Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice

 

Just finished reading Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice by Bruce Levine.  As Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Halm noted in his review of the book,

“Often reviled and generally misunderstood, Thaddeus Stevens has been relegated to a dark corner of the American historical stage. The distinguished historian Bruce Levine not only brings Stevens back into the light but also reveals his significance to the revolutionary dynamic of the Civil War and Reconstruction.”

When many modern readers think of Thaddeus Stevens what may come to mind first is the curmudgeonly Congressman played by Tommy Lee Jones in Steven Spielberg’s great bio-pic, Lincoln.  While Jones apparently got the personality of Stevens right in the film, Stevens role in the nation’s struggle over slavery was much greater than most people understand.  In order to properly tell about Stevens’ contribution to American life, Levine gives us a detailed history of how issues of emancipation and racial equality evolved in the decades leading up to the American Civil War and during—and after—the war itself and of Stevens’ central role in shaping our concepts of racial equality that resulted.  It is a remarkable story—one not given much time in our high school history classes—of how American politics and culture dealt with the issues surrounding slavery while fighting what many now see as the Second American Revolution.

Stevens was born in Vermont in 1792 and suffered from a club foot all his life.  His father abandoned the family when Stevens was six, and he grew up in poverty.  However, his mother encouraged him to read and to get a good education.  Thanks to a New England culture that provided access to education for poor students, he was able to attend Dartmouth College and then taught school while he studied for his law degree.  In 1816, he moved to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he established himself as a lawyer.  He was elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 1833, where he advocated for public school system, and served as a delegate to the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention in 1836-37.  After losing re-election, he moved to Lancaster to build his law practice and was elected to the U.S. Congress. Over the next three decades, until his death in 1868, Stevens was an outspoken advocate for full emancipation of slaves and their acceptance as full citizens. 

What is intriguing about Levine’s book is the detail that he provides on how emancipation and related issues gradually developed in the years leading up to the Civil War and during the war itself.  Politicians were so concerned to attract the Confederates back into the Union that they were reluctant to make any demands on the slave-holding states, even to the point of being reluctant to allow escaped slaves to serve in the military.  The result is a fascinating look at this aspect of our history that few of us got in high school or college American history classes.  Given today’s climate, where we again as a nation are struggling to overcome the idea of racial distinctions, it is a powerful bit of historical narrative.

Stevens was in the midst of the debate over these issues and championed freedom throughout his career.  He wrote this epitaph for himself, which was carved into his monument in 1868 at the Shriner-Concord Cemetery, then the only racially integrated cemetery in Lancaster, Pa:

I repose in this quiet and secluded spot not from any natural preference for solitude.  But, finding other cemeteries limited as to race, by charter rules, I have chosen this that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life: EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR.

Thaddeus Stevens is a great read and a great lesson for our times. 

Online Technology and the New Normal for K-12 Education

 

In September 2020, I posted some thoughts about the return to school in the midst of the COVID-19 surge and the idea of a “new normal” stimulated by the pandemic.  I ended with this note:

In short, the new normal will be one marked by continuing change.  The immediate challenge will be to remind ourselves of the foundational principles on which the new normal must be based and to articulate them for this new environment.  As we move through the pandemic, it would be good to keep an eye out for innovations that could—or should—be part of the new normal, whenever that may come.

 

This month, as my son prepares for a new year of teaching high school English next week and his sons get ready to start their years as sixth and eighth graders later this month, the public is focused mostly on the extent to which our schools—both K-12 and higher education—are prepared to require masks for both students and faculty, given the prospect of a new surge in COVID-19 cases due to the Delta variant.  Let’s put that issue aside for a minute and take a look at where we stand with the “new normal” and what might lie ahead for both teachers and students.

 

One sign of movement toward a “new normal” is that some schools will continue to offer virtual as well as in-class instruction, but will fine-tune how they do it.  Last year, my son had to teach both in-class and virtual students at the same time.  It was not an easy task, since his virtual students could see him only if he sat at his desk all the time.  This year, they are taking a new approach.  The school will offer virtual sections as well as classroom sections.  Students can choose which one they want to attend.  Teachers will have only one environment at a time.  This is clearly an improvement for both teachers and students and a good starting place for normalizing virtual instruction as an option in an otherwise face-to-face environment.

