90% OF THE UNIVERSE IS STILL MISSING

If 90% of our universe is still missing from our telescopes, imagine how much is still missing from what we call our history. The best way to realize this is to spend time with someone 30 or 40 years younger than you...!

Three instructive incidents come disagreeably to mind. My days teaching US History...the day I took my daughter to see Casablanca....and the day my grandson told me about the Bible. With each generational encounter, I was reminded there is a solemn distinction between teaching and learning. You see, some things can't be taught, they must be remembered.

In an American History classroom you try to use the usual suspects -- facts, dates, maps -- but only for what they actually are. Props on a human stage crowded with the most amazing heroes and villains Hollywood ever imagined. Unlike disciplines such as math or chemistry, history is a flesh-and-blood drama which changes each time you take a different seat in the audience. One strategy was to invite the students to check the obits for people who had lived during some of the periods we were studying.

Sometimes this succeeded, sometime it flopped. But at minimum the students could catch a sense that the 1929 Crash, the WPA, and the GIs at Normandy were once far more than data and dates on a page. When you're teaching the young and the restless, you take your successes wherever you can find them.

There was much less success with my Casablanca caper. To those from my generation, the film has it all. Personal conflict played out against an epic historical clash, including love and loss, courage and failure. But while my daughter seemed to enjoy Bogey and the bad guys, the layers of historical nuance were lost. And how could I have expected otherwise?

The rape of Europe by Hitler, the passion and purpose of the Resistance, and Bogey's inner struggle over discovering a great cause at the expense of a great love -- this is the stuff that dreams are made of. But to invoke the classic cliche, you really had to be there.

And then there's my college-agnostic grandson who one day reminded me that before there was Christianity, there were many christianites. He had learned that during the first 300 years after the Cross there were competing Gospels like the Gnostic, the Coptic, and those of Peter and Barnabas. When Dan Brown gave the world The DaVinci Code he helped reinforce the doubts of the young.

To counter these doubts with debate is hardly the way to help the young soften their indulgent doubts about the old. And so you suck it in, and wait for a day when what you'd like to teach them they will learn for themselves. But then you remember -- as all these reflections --you're not likely to be here when they do!