Missed Opportunities

History doesn't have to bore kids. The stories of history are the stories of real people, and we need to take the time to help kids connect the dots, to see that history never occurs in a vacuum, that there are always threads to the past. Of course that means you will need to be aware of those threads if you're to provide connections for others.

In the course of prepping a previous entry (Worst Part of Coaching), I had to look up the name of a town (Untergruppenbach) and its castle (Stettenfels) in southwest Germany. I remember that summer experience well because we helped renovate that old castle. Actually, I think we were used as youth labor to turn it into a tourist spot. Probably someone should have become suspicious when the American youth contingent was assigned to dig, by hand, with shovels, a swimming pool. (I missed out on some of that because my French, being the least bad of our group, got me a short gig as the Yugoslavian bricklayer's assistant.)

In any case, I learned a lot, some of which became the foundation for various life lessons to students that I may resurrect later in this space. None of what I learned, however, came close to touching on the history of the castle or even Germany. Admittedly, we were there to work in a youth camp, and our "adult" chaperone was way more concerned about ingratiating himself with future leaders of the sponsoring church's youth group than much of anything else, so maybe I'm being harsh in my assessment that those of us on the trip were cheated out of learning something historically important. I’m in no way suggesting that there was anything nefarious in this. Actually, I'd bet the guy in charge of us was so shallow he never even thought to consider the building’s history. I am saying that there was a huge missed opportunity.

I'm under no illusion that, as a teen, I would have been this enthusiastic participant in some castle genealogy presentation, but I would have been polite and, even then, the words "Holocaust," "Nazi Germany," and "Aryanization" would have grabbed my attention. I'm pretty sure that most of the other kids would also have liked knowing that the castle on which we were working had been stolen from its Jewish owners in 1934 as they fled to South Africa. (It was restored to the family in 1951; they then sold it in 1957 to the guy we ended up working for.) That historical perspective could have been important to us back then, and I'm sure I could have used it a time or six in the last four years, or the last 40, for that matter.

These are the kinds of bits of information that make history both relevant and interesting and help kids connect to the big picture stuff. I wish someone had shared this piece with me.