 

That said, we can also expect to see more “blended” or “hybrid” teaching and learning environments—courses for which the teacher mixes live classroom sessions with occasional online learning elements. 

 

There is no question that technology will play an important role in defining this new environment.  Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when innovation was stimulated at least in part by the space race and geopolitics—not to mention the explosion of baby boomers into K-12 classrooms—public broadcasting played an important role by providing content for teachers to use in their classrooms.  I worked at WPSU-TV back then, and every weekday, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. during the school year, we broadcast television series chosen by teachers for use in area classrooms across grade levels.  We also produced a number of instructional K-12 television series.  Two of my favorites were Investigative Science in Elementary Education (ISEE), which showed scientific phenomena at work as the basis for classroom investigations and experiments in grades 1-3, and What’s in the News, a weekly news series for middle-schoolers designed to stimulate classroom discussion of civics. 

 

I was delighted earlier this week to learn that Pennsylvania’s public television stations—working together as Pennsylvania PBS, are continuing to refine and expand the use of their broadcast signals to provide expanded video lessons and other resources to schools in the area through data-casting—sending digital content on the stations’ broadcast wavelength.  While datacasting provides access to a large collection of instructional resources, it is limited in that it is a one-way delivery system.  That is a problem in rural areas like Central Pennsylvania, where broadband is often unavailable.  However, the federal government’s new infrastructure plan includes funds to provide broadband nationally—the information revolution’s counterpart to interstate highways—which will allow teachers and students to interact with data and remote students and content experts and complete the instructional cycle.  Other states are also experimenting with datacasting K-12 content to schools and homes, so adding broadband ultimately will create a powerful new instructional resource for all students across the nation.

 

What other innovations might play an important role as the new normal takes shape?  Here are some thoughts based, in part, on the experience of higher education institutions over the past two decades:

 

Open Educational Resources (OERs) For almost two decades, higher education institutions have worked together to create and share online instructional materials that are open and available free of charge for any instructor anywhere to use.  An example is the Community College Consortium for OERs (CCCOER).  Another example is the Pressbooks Directory, which hosts more than 2,000 open access e-books that have been developed by college and university faculty members.  In the new normal, we can expect K-12 schools and teachers to increasingly share locally developed instructional resources through a curated OER platform.  One example is Open-Up Resources, which describes itself as “a 13-state initiative to address quality gaps in the curriculum market.”  I would also expect to see other sharing collaboratives emerge at local, state, and regional levels to give teachers direct ability to share lesson plans, study guides, and other locally developed teaching materials with colleagues within a school district and in other districts that have a shared curriculum.  Public Broadcasting—whether it be within a station’s service area or among stations across service areas statewide, regionally, or nationally—can play an important role in encouraging and supporting access to K-12 OER sharing through datacasting services.

 

Course Sharing As online learning began to mature and be accepted in the higher education community in the 1990s—and as more and more institutions adopted online courses for local/regional use—institutions began to work together to share courses and share students. One example is the Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance (IDEA).  Universities in the Midwest have created online degree programs that integrate courses from several institutions.  Students enroll in a degree program at their local institution, but take online courses from several institutions as part of the curriculum.  Rather than compete, the institutions combine resources to ensure that all students have access to the best possible courses in a discipline.  In the K-12 arena, this kind of sharing might focus on sharing specialized courses, such as STEM courses that prepare graduating high school students to move into technical jobs after graduation.

 

Dual Enrollment High schools may also want to work with local colleges and universities to offer selected online undergraduate courses for dual enrollment, allowing high school students to earn both high school graduation credits and college credits toward an undergraduate certificate or degree.  

 

The Pandemic has been a shock to the system for K-12 education, but one which K-12 teachers have already begun to use to create a new normal for education in the Information Society.  It is a process that will extend well into the decade but that will create an educational environment responsive to the societal and technological changes that are now underway.