Today, I’ve got a thoughtful flash fiction piece ready for you. It covers the way that history is taught within education and how that often separates the past from the present, as historical figures become names and dates instead of people. It’s an unreal sort of feeling that is difficult to describe and there’s no one person to lay the blame onto, as I am also unsure of how it could be fixed. In short, much of history as it was taught to me through primary and high school felt strangely distant, as if I was being told about a fictional novel rather than the truth, despite logically knowing that it was truth. In any case, I hope you enjoy this piece!
History
It wasn’t always a warm classroom, but the textbooks seemed perpetually warm. There was nothing truly cold or miserable about them. Perhaps it was only me–maybe I had some early teenage inability to imagine any life but my own. More likely, I think, is that it must have been an unfortunate blend of self-focused thought and mellow teaching.
Nothing seemed real or consequential. My eyes roamed over medieval villages and Victorian streets plagued by disease–cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis–thinking, all the while, that it didn’t seem so bad. I was wrong, but how was I to realise that?
Their hunger couldn’t be accurately illustrated in such colours, not when they were so easy on the eye. Servants smiled and said nothing of the beatings their masters gave them. I’d work happily, I thought, as they did.
My daydreams drifted to Norman battlefields, not seeing horrors but instead adventures. I flipped the page and my brain tested me with a witchcraft trial.
Somehow, the truth in one class was taught in the same manner as fiction in another. People–real people–became characters. Historic events became plots. It wasn’t right, but it was three hours a week and no one questioned it. Our hands asked about dates and details, not the atmospheres or the reality of the past.
The bell rang. I shunted my chair backwards, the one that I hated for its cheap plastic and cracked back. Bag on shoulders. Timetable in hand. Perhaps, also, it couldn’t sink in because we moved on so quickly to quadratic equations and Guten Tag, Herr.
It wasn’t what we were taught, but how.
Enjoyed the fiction? Why not check out Everything Under The Rainbow or Lighter Fluid?
(They’re some of my fiction books! Available on Amazon!)
Oskar Leonard 