Hunger: The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools By Bill Bigelow
March 15, 2012 "Huffington Post' -- "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 oldSkibbereen. 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 Peopleblames 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 inThe 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, Ore. -- 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 - Co-director, Zinn Education Project; Curriculum editor, Rethinking Schools "Skibbereen" By Sinead O'Connor.
then they had to go through the nightmare of ellis island and being checked for admission to the US, some being denied entry. There was no food stamps for the lucky Irish that were admitted into the US. No free housing and no free healthcare. Of any immigrants to the US, it was the people at this time that came here that I admire the most for their endurance and patience with the bigotry that met them by the WASP. They really had to fend for themselves, unlike the over-weight illegal immigrants of today that stand in grocery line ahead of you and whip out their welfare card to pay for their cart of groceries and then open their wallet brimming with 100 dollar bills to pay for the stereo and other non-food items (its like they want you to see all their cash, because they make a big effort to flash it around).
There's been quite a few murders of whites of this magnitude and larger in history. Mostly it gets shoved under the carpet, but it's good to remember that victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing come in all colors. There was also the Russian one that Stalin did killing something like 20 million Christian russians.
Humanity never learns.
Pearson:
Glad he brought Pearson up. Pearson is in the business of propaganda too. The 10th anniversary of 9/11 gave them the opportunity to make some big bucks:
This article is from the now dead American Pendulum, which was destroyed by some sly ones. Used to be good site but they still have some of the old articles and this one is perfect about Pearson: http://www.americanpendulum.com/2011/09/01/pearso...
Grarifying to see this piece of truth-telling. For more see mywww.irishholocaust.org. Be sure to click on its map to learn which Brit reg't starved your relatives.
Whats in these words ? famine / genocide maybe its blame or fault . I contest that prince-ably ittle has changed FOR THE BETTERMENT OF HUMANITY since 1840's. PRIVATE Corporate entities stalk and pillage the planet at will , programmed to maximize profits .Lying is '' the Art of spinning '' The avaricious is pure and in its core / heart a simplicity ,understood by all who breath or who wish to breath . I believe man is unique in the application of CAPITALISM . this capitalism is fueled by greed , Its principle enemy is community , The Irish peasants of 160 years ago we're superfluousness for a variety of reasons just like the present daily death toll of darker skins , racism is within the armory of capitalism, the Irish peasant we'er depicted in caricature as primates. i D'ONT HAVE THE ANSWER TO Hep INOCULATE humanity but i am understanding my enemy .
Happy St Patrick's Day xxxx
The hatred the British must have had for the very poor Irish they ground under their feet is something of a puzzlement. Food shipped from America by the Quakers was not allowed into Irish ports by the British. It had to be transferred to British bottoms before entry.
God bless the Irish. I'm not one of them except in my heart.
The English Ruling Class (& their American cousins) are a death-oriented group that despises everyone else on the planet - they have done so for hundreds of years, hence the British & then US Empires. These groups currently hide behind the mask of giant corporations. They need to be rooted out & thrown on the trash-heap of history.
A good argument against textbooks. Many textbooks are written to please the big textbook purchasers (states that buy the same textbooks for all the schools in a state, like Texas). If they don't want something in it, it usually is taken out and vise versa. Then those same annotated texts are sold everywhere else. The good teacher doesn't rely on the textbook. He/she supplements with real world knowledge and truth as the author has done. That's getting tougher to do today with lock-step curriculum and standardized tests keyed, often, to the text.
Super good to see this, being 5th generation Irish (and don't think the Scots-Irish, whether in Scotland or northern Ireland had it any differently...you do know that the majority of indentured servants in early America were Scots-Irish) and also Scots-Irish.
Now, would ICH, a leftist site, mind telling the truth about how Stalin starved several million Ukrainians to force them into collectivisation in the 1930s? BTW, Stalin did what the Brits did: sell every last ounce of food confiscated from the starving Ukrainians abroad? It's okay, leftists, to tell the truth.
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