A message comes through as the students settle into their lesson on a review day. Curfew has been declared in parts of Colombo. But exams are coming up. The students are to attempt a practice question about unresolved issues left after the post-WWI peace treaties. There is palpable tension in the air that remains beyond the reality of the students, who stay unaware. At least for now they are safe from the chaos.
Outside the window, parents gather in a scramble to pick up their kids. More messages come in that parents are at the gate. A few students are asked to go downstairs. Curfew has now been declared in the Western Province. The “c” word that dominates memories inter-generationally in this country makes another appearance. This time not for a raging pandemic. This time perhaps to avert revolution.
In a few hours the prime minister who managed to avert war crime charges for 13 years riding on a high of racist religious-nationalism will resign. His plan for a final bloodbath remains unfulfilled. Police will watch as paid goons attempt to engineer violence by beating up peaceful protestors. It will be a loud night as fires rage in rainstorms and the desperate who have not spoken get to scream.
But that was still a few hours away. Inside the classroom the students moan they hadn’t studied. They had been camping last weekend so had had no time. They are shushed and told to try. Outside car horns. Inside clock ticks.
No teacher training accounts for what to do when revolution breaks out in the country when you are in the middle of a history lesson. Do I tell them about Bakunin, the great enemy of Marx? In 1873, Bakunin wrote, “there can be no reconciliation between the wild, hungry proletariat, gripped by social-revolutionary passions and striving persistently for the creation of another world based on the principles of human truth, justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity (principles tolerated in respectable society only as the innocuous subject of rhetorical exercises), and the well-fed, educated world of the privileged classes, defending with desperate energy the state, legal, metaphysical, theological, and military and police order as the last stronghold now safeguarding their precious privilege of economic exploitation.” Nearly 150 years ago Bakunin said this would happen. Would that help?
Or do I tell them about Tolstoy? 20 years after Bakunin’s predictive words the great Tolstoy wrote, “Governments and the ruling classes now base themselves neither on justice nor even on a semblance of right, but on an organization so cunningly devised by the help of scientific progress, that men are caught in a circle of violence, from which there is no possibility of escape.” Should the students have discussed if this is what happens when people try to escape? Would that help?
What should a history teacher do when history happens in history class? The general teacher trainings tell us not to react. Not to let it show the uncertainty that grips the mind, heart and soul whatever may come. Yet the face must stay calm. As students packed up after hearing the news, I looked for words of reassurance.
I left them with this thought: you lived through a global pandemic that killed millions and you are now living through political turmoil that will no doubt leave a body count. This will make it into the history books. Remember where you were. Remember what you were thinking. Remember how you were feeling. One year from now when you sit for your exams you will be hardened by life and experienced beyond most kids your age. You will have planned your study habits around power cuts. You will have studied in literal firestorms while interacting with friends and teachers who seemed perpetually masked and whose smiles had become distant memories. You will have learned to read happiness in people’s eyes. You will be strong. This will shape your character. This might make you unbreakable.
Perhaps awareness is all a history teacher can ever teach.