Essay Questions

Published in 1991, how did “The History Teacher” become especially relevant in the post-Trump political climate of America.

Having jettisoned such traditional ideological concerns as family values, fresh wars in foreign policies, economic austerity and democracy over the course of the Trump Presidency, the conservative agenda responded to his 2020 election loss by becoming obsessed with what they termed “cancel culture.” Ironically enough—but strangely lacking a paradoxical dimension—the titular character of this poem personifies the conservative agenda even as he at the very same time is model proponent in favor of cancel culture. Over the course of this very short poem, the history teacher effectively cancels the truth about the Ice Age, the Spanish Inquisition, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the Boer War.

What point is being made by the teacher’s students leaving his classroom and becoming playground bullies?

This is, of course, the central question of the poem and the answer relates to the main theme. Consider: the teacher is “protecting the innocence” of his students by not revealing the ugly truths of humanity. In his fairy tale world, people aren’t capable of creating bombs which kill hundreds of thousands in the blink of an eye, nor do they torture those who disagree with your religion, especially if your religion denies that the world has been around for more than 6,000 years. The inherent—unspoken—theory is that one doesn’t learn these things, one won’t the kind of people who actually do those things. The lesson is obvious: people are by nature pretty bad, even kids, and they don’t need to learn history to learn how to be a bully.

What is the ultimate irony of the title of this poem?

“The History Teacher” is an example of a poem that is constructed primarily of the literary technique of irony. Irony positively oozes from almost every line. One might argue that the greatest irony of the story is that despite protecting his students from the depths of human depravity by whitewashing history, they become bullies nevertheless. And that might well the height of the poems exploration of irony. But it all begins with that title and ends with the clueless oblivion of the teacher to what his charges are doing once they are discharged. The history teacher places great faith in the power of learning his subject to control human psychology, but ironically the history teacher himself has utterly failed to learn any lesson from the subject he teaches.