Image by Library of Congress.

“Knowing the before, lets you create a different after.”

— Quintín Lame, Indigenous Colombian revolutionary

“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all,” complained Simon and Garfunkel. Can you? Think, I mean. The songwriters concluded that their “lack of education” hadn’t “hurt [them] none.” Did yours? Did your schooling give you the information and skills to critically contend with current events? Eleventh and twelfth grade social studies teacher and activist, Gianni Notaro, is going to tell you it did not.

Notaro’s complaint is not about what we did learn, but what we didn’t. Because it’s what we didn’t learn that keeps us from making sense of the world we live in. He’s working to rectify that problem. Beginning last summer, and starting again last week, he offers, free of charge, his program, The Peoples’ Classroom, originally at The Other Side of Utica, but spreading now to places like Superofficial in nearby Rome, NY, with possible sessions upcoming in Syracuse.

“A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect” are the words projected on the giant television set on a table in front of the window at The Other Side. It’s a pleasant evening and the door is propped open for people returning to the first session of The Peoples’ Classroom since summer. Notaro stands at the front greeting returnees and newcomers.

Notaro’s partnership with The Other Side began when he was looking for a place to present working peoples’ perspectives about historical events and issues—to adults. The Other Side was looking for a speaker to complement Patrick Fiore’s refugee-inspired art installation, “Hope, Challenge and Beauty. The match seemed perfect. And proved so, with Notaro featured as The Other Side’s Big Conversation speaker, contributing a talk entitled “The Other Side of Ellis Island.”

After some six or seven sessions, weekly, during August, Tuesday become Peoples’ Classroom night, with the audience learning about immigration in the U. S., the history of Palestine, and the modern presidencies. Tonight, though, the topic is “A Working Class Perspective of the American Revolution and the Creation of the U. S. Constitution.”

Most gratifying to Notaro is that people come. “I decided I’d be happy if I got maybe five or six people the first night,” he explains. But people filled the seats in the small, independent arts center. They came ready to listen, to learn, to talk, to change. One came to hear someone present his son’s view of things, though they ran counter to his own. And, they come back.

Notaro begins with a question: “Is our government working?” Audience members talk among themselves before Notaro brings it back to his thesis for the evening—the words projected on the TV, embellish them by saying, “The system is working exactly the way it was designed to work.”

What follows is a compendium of facts and ideas you probably never learned in your high school history lessons. Foremost of which, for tonight’s lecture, is Founding Father, and framer of the U. S. Constitution, James Madison’s belief that “The primary function of government is to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority of the poor.” With the additional revelation that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Madison and Monroe were the Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Musk of their era, all of them millionaires. (Converted to today’s dollars, Washington alone would be worth 594 million.)

Notaro takes his avid listeners through settler colonialism with a breathtaking map showing in fast-action the lands of indigenous Americans that covered the country vanishing, diminished to a few red dots in the west as time passes. One of the darker roots of the American Revolution? The British wanted to limit the colonies’ western border, creating the Proclamation Line of 1783, beyond which, settlements would be prohibited, saving some land for the original inhabitants; the colonists believed in Manifest Destiny—their divine right to possess the land between Atlantic and Pacific. We remember, the audience eagerly proves by shouting them out, the names of Columbus’s ships (the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria—our utterance chant-like) but who can name the original inhabitant of the land (s)he lives on? Here in upstate New York it is the Haudenosaunee. You will likely be more aware of the tribe as named by the settlers, the Iroquois. A name that means, pejoratively, “black snake.”

The audience is taken on, Notaro’s signature catchphrase, “a deeper dive,” into Bacon’s Rebellion, in which white indentured servants and black chattel slaves join together in battle, terrifying their white owners prompting the first codified racial hierarchy in this country. (One tenet of which promised seven to ten years imprisonment and a public whipping to any white woman who bore a black child).

The Stono Rebellion, in which a slave who could read, saw a leaflet from Spanish-held Florida, promising freedom to anyone who could get there. Stono and his compatriots fail. But their mere attempt results in the slave codes that, among other restrictions, prohibited blacks from learning to read and write.

And how it all came to a head when slave James Somerset, taken to non-slaveholding England by his master, uses the opportunity to flee, and when he is recaptured, and his owner wants to sell him to Jamaica, British judge Lord Mansfield declares Somerset a free man. Remember, in addition to being millionaires, Washington owned 123 slaves, Jefferson some 600. You can see their quarters still, on the palatial estates of Mount Vernon and Monticello. It can be argued, and Notaro does, that the American Revolution was fought as much to retain slavery in the colonies as it was to rebel against a tea tax that amounted to three cents on a pound. The working class colonists owned no slaves. Some other cause for revolution needed to be drummed up to rally all to the fight.

There is a short break. Notaro’s wife Caitlyn, an art teacher who designed The Peoples’ Classroom’s logo: a spread banner, chains dangling, from which emerge raised, multi-colored arms holding books titled Education is a Weapon; Solidarity Forever; Study, The Mind is the First Revolution! and The Rich and the Rest of Us, brings animal crackers for the audience to munch.

Class resumes with Shay’s Rebellion, led by a war hero farmer who thought the costs of the war ought not be paid by workers. It took the fledgling government six months to put down the rebellion; the Articles of Confederation having provided for no standing army, the founding fathers and rich merchants were obliged to hire mercenaries to crush it. And to quickly reject the weak Articles, replacing them with the strong Constitution of the United States of America.

The dive goes deeper.

