Published: September 19, 2008 12:33 am            

ADAMCZYK: You won't be condemned to repeat it

Somehow the young polymath of the old days, who collected stamps and read biographies and could name all of America’s presidents and all of England’s kings and queens, has been supplanted by a different kind of academic versatility. The young person who can put to use all the controls of a computer or all the buttons on a PDA, for example, trumps a head full of all that arcana more suitable for a round of “Jeopardy.”

As a working definition of what “smart” is has evolved, so has the appreciation and need of understanding history. You begin caring about history when you have some years behind you. I find it’s the older citizen most eager to know about the past, and that’s regrettable in a way. The young, having been born into a world of faster faster faster, take discontinuity for granted these days, and theoretically lead lives with a leave-until-later approach to sorting out what happened; what they endure, what they influence and what influences them, isn’t even history in their minds. It’s some curious amalgam of the vectors of their lives their schools call “social studies.”

The odds are you care, in some way, about history. How do you express it?

Surprisingly, there is television galore to watch, and the study of history has been blessed with an assortment of methodology granted it by the broadcasting industry. Fortunately it comes in waves, on television; in the cable-ready world, history has not been banished to some ghetto of early-morning programming. It has its own channels, and several of them. Among PBS’ most popular programs are “History Detectives,” wherein researchers in leather overcoats get summoned to a case like Steed and Mrs. Peel of “The Avengers” to trace the lineage of some scrap of evidence, and the durable “Antiques Roadshow,” a strange cross between an appraisal, a history lesson and a game show. No televised baseball game is available without the attendant explanation of some team’s lineage, some ballpark’s memories.

Beyond television, the dedicated amateur historian can get hands-on involved. The Kenmore-Tonawanda area has historical societies, several of them. With the Internet and the widespread interest, it is easier than ever to trace one’s own genealogy, and that can include the fascinating pastime of visiting graveyards (and clerk’s offices). You can build models of fighter planes and notable ships. You can recreate a railroad or a town or Crystal Beach, in miniature.

There are also books, of course (anyone who thinks no one reads any more should visit a Barnes & Noble on a Saturday afternoon), and formal study; ask UB’s Department of History for stories about retired and otherwise senior students who sign up for graduate school courses, and their arcane motives for doing so. Even turning on the radio can be a study in the field. The prevalence of the “classic rock” format, with 30- and 40-year old records in steady rotation and aimed at aging Baby Boomers, is notice that, beyond nostalgia, a generation insists on remaining in touch with the history that it itself made. I grew up in the 1960s, and be assured, my little radio was not pumping out hits of the 1930s.

So when I learned that last week, the 600 students of Hoover Elementary School in Kenmore had an assembly commemorating 9/11, this old historian took notice. The participants, led by music teachers Donna Feathers, Margie Lane and Gabrielle Moore, teacher aide Jan Heimiller and school secretary Nancy Mooney, presented a program on a topic that scarred and impacted every American except the ones too young to remember it. On this day, the ones too young were the ones doing the remembering.

The school displays a large quilt with emblems of how local citizens responded to 9/11, and the assembly focused on the rescue work, done locally and every day, by Kenmore and Tonawanda’s uniformed emergency responders.

“This was so significant,” said Heimiller. “Young people need to understand how many people were helpless, how many were heroes.”

The program also featured Hoover student Kelsie Skinner and her involvement in the Blue Rose Foundation, a local organization serving the needs of those with developmental disabilities.

Thus did a group of elementary school students interact with history, by tying it to a better understanding of the world in which they live, and overturning philosopher George Santayana’s ominous observation that those who cannot learn from history are condemned to repeat it. At Hoover Elementary they’re learning it in a way that dovetails with their lives and their world. It suggests I needn’t worry about the future of history; it seems to have gotten off the bookshelves, out of the museums, and quite nicely into the lives of some of Kenmore’s citizens.

Ed Adamczyk is a Kenmore resident whose column appears weekly in the Record-Advertiser. Contact him at EdinKenmore@gmail.com.

        

• Click to discuss this story with other readers on our forums.