YOU ARE NEVER TOO OLD TO RELEARN EVERYTHING YOU HAVE LEARNED ABOUT THE PAST
Why Change Team Lead Fernande Raine is calling on historians to be both ruthless truth-seekers and weavers of community.
Our Change Team Leads share their passion for learning and wellbeing through the creation of MasterClasses — rich learning journeys that seek to inspire, support exploration and create change. We spoke with the CTL of History for Wellbeing, Fernande Raine, to explore her background, her passion for history, and how a career conflict led her to fully explore the tension between historical truth and historical storytelling.
How did your upbringing shape who you are today?
I am profoundly shaped by my family’s commitment to serving and celebrating humanity. My parents were both scientists who devoted their life to research, and I remember the first logo I ever registered was that of my father’s employer, which said: Pro Bono Humani Generis (for the wellbeing of the Human Species). So, I grew up in an environment in which the only acceptable way to spend one’s life was by dedicating yourself to making the world a better place.
The question was not whether you would work hard to do your best, or whether you would find a job of service, it was merely which job—as an educator, researcher, artist or musician.
We moved to Germany when I was in Middle School, and I am deeply shaped by being both German and American, and by my love of music, nature, learning and humanity. But I am also shaped by the fierce impatience I developed with my family’s ability to be complacent and content with the status quo, as I rejected their rather intellectual and academic approach to social justice.
Analyzing, reading and writing is not enough: it is our obligation to act, to invent and to mobilize systems for change.
What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned about history?
That you are never too old to relearn everything you have learned about the past.
During my extensive studies in history and despite my passion for social justice, I managed to completely miss the complexity of the history of race in America until just a few years ago.
A bizarre conflict during a conference revealed to me that there is so much I do not know, and I set off on a path of learning and discovery of aspects of US history that had completely eluded me. I realized in that journey just how skewed and flawed the narratives are that we teach young people in school, and how much teaching and re-teaching we need to do to complete the last mile of democracy.
I realized that there is a core tension in the field of history in that every historian is part truth seeker and part romantic. We are curious to learn something new about humanity and dive into the documents of the past looking for untold stories. But we are also storytellers, who want to serve humanity with our stories and help people feel connected to someone or something.
This tension causes trouble, because the most enticing romantic narrative is that of a national community, making us prone to spinning threads of nostalgia and patriotic pride to define our “tribe”. That narrative, however, can be exclusive and can cause us to ignore the kinds of stories and truths that interfere with the warm fuzzy feeling we want to get upon seeing a flag or hearing an anthem.
Historians have to face that tension and live up to their responsibility towards humanity as a whole. They have an important role to play in setting an example by being both ruthless truth-seekers and weavers of community, fueled by a deep love for humanity as a whole.
What’ has been your career “high” to date? What are you most proud of?
I don’t really think of my life as having career highs—every step is a journey of discovery and learning. I am very lucky to be someone who is not afraid of failure, and who will take risks and attack bold projects, causing me to look at some of my biggest failures as my biggest highs because it was then that I learned how not to get things done.
But when I look at the work I've done with Ashoka and the blooming field of social entrepreneurship in Germany and France, and know that these programs would not be there in that form had I not launched them 15 years ago, that's incredibly exciting to me.
I am most proud of my ability to find amazing people wherever I go because it is in those connections that we can create real and lasting social change.
What do you hope to do next?
I will spend the rest of my life working to change how we teach history so that we can advance the wellbeing of humanity as individuals, as society and as a global community in harmony with the planet.
My goal is to ensure that history becomes a subject that teaches belonging, connection, agency and community—not a subject that bores kids and makes them feel disempowered.
To do this, we must get rid of textbooks and make history the study of humanity, enabling kids to be curious, to discover their own power, to understand their identity and other cultures and stories, to develop their voices, connect with other human beings and to realize how much potential we have to create harmony and opportunity for people to thrive if only we try.
I hope to achieve this by changing the field in three ways:
By reframing the subject through the lens of wellbeing, and helping educators and parents to see what that means.
Secondly, by weaving collaborative ecosystems of history providers in regions, because this kind of new storytelling and human inspiration has to come from museums, libraries and parks as well as from teachers in schools.
Finally, by changing the field of assessment in schools. If we only measure “hard skills” and ignore whether or not we are helping our young people thrive as citizens of the world, we will never achieve a shift in the education system.
We must orient our entire education system towards supporting young people in their growth in terms of civic wellbeing—this, too is a collaborative effort.
I hope that 20 years from now every young person is able to graduate from school feeling empowered as a citizen, seen as a human being, connected to their global community through an understanding of how we got here, and ready to address the challenges we face and will face in the future with creativity and love.
Source: collective.round.glass/learn/fernande-raine