It reveals those details the history books omit. Why the (wealthy) Senate has so much more power than the (ordinary) House of Representatives. Why legislation that seventy per cent of Americans support never gets passed. How almost no other nation in the world, that claims to be a democracy, elects its leader by means of an electoral college, making the popular vote, as recent elections have evidenced, inconsequential. Even tiny insignificant, but memorable details such as the fact that as kids we were all lied to when we were told George Washington’s false teeth were made of wood (never mind the cherry tree story). They were actually constructed from the teeth of slaves, a detail that is disturbing on so many levels.

Class ends.

Notaro’s original contention proved. Is our country’s system broken? No. The country is currently operating exactly the way it was set up to run. It was designed to keep the people away from the government. Public opinion, a Princeton University poll shows has zero-impact on getting legislation passed. Unless…that legislation is favored by the rich. Bear in mind, only one per cent of U. S. citizens are millionaires. But fifty per cent of people in Congress are.

Need the view of one more founding father to further Notaro’s point?

Alexander Hamilton noted, “It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.”

On the founding fathers’ opinions, Notaro rests his case.

Okay. Why, though?

I visit Gianni in his “real” workspace—a typical high school classroom, but with walls emblazoned with thirty-five side-by-side banners proclaiming: “Stay curious; question everything,” “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice in this world then you are a comrade of mine,” “There is enough if we share,” “All labor has dignity,” and “By any means necessary,” to ask him this question. Here is a celebrated teacher—in 2018, Notaro was awarded the Empire State Excellence in Teaching Award, one of the highest honors a teacher can receive in NYS—who shepherds the school’s tenth, eleventh and twelfth grade students through courses in Advanced Placement World History, Advanced Placement United States History and a Film Studies elective, who organizes the school’s Teachers’ Center and orchestrates its professional development programs, who serves as the instructional coach for the building, and who, moreover, has a family, whose seven-year-old son awaits him at the end of this chat. Why do more?

“It’s important,” Notaro tells me. “Nobody knows our history.” Too many of us, he explains, grew up with a milquetoast version of our country’s past. We must know the truth to be better able to act.

How did he, I wonder, learn to take these “deep dives” into truth? Notaro credits his middle school social studies teachers for piquing his interest. He recalls watching, and loving, the movie “The Last of the Mohicans” and recreating Revolutionary War battles in the classroom.

It was in his classes at SUNY Oneonta, where he met professor Dr. Ralph Watkins, a former Black Panther, who introduced him to Malcolm X and alternative ways of looking at history. Malcolm X’s, “It’s so important for you and me to spend time today learning some things about the past so we can better understand the present, analyze it, and then do something about it,” serves as a guiding principal to Notaro’s classes.

It was also at this time he read James W. Loewen’s LIes My Teacher Told Me and learned that his education had ignored or obscured crucial parts of history, encouraging those very first “deeper dives.”

What’s it like to be a high school kid in Notaro’s history class? Consider this simulation on settler colonialism. The class is given a map of the school, told to break into groups, and divide the building into parts for each group to control. They think they are the imperialists. But Notaro has surreptitiously spirited out three class members with excuses that they needed to go to the office, or nurse, or wherever. Instead, he gives them the same map, tells them to divvy up the school among them. Then sends them back into the classroom, where all the others have been working, negotiating, making decisions and coming to logical conclusions, arms them with a Super Soaker Water Gun, and watches while they demand all the larger groups’ “territory” or they will douse them. I’m thinking both the unbeknownst indigenous group and the three usurpers will remember this lesson long after any definition they might have memorized for a test on settler colonialism, will have been forgotten.

Is it different, I ask, teaching kids and teaching adults? “Not that much,” Notaro tells me. And his method of evaluating? “The both ask great questions.” In fact, Notaro’s topics for The Peoples’ Classroom have pretty much come from the NYS Frameworks for high school Regents history classes.

Notaro understands that in the “general tenor inside the country,” his ideas and methods carry a potential risk. He doesn’t care. HIs message is too important. “If you do not grapple with the past, you cannot possibly reconcile with the present,” he believes. Though he is always respectful of students’ differing opinions.

“I certainly believe there is a danger in people knowing the things I am teaching,” Notaro explains. He cites the Powell memo from the Reagan era, when the rich realized they were losing their grip on the country and plotted a coordinated attack to fight the egalitarian reforms that were being instituted. This, he explains, ultimately resulted in history being “sanitized”; our darker history “swept under the rug,” which paved the way for belief in “American exceptionalism.” A Reagan official actually stated that an educated proletariat was a threat to the capitalist class. “This is why I feel my Peoples’ Classroom initiative is so important and something I’m obviously incredibly passionate about.”

Others agree. Notaro has been heartened by the forty or fifty people who regularly attend his classes, and the donations they make to his program and the venue where it is offered. He’s recently been in contact with Brett O’Shea, a podcaster whom Notaro mightily admires. O’Shea was so impressed with Notaro’s program that he interviewed Notaro for two hours on Rev-Left radio show.

Peoples’ Classroom attendees are impressed, as well. “When I first met Gianni, I found him almost unbelievable; to think there is a like-minded radical, actively working in our community’s schools….It seemed too good to be true,” says Sherman Stein. “I…have so much respect for Gianni’s charity in donating his time and energy….I hope that we…later-in-life learners can take what we learn and go forth, better equipped to understand and take on the increasingly hostile…world.”

Kim Domenico, director of The Other Side of Utica explains, “The Peoples’ Classrooms are…history’s truth, that Gianni insists on telling, and because he insists on telling it like it is, he conjures up for me that better world in which all really are one, and injury to one is injury to all. There is no one way to respond to this truth. But it is important to allow oneself to be changed by it.”

One can’t help be changed by it. Because, as a banner in Notaro’s room proclaims, “To tell the truth is revolutionary.”

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