“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” the Spanish and American philosopher George Santyana told us.

Events this year in Maine and Florida may ensure that young people coming up will repeat the past rather than learn from it. The good and the bad of it.

The University of Maine Farmington last spring stepped away from its role as the public liberal arts college of Maine when it axed the departments of religion/philosophy, world languages and women’s/gender studies, sacking five tenured professors. The UMaine System office called it “retrenchment,” which means it didn’t fire anyone, it just eliminated jobs.

It also sacked one professor each from the departments of geography, psychology and history. Nine others retired rather than risk the sack.

Not to be outdone by a small state college in the frozen North, Florida’s legislature — which functions more every day as the presidential campaign committee of Gov. Ron DeSantis — passed legislation that has thrown the teaching of history into disarray.

While the liberal arts as a whole took the hit at UMF, the decline in teaching history bothers me most. To my mind, history is at the core of the liberal arts. Firing a teacher can mean, say, 90 students a year (at 15 per class, six classes taught a year) don’t learn part of how we got here.

Winston Churchill said, “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.” Those 90 UMF students are missing a look back that is deeper than their smartphone screens. And thus a platform for what they should do in the future.

Andrew Ujifusa, assistant editor of Education Week, sums it up best: “We study and share history in part to give us the foundation for action.”

Way too much history already isn’t being taught. I’ve taken any number of history courses, though I majored in political science, yet just this week, I heard on the radio about white riots and raids on Black neighborhoods just after World War I. I had known about white mobs destroying the Black section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, but I hadn’t known about riots in East St. Louis, Illinois (130 miles from where I grew up); Chicago; Washington; or Elaine, Arkansas, all of which happened in 1919, as resentful whites attacked Blacks newly empowered by their success in the armed forces and by the growing Black economy.

Or that President Woodrow Wilson, a vehement racist and misogynist, ignored the whites rioting and murdering Blacks. One of Wilson’s accomplices was young J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the General Intelligence Division of the Justice Department and carried out the Palmer Raids, in which large numbers of Italians and Jews were arrested for being, well, Italians and Jews.

My late wife was required in history class to memorize the names of all 77 Oklahoma counties, but I never in 52 years heard her mention the Tulsa race riot, when rampaging whites destroyed the “Black Wall Street” and murdered scores if not hundreds of Blacks.

She had even lived in Tulsa. If she was taught about the Tulsa riot, she wasn’t taught well enough that it stuck.

The radio presenter said, in essence, that America was as divided in 1919 as it is now.

The antidote? Ujifusa again: “When the nation feels … divided in an unprecedented way, studying history serves as a guide. A nation that can … place the turbulent present in historical context is better empowered to grasp the present and decide on the best course of action ahead.”

The situation in Florida may be, as usual, even more dire. Teachers there report being afraid even to teach facts.

Here’s why. Florida’s “Individual Freedom” Act says teachers cannot teach anything that makes a pupil feel that “he or she must feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress for actions in which he or she played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.”

Sometimes referred to as the “Stop WOKE Act,” the new restrictions will lead to watering-down of discussions about the history of the United States, including on matters of race, teachers have said. Hundreds of Florida teachers have resigned, saying they are being intimidated.

Another new law requires schools to post a list of every book used in teaching or available in libraries, and it lets parents challenge the books. If you recall your parent-teacher conferences, you’ll remember the classroom usually had its own small library, often paid for. Teachers have begun closing those classroom libraries lest someone object to, say, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” or “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

And even before posting the list, classroom books have to be approved by a “media specialist.” Jeremy Baldwin, a teacher at Booker High School in Sarasota, said, “Our classroom libraries are off the table, they’re gone, because we have to have a media specialist — who (is) not even employed in Sarasota — look at each and vet all of our materials and there’s no one there to do it. So, the books are basically all banned.”

Yes, that’s Florida. And we’re not Florida. Yeah, I heard you say that, “Thank God.”

With any kind of luck, we can yet again make a prophet of Winston Churchill, who said of us, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing. After they’ve tried everything else.”

Bob Neal sometimes wonders how many of the insurrectionists would have stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, if they had known a bit more about our history. Or a lot more. Neal can be reached at bobneal@myfairpoint.net.

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