Let's Talk About Them.

• Author: Puterbaugh, Dolores T.
• Position: PARTING THOUGHTS

"WHY AREN'T THESE THE PEOPLE we talk about?" she asked after class one day. She gestured sweepingly at the chairs as if they still were occupied. "None of us heard of these people before you told us about them. These should be the people we know about...." Her voice trailed off. What could I say? "Well, you know about them. You go and talk about them." She smiled, nodded; she is bright, articulate, and already successful in the broadcast/audio field, working for a professional sports team. It went unspoken: she is intelligent, industrious, and a good student; why didn't she recognize any of these names?

Why indeed? There is no mystery here, just Psych 101, the generic first-year course that some students take deliberately and others register for with weary resolve to "get through it" for the required social science credits. I give two choices for the major term paper: the more popular option is to pick a mental disorder diagnosis and compare and contrast two modern forms of treatment. The second is to pick one of three historical figures and analyze their life through the lenses of Abraham Maslow and Lawrence Kohlberg. This year's choices were Rev. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dr. Hector Garcia, and Pres. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. As incentive to learn more about great people, I use the same list with a few others tossed in as an extra writing option for students whose research, analysis and writing skills surpass their expertise in timed, multiple-choice tests. The former seem more useful, for the long run, than the latter.

This is not the only student who has come right out and asked, rhetorically, why he or she did not know someone, or some pivotal event, often within their ethnic history. For instance, the devout Lutheran siblings, attending college at ages 15 and 16, who wondered why they did not know who Bonhoeffer was; or the young woman who attended high school in Mexico and never heard of the Cristero War. She went home and asked her mother and grandmother: how did I miss this? Did I sleep through half of history? She told me they told her: oh, no, La Cristiada is never spoken of in schools--only in the churches. Then there are a number of young, African-American women who never heard of Sirleaf, despite her recently sharing the Nobel Peace prize with two other women.

There is not one reason, and the reasons I offer ought to be seen as interwoven symptoms within the culture; like a tapestry, every thread will not touch every other thread, but...