Audrey Mantey
When The Gates were installed in Central Park, one of the common complaints was that people didn’t like the orange color that was used. The artists insisted it was saffron. Reviewers obligingly wrote that it was saffron; readers nodded, and continued to call it orange. The public didn’t need anyone telling them what color it was. It was the color of traffic cones and highway barrels. In the minds of some, Christo and Jeanne-Claude had turned Central Park into a construction zone.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude have some historical facts about Central Park on their website. When the park was first built, the original intent was to have steel gates at each of its entrances. The city commissioned a design for the gates, but it was ultimately rejected. Since the creation of the park, the walls surrounding it have had open gaps to enter through, which people still refer to as gates, as if the abandoned plans exist as tangible objects that can be opened and closed. The artists’ website also lists some facts about the artwork itself. It consisted of 7,503 gates, made of 60 linear miles of nylon tube, and 116,389 miles of nylon thread, all in that saffron color (or orange, depending on one’s point of view).
The details of how much nylon went into The Gates are nice to know if you like trivia. But that’s not the heart and soul of what the project was about. It’s both experiencing The Gates in their environment, and the meaning which we add to the project - the constructed meaning - that gives it significance. For 16 days, a space that was once designed to be enclosed and surrounded by lockable gates to keep people out was instead filled on the inside with thousands of gates that couldn’t be closed. Anyone could freely walk through gate after gate, without restrictions. Such was the brainchild of two immigrant artists, who lived in New York as illegal aliens for the first three years after their arrival.
In Florida this last summer, Jeb Bush signed new legislation affecting how history can be taught in public schools. The new law says that “American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable, and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”
Knowable, teachable, testable - and above all else, factual. That there were 7,503 gates in Central Park for 16 days in 2005 is factual. That the Declaration of Independence was written and signed by 56 men is factual. These facts are easy to teach and even easier to test. But not all facts are black and white - some are orange and saffron. The public looks at an event one way, and our elected officials typically use the means at their disposal to manage our perceptions so that they coincide with the official government story. Normally this is done through press conferences and manipulating the media, withholding key information that conflicts with their storyline, and generally by “catapulting the propaganda.”
This recent legislation, however, is alarming in that it propels teachers into the role of government spokespeople by outlawing constructivist methods to teach history. Teachers are no longer allowed to facilitate student inquiry into the motives behind our government’s past actions. Teachers aren’t supposed to encourage public school students to look for connections between different events in our history, and reflect on those patterns to construct their own meaning or form their own opinions.
The Florida legislature has constructed American history’s meaning for us, and we are to teach that meaning as fact. “The history and content of the Declaration of Independence, including national sovereignty, natural law, self-evident truth, equality of all persons, limited government, popular sovereignty, and inalienable rights of life, liberty, and property, and how they form it forms the philosophical foundation of our government.”
“Equality of all persons” wasn’t the phrasing used in the version of the Declaration of Independence that I read in school. It’s a curious bit of verbiage coming from one of 15 states which has refused to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. ERA resolutions were introduced in the 2005 Florida legislature session, but were not released in committee.
The text of that amendment reads: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” The philosophical foundation of equality of all persons must also have been overlooked by Florida when it was passing its 19 Jim Crow laws, including the 1967 city ordnance in Sarasota, which directed police to clear public beaches of “all members of all races present” if two or more races were found together on the beach.
I don’t think I’m supposed to question that, though, or form my own opinion about it.
Nor am I supposed to question why the holocaust is to be taught in a way that “leads to . an investigation of human behavior, an understanding of the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping,” but there is no mention of any of that, including racism, in the section of the bill that discusses “the political conflicts that led to the development of slavery.” And I won’t question why “an investigation into human behavior” isn’t necessary when we teach the “period of discovery” or the “expansion of the United States to its present boundaries.”
To do so would be to risk constructing meaning where none exists.
This year in school I am teaching my students that The Gates were 1,067,330 square feet of recyclable, rip-stop nylon fabric, suspended from 5 inch square recyclable extruded vinyl tubing at a height of 16 feet. They are saffron, not orange, because the people who financed them have made that decision. I won’t be asking my students why the artists chose to recycle the materials used in the structures, or why they gave away a million free samples of the material but refuse to sell any part of their project for a profit or accept any grants. I won’t be asking anyone to think about enclosures or immigration. In solidarity with the teachers in Florida, I am instituting a Zero Tolerance policy toward critical thought in my classroom.