The truth shall make us free.
The truth shall make us free some
day.
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,
The truth shall make us free some
day.
—VERSE OF “WE SHALL OVERCOME”ALL OVER AMERICA, high school students sit in social studies and
American history classes, look at their textbooks, write answers to the
questions at the end of each chapter, and take quizzes and examinations that test
factual recall. When I was subjected to this regimen, I never defined any of the
terms at the end of the chapter until the sixth week of each six-week grading
period. Then the teacher and I would negotiate what proportion of the terms I
had to define correctly to get an A- (usually something like 85 percent) and I
would madly write out definitions through the last two days of class. Three
years later, when my sister took American history, she developed a more
effective technique. She handed in the work on time, writing real definitions to
the first two and last two terms, but for the thirty or forty in the middle she
free-associated whatever nonsense she wanted. “Hawley-Smoot Tariff: I have
no idea, Mr. DeMoulin,” was one entry. “Blue Eagle: FDR’s pet bird who got
very sad when he died” was another. Today students use the Internet: “At my
school we divided up the list and then posted our part on the Internet. Then you
could download the terms, change the style, print them out, and hand them in.”
Educational theorists call such acts “day-to-day resistance”—a phrase that
comes from theorizing about slavery—but I did not know that then. I am still
envious that I never thought of such marvelous labor-saving ploys.^4
Of course, fooling the teacher is of little consequence. Quite possibly my
sister’s teacher even knew of the ruse and joked about it with his colleagues,
the way masters chuckled that their slaves were so stupid they had to be told
every evening to bring in the hoes or they would leave them out in the night
dew. Some social studies and history teachers try to win student cooperation
by telling them, when introducing a topic, not to worry, they won’t have to
learn much about it. Students happily acquiesce.^5 Students also invest a great