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Just to the left of the American flag hanging in teacher Michael Stagnaro's Los Banos High School classroom is a banner displaying these words from John Adams -- "Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people."
Stagnaro, who also is an Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran, hopes he is providing his students with some of that knowledge. “Very rarely is learning just listening to a teacher,” said the 32-year-old world history instructor. “The students, they have to be the ones to keep the conversation going.”
But even getting that conversation started when it comes to conflicts in the Middle East and South Asia can be a challenging task for today’s teachers. Just as it was after America’s last controversial war, the decade it spent in Vietnam. If George Santayana is right — that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it — then teaching about war becomes a vital part of any curriculum.
The late congressman, professor and author Walter Capps knew this. Three years after the fall of Saigon, he began his famous and long-running class at UC Santa Barbara, “Religion and the Impact of Vietnam,” which routinely drew 900 students and was featured three times on “60 Minutes.” Capps believed that “politics is born in conversation,” and he enlisted a vast array of soldiers, scholars, refugees and others to speak in his classroom. “We are strongest as a people when we are directed by that which unites us,” he wrote, “rather than giving into the fears, suspicions, innuendos and paranoias that divide.”
For today’s students, it seems that in most classrooms, conversation about the war is off limits. With little direction from their superiors or the broader education community, many instructors find it easier to breeze over the subject or not address it at all.
Not Stagnaro. On Thursday, during a lesson on World War I refugees, the teacher passed out a news article on the estimated 1,600 Iraqi refugees who are returning home on a daily basis. Stagnaro read the article aloud to his class, asking them to imagine “the size of this school returning to Iraq today.” What do you think they have to come back to, he asked his class of 30 sophomores.
“Homes,” one student yelled out. “If they’re there,” Stagnaro quietly replied.
“Work,” another kid ventured. “If they can find it,” their teacher answered. “Remember that war is never pretty. War is ugly. It is unfriendly. It takes no sides and the innocent suffer.”
Stagnaro has seen that side of war firsthand. After growing up in the Bay Area, attending Bethany University in Santa Cruz and earning a master’s degree in 2002 from Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey, Stagnaro joined the Army Reserves. In October 2005, Stagnaro was deployed to Kuwait, where he served as a base camp and battalion chaplain for a year. His experience has made Stagnaro approach all of his subject matter differently from many world history teachers. “I have the students look at the human cost,” he said, offering this example: “True, there were 40,000 that died in this battle, but just think about that. That’s 40,000 sons, maybe 40,000 fathers, a whole generation from one town.”
This kind of information is harder for some of Stagnaro’s students to swallow. Eight of his 30 fourth- period world history students said they have family members stationed in the Middle East. One of them was sophomore Alyssa Aguilar, whose soldier cousin is serving in Iraq. She said his involvement makes the war very real to her. “It hits over here too,” she said. “It sucks, but they’re fighting so we don’t have to suffer.” Maci Freeman, also a Los Banos sophomore, said a close family friend is also stationed in Iraq. Before Stagnaro’s class, she admitted that “I kind of had an idea (about what was going on in the Middle East), but I didn’t know as much as I know now.”
