canon
of American history. The historical record, at least in regard to education, is
more concerned with maintaining a widely consumable narrative than it is with
the truth. This obstruction of truth is not okay. Public education is just lying
at this point, and that does not sit well with students.
Thomas Dion provides something of a response to this argument in his essay “Early
American Literature: “Is this Fiction or Non-fiction?” (2014). Through this
lens, Dion asserts that even though many of the claims and reports made
throughout early American literature are falsified, there is still an inherent
value in studying them anyway. If we read the traditional, normalized narrative
of Columbus as fiction, there are still a number of valuable lessons and
insights which we can draw from it. The falsified information reveals just as
much as the truth might. The very fact that things were omitted is just as
telling as their inclusion.
In each of the indexes for the model assignments of past sections of this
course, you will find at least one essay in which a student discusses the idea
of truth and myth in the American origin story, as well as the idea that we are
teaching a sort of alternate, “family friendly” version of history. This is a
very large conversation that has been happening for some time, and it is
comforting to see so many other students be as concerned about it as I am. Those
who seek the truth should not be the outliers, and it’s nice to have that belief
reaffirmed.
In exploring which America to teach, I found it necessary to include these
student responses, as they are mostly concerned with this same idea that we are
not necessarily teaching the “true” America, but in understanding what exactly
it means to teach the “true” America I think we must still understand and
explore the importance of this sort of watered down, family friendly version of
history with which we are all familiar. If we consider the revolutionary spirit
and ideas of those who built this country, I think the founding fathers would be
pretty upset by the fact that there has not been a second American revolution.
The mere existence of this historical conundrum (real America v commercial
America) is evidence that the institutions of power which preside over us have
lost sight of the original purpose and intention of the function that they
fulfill. Information is being deliberately withheld, and the population is being
intentionally misinformed, and we have allowed ourselves to become so
sidetracked that we squabble over the perceived impact and importance of
Christopher Columbus, a man who is himself so insignificant that the country of
which we were to believe he was a hero imprisoned him for wasting their time and
money. The historical depiction of Columbus matters in the sense that it is
proof of this systemic commitment to the perpetuation of misinformation, but
past that it is really just a convenient distraction. If we are to teach the
true America, Christopher Columbus really is not even a part of the story. The
true America is not about one person, nor is it about a group of people. It is
the story of how people, genetically identical people, can be so obtuse and so
ignorant that they believed that the geographical coincidence of the proximity
of their ancestors to the Earth’s equator plays any sort of role in their right
and will to live. It is also the story of literature and the humanities being
tools so powerful that they were able to spark a paradigm shift that launched
humanity into an age of unprecedented growth and discovery.
We spend so much time debating the validity of these conceptions of the
“dominant culture” and “multicultural” approach we forget the purpose of culture
altogether. We fabricate these arbitrary borders that keep us separated for no
reason other than we seem to like to separate ourselves, and in doing so allow
ourselves to be dictated and controlled by institutions so bloated and corrupt
that they actually believe that these distinctions matter. The only true way to
teach America is to teach it every way. We must put the “multicultural” lens
aside and realize that our only chance of building and living in the world that
we want to live in comes with accepting that we are not this or that, him or
her, the self or the other. We are the people of Earth, as we always have been,
and it should be easier to see and understand this now than it has ever been,
but that really does not seem to be the case. This world is dying because of our
inability to understand one another, and this inability is rooted in our
continued insistence on reinforcing this idea that we are all so different.
There should be no debate between a multicultural and dominant culture approach
to teaching history. We should simply teach history. The approach we take should
be the flat cultural approach. We must find a way to turn this conception of
multicultural into monocultural. Accepting culture as a human universal and not
seeing the need to categorize and define and label and ruin it should be at the
forefront of our educational mission.
The texts we have covered in class very much helped me come to this conclusion,
as we studied female writers, writers of color, and “traditional” writers. What
I thought would just be separate, distinct perspectives happening simultaneously
actually turned out to be a discourse on the larger purpose of literature,
literacy, and education. We took the “multicultural” approach, and in doing so I
realized the possibility and viability of the “monocultural” approach. History
is not all of the voices trying to drown each other out, with only the loudest
and wealthiest of the voices prevailing, as we have a tendency to believe it is.
History should be a symphony of the human experience, and we should look at its
different voices not as conflicting but as harmonizing. The very fact that these
different perspectives simultaneously exist is proof that there can be no one
true, dominant approach to studying history, or the humanities. Diversity is the
death of the individual. We are all only human, each and every one of us, and
past that no other distinction should truly matter.
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