The Real Irish American
Story Not Taught in Schools
By Bill Bigelow
March 18, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Zinn
Education Project"-
“Wear green on St. Patrick’s
Day or get pinched.” That
pretty much sums up the
Irish-American “curriculum”
that I learned when I was in
school. Yes, I recall a nod
to the so-called Potato
Famine, but it was mentioned
only in passing.
Sadly, today’s high school
textbooks continue to
largely ignore the famine,
despite the fact that it was
responsible for unimaginable
suffering and the deaths of
more than a million Irish
peasants, and that it
triggered the greatest wave
of Irish immigration in U.S.
history. Nor do textbooks
make any attempt to help
students link famines past
and present.
Yet there is no shortage of
material that can bring
these dramatic events to
life in the classroom. In my
own high school social
studies classes, I begin
with Sinead O’Connor’s
haunting rendition of “Skibbereen,”
which includes the verse:
… Oh
it’s well I do remember,
that bleak
December day,
The landlord and the
sheriff came, to drive
Us all away
They set my roof on
fire, with their cursed
English spleen
And that’s another
reason why I left old
Skibbereen.
By contrast, Holt McDougal’s
U.S. history textbook
The Americans, devotes
a flat two sentences to “The
Great Potato Famine.”
Prentice Hall’s America:
Pathways to the Present
fails to offer a single
quote from the time. The
text calls the famine a
“horrible disaster,” as if
it were a natural calamity
like an earthquake. And in
an awful single paragraph,
Houghton Mifflin’s The
Enduring Vision: A History
of the American People
blames the “ravages of
famine” simply on “a
blight,” and the only
contemporaneous quote comes,
inappropriately, from a
landlord, who describes the
surviving tenants as
“famished and ghastly
skeletons.” Uniformly,
social studies textbooks
fail to allow the Irish to
speak for themselves, to
narrate their own horror.
These timid slivers of
knowledge not only deprive
students of rich lessons in
Irish-American history, they
exemplify much of what is
wrong with today’s
curricular reliance on
corporate-produced
textbooks.
First, does anyone really
think that students will
remember anything from the
books’ dull and lifeless
paragraphs? Today’s
textbooks contain no stories
of actual people. We meet no
one, learn nothing of
anyone’s life, encounter no
injustice, no resistance.
This is a curriculum bound
for boredom. As someone who
spent almost 30 years
teaching high school social
studies, I can testify that
students will be unlikely to
seek to learn more about
events so emptied of drama,
emotion, and humanity.
Nor do these texts raise any
critical questions for
students to consider. For
example, it’s important for
students to learn that the
crop failure in Ireland
affected only the
potato—during the worst
famine years, other food
production was robust.
Michael Pollan notes in
The Botany of Desire,
“Ireland’s was surely the
biggest experiment in
monoculture ever attempted
and surely the most
convincing proof of its
folly.” But if only this one
variety of potato, the
Lumper, failed, and other
crops thrived, why did
people starve?
Thomas Gallagher points out
in Paddy’s Lament,
that during the first winter
of famine, 1846-47, as
perhaps 400,000 Irish
peasants starved, landlords
exported 17 million pounds
sterling worth of grain,
cattle, pigs, flour, eggs,
and poultry—food that could
have prevented those deaths.
Throughout the famine, as
Gallagher notes, there was
an abundance of food
produced in Ireland, yet the
landlords exported it to
markets abroad.
The school curriculum could
and should ask students to
reflect on the contradiction
of starvation amidst plenty,
on the ethics of food
exports amidst famine. And
it should ask why these
patterns persist into our
own time.
More than a century and a
half after the “Great
Famine,” we live with
similar, perhaps even more
glaring contradictions. Raj
Patel opens his book,
Stuffed and Starved:
Markets, Power and the
Hidden Battle for the
World’s Food System:
“Today, when we produce more
food than ever before, more
than one in ten people on
Earth are hungry. The hunger
of 800 million happens at
the same time as another
historical first: that they
are outnumbered by the one
billion people on this
planet who are overweight.”
Patel’s book sets out to
account for “the rot at the
core of the modern food
system.” This is a
curricular journey that our
students should also be on —
reflecting on patterns of
poverty, power, and
inequality that stretch from
19th century Ireland to 21st
century Africa, India,
Appalachia, and Oakland;
that explore what happens
when food and land are
regarded purely as
commodities in a global
system of profit.
But today’s corporate
textbook-producers are no
more interested in feeding
student curiosity about this
inequality than were British
landlords interested in
feeding Irish peasants. Take
Pearson, the global
publishing giant. At its
website, the corporation
announces (redundantly) that
“we measure our progress
against three key measures:
earnings, cash and return on
invested capital.” The
Pearson empire had 2011
worldwide sales of more than
$9 billion—that’s nine
thousand million dollars, as
I might tell my students.
Multinationals like Pearson
have no interest in
promoting critical thinking
about an economic system
whose profit-first premises
they embrace with gusto.
As mentioned, there is no
absence of teaching
materials on the Irish
famine that can touch head
and heart. In a role play, “Hunger
on Trial,” that I wrote
and taught to my own
students in Portland,
Oregon—included at the Zinn
Education Project website—
students investigate who or
what was responsible for the
famine. The British
landlords, who demanded rent
from the starving poor and
exported other food crops?
The British government,
which allowed these food
exports and offered scant
aid to Irish peasants? The
Anglican Church, which
failed to denounce selfish
landlords or to act on
behalf of the poor? A system
of distribution, which
sacrificed Irish peasants to
the logic of colonialism and
the capitalist market?
These are rich and troubling
ethical questions. They are
exactly the kind of issues
that fire students to life
and allow them to see that
history is not simply a
chronology of dead facts
stretching through time.
So go ahead: Have a
Guinness, wear a bit of
green, and put on the
Chieftains. But let’s honor
the Irish with our
curiosity. Let’s make sure
that our schools show some
respect, by studying the
social forces that starved
and uprooted over a million
Irish—and that are starving
and uprooting people today.
Bill
Bigelow taught high school
social studies in Portland,
Ore. for almost 30 years. He
is the curriculum editor of
Rethinking Schools
magazine and co-director of
the online Zinn Education
Project,
www.zinnedproject.org.
This project, inspired by
the work of historian Howard
Zinn, offers free materials
to teach a fuller “people’s
history” than is found in
commercial textbooks.
Bigelow is author or
co-editor of numerous books,
including
A People’s History for the
Classroom. and
A People’s Curriculum for
the Earth: Teaching About
the Environmental Crisis.