FROM THE CLASSROOM: Lessons from history

Over the last couple of years, I have followed with interest news unfold from around the world about monuments and statues being pulled down, primarily (although not always) because of the sometimes unpleasant details which emerge around their history.

We’ve seen it happen on so many different occasions – the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001 in Afghanistan; the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes in 2015 in Cape Town; and of course, more recently, the removal of the statue of Gandhi just last month in Ghana.

On the one hand, I have to say that I am pleased that people are taking the effort to look beyond what history books have told us for as far back as I can remember.

For so long, we took at face value what we were taught in school without question, and it is only more recently (perhaps with the advent of the internet and the easy availability of information) that we are inclined to discover more for ourselves than we are told in school.

That many of us can recognise that history books are not completely objective (written, as they are, by the victors) is a great leap forward, especially in today’s times of fake news and manipulated narratives.

However, at the same time, I am also a little bit saddened, as I am not convinced that pulling down parts of our history, however distasteful they might be, serve the bigger purpose.

If we are trying to teach our children to be more curious, to ask the tough questions, to try to see both sides of the story and to be more empathetic, is this going to be achieved by simply removing monuments from our past which don’t fit the popular narrative, particularly in places of learning?

Are we doing our children justice by removing visible signs of leaders such as Lenin, Stalin or General Lee, simply because they represent ideals which we do not necessarily agree with? Aren’t we then simply replacing one boxed version of history with another?

Perhaps we would be better served by leaving the statues in place, lest we forget the other side of the story.

If we instead taught our children a more balanced version of history which allows them to make up their own minds, and which doesn’t require us to brush our unsavoury past under the carpet, it could go a long way to creating a more empathetic generation of actual free-thinkers.

While we needn’t necessarily celebrate the (mis)deeds of our predecessors who have shaped what we are today, surely we want our children to know their history in its entirety, politically correct or not.

Waheeda Shariff Samji is a firector at The Latham School