Abstract
This chapter expands the theme of hidden histories: the ways that unacknowledged losses and deep rents in the social fabric can haunt children. Calling on my history of AIDS activism beginning in the early 1980s, and on life in a range of classrooms, I describe the opportunities for learning that we miss when as adults we mistakenly believe that we can hide tough social realities from the young and how social amnesia impedes social change. A final story from my own classroom of novice teachers about the challenge of giving up the linear perspective on human development allows me to argue that the prospect of the new can prompt anxiety and excitement, discomfort and pleasure.
Exactly because the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged; to be transcended it must first be remembered.
(Jacoby 1975 , p. 5)
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Silin, J.G. (2018). If Memory Serves: How and Why I Remember the Difficult Times with Children. In: Early Childhood, Aging, and the Life Cycle. Critical Cultural Studies of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71628-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71628-2_6
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