The Truth We Teach Is the Democracy We Get
There’s a saying about planting trees whose shade you will not sit under. If you’ve worked with young people who go on to do great things, you know this proverb to be profoundly true. We also know that the big lessons don’t always come from the classroom. They can come from the stories we tell, the silences we keep, the values we model, our public spaces and how we remember the past.
That’s why the unveiling of the “Unbound” monument outside of King’s Chapel, one of Boston’s oldest churches, is more than a work of art.
In his essay “The Purpose of Education,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Education without morals is like a ship without a compass, merely wandering nowhere.” “Unbound” offers no easy comfort. She offers truth and the first steps toward reconciliation. As our history and Constitutional rights are under siege, the journey of King’s Chapel to bring us this monument of justice and reconciliation comes at the right time.
As educators, we are entrusted with the responsibility of preparing young people to live fully into their potential. Defined not by a zero-sum game, but a world where we are more than the sum of our parts. An abundance of ideas. More prosperity for more people. We don’t need to raise another generation of isolated individuals taught to fend only for themselves. We need young people who believe they have agency over their lives. That they can play a meaningful, even heroic, role in shaping their communities, their country, and the world.
A few weeks ago, I stood at the 9/11 Memorial in New York City. The Survivor Tree. The Memorial Glade. Two vast pools that sit in the footprints of the fallen towers. Eight acres of quiet reflection tucked into the bustle of lower Manhattan. Where memory becomes landscape. It brought to mind other sites of public reckoning: the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., the more than 300 Holocaust memorials in Germany. Each of them asks something of us. Not just to remember, but to learn. To grow. To act.
Germany’s Holocaust reparations program, still active today, has distributed billions in compensation. But one of the most powerful Holocaust memorial practices may be how remembrance has been embedded into everyday life. Artist Gunter Demnig initiated a practice in cities across the country of placing small brass plaques known as Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, in the sidewalks outside former homes of individuals who were persecuted by the Nazi regime. Each plaque bears a name, a date, a fate. These stones do what the best curricula and monuments should do: they bring memory into the flow of daily life. They remind us that repair is not a moment. It's a commitment. They whisper to the next passerby: This happened here. And it matters still. Lest we repeat it.
Imagine if our students learned from these kinds of stories, not only what happened, but how people responded to change, to crisis, to injustice. What choices were made? What courage was summoned? What was buried, and who fought to bring it to light? If we taught them these stories, the ones that are often left out or deliberately erased, we wouldn’t just be preparing them to pass a class. We’d be preparing them to carry this country forward. As a nation, we are long overdue for choosing “clean pain,” as described by Resmaa Menakem in My Grandmother’s Hands. To confront our legacy of slavery, genocide, labor exploitation, and exclusion publicly. In stone, in bronze, in ritual, in curriculum, in community. Because that’s where healing begins and trust is built. Because democracy begins with belonging. Just as our Constitution begins with “We the People.”
Roeshana Moore-Evans, founder and principal strategist of Equity Empowerment Consulting and former executive director of Harvard's Legacy of Slavery initiative, contributed to this article.
