Modern American studies

by Stan Lowe, Chairman (retired), Wyoming Veterans’ Commission
Wednesday, June 6, 2007 1:48 PM MDT

Last week, I once again attended an annual program at Casper’s Roosevelt High School, exceptionally well-presented by sophomores, juniors and one senior taking an 11th grade course called Modern American Studies.

For 12 years, the course’s students have studied several important issues in depth that have profoundly influenced our nation’s history.

Roosevelt’s instructors Susan Griffith (history), Mary Semino (art) and Daney Tanner (English) conduct the studies. They comprise the “MAS/English/Art Block” in that school’s unique block teaching system.

The system focuses students’ attention for whole days on block class subjects, making possible the extraordinary things accomplished in the studies.

Guided by their instructors, the students write the program’s script, memorize it and decide how best to present it. They build props, called installations, to create a visual environment for their orally presented messages.

In past years, program topics included: World War II (a Japanese POW camp and two on the Holocaust); how the Korean and Vietnam wars ended; the Civil Rights movement; wartime letters; music from wars and other historic eras.

This year’s theme was freedom.

My guide was Krystal Crouse. She explained the program theme, overviewed freedom and the struggles for it during the 20th and 21st centuries, and guided me through the installations to each station, where students presented assigned topics.

At the first station, Berlin Wall presenter David Land stated that building the wall completely changed President Harry S. Truman’s optimistic appraisal, “The flags of freedom fly over all Europe,” made earlier when he announced Germany’s surrender.

David concluded his remarks about the miserable life of East Germans living behind the wall by quoting President Ronald Reagan’s famous challenge, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Station 2 depicted the tunnels of Korea and the jungles of Vietnam. The commentator, David Taylor, spoke of our involvement in wars in Korea and Vietnam because of the Truman Doctrine n- initiated by President Truman to stop the spread of communism, which was crushing freedom -n and the United Nations’ Charter.

The underlying message was that nations don’t fight just for their own freedom, but to help others get theirs.

Station 3 was a jail cell, and Jackie Thoma and Samantha Nicholson were the speakers. They told about Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent struggle for India’s freedom from Great Britain, and Nelson Mandela’s fight to abolish apartheid in South Africa.

Similarities of their efforts were noted in Martin Luther King’s leadership during the American Civil Rights movement. The fact that those leaders went to jail demonstrated the sacrifices they willingly made for freedom.

Station 4 featured the satellite countries in East Europe seized by the Soviet Union after World War II, which it dominated until communism finally collapsed there. Katie Fitzgerald talked about the enslaved people of those countries who, for 40 years, lived in oppression. They wanted freedom, but never had a chance to get it.

Finally, Poland’s Lech Walesa led a freedom movement in that country, which made it the first to break away from the communist block.

Station 5 had three shell-like domes representing Iraq’s Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis. The domes signified a shell game. The objective was to find which shell holds the answer to this difficult question: how will those three peoples, with a long history of fighting, eventually work out a way to live together peacefully?

There is no easy solution, but with patience and persistence, the spirit of freedom within the breast of mankind will ultimately triumph as it has before.

Mrs. Griffith afterward explained the objectives of the students’ program: increase people’s awareness that sacrificing to get freedom is not simple; having had freedom all of our lives, we appreciate and understand it, but for those who never enjoyed freedom, understanding it is difficult; and freedom is hard to acquire but easily lost unless citizens earnestly maintain it by exercising their voting and other rights and hold political leaders accountable.

At the end of the students’ program, I was given a star and asked to write on it my favorite freedom and pin it to the wall. I wrote “Freedom from Fear,” one of the precious Four Freedoms we fought for in WWII, now obliterated by radical Muslims.

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