Reflections on Youth Resistance with David Schaafsma

Today Ethical ELA welcomes guest blogger, David Schaafsma of the University of Illinois at Chicago. In the spirit of youth resistance, please consider supporting “Teens Teaching Teachers,” a student-led session at NCTE in Baltimore, by donating to their fund and sharing this link:
https://www.gofundme.com/manage/ncte2019

Seeing a Middle School Production of Antigone in Munich: The Sophie Scholl Story and Reflecting on How to Foster Youth Resistance in Meaningful Ways

David Schaafsma, University of Illinois at Chicago

“I am not afraid of the danger. If it means death, it will not be the worst of deaths–death without honor”–Antigone

Antigone: We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us.
Ismene: Who said that?
Antigone: Hegel.
Ismene: Sounds more like Beckett.
Antigone: He was paraphrasing Hegel–The chorus in Anne Carson’s translation of Sophocles’ Antigone, to make the point that many writers and thinkers across time were and still are paraphrasing Sophocles.

I just saw a middle school production of a play I hadn’t known, Antigone in Munich: The Sophie Scholl Story, by Claudia Haas, about a