by Chu Chin Kwok

Created on: November 29, 2009

How to teach controversial periods in history with an eye to citizen empowerment rather than victimization and anger?

What are the controversial periods in American and world history? Well, plenty. Chief among them is of course slavery. This precipitated the great American Civil War. Reforms came in the form of Confederation of the States, Civil Rights Movement spearheaded by the likes of Martin Luther King and others. We then have the great expansion or migration westwards and towards other directions that encroached upon native American Indian territories. Massacres of native American Indians by white American military forces occurred in these originally Indian territories: Battle of Wounded Knee, for instance, is just one of the many notoriously cruel and inhuman crusades against the Indians that resulted in the extinction or near-extinction of many Indian tribes.

The Chinese Exclusion Acts, which prohibited further immigration of Chinese into America - when early in the 19th Century Chinese coolies were brought in en masse to help build rail-roads, highways, open up mines etc - were obviously racist in character, bringing about untold miseries to the early Chinese Americans.

In Europe during the World War II, hundreds of thousands of Jews were persecuted, displaced and eventually killed in and outside infamous concentration camps: the Holocaust. Likewise, in many parts of China, the Japanese imperialist forces massacred hundreds of thousands of Chinese and plundered cities, villages etc during the period 1937 - 1945. No doubt the trials at Nuremberg and Nanking did see the war criminals get their just deserts, but to the victims and the immediate families, they are constantly being haunted by memories of the sufferings of their loved ones.

The above are just some of the better-known periods of the recent history of mankind that brought about unimaginable miseries and sufferings to the victims, many of whom did not live to tell their ordeals.

So, how do we bring about citizen empowerment instead of wailing in the past, however tragic and strong our sense of victimization and anger?

I would suggest the following steps to be taken by our educators when teaching the controversial periods of human history so as to help turn the sense and feeling of victimization and anger into something positive and empowering:-

- Students must be taught to recognize that what had happened was wrong, cruel, morally and legally impeachable;

- Our school-going children, on whose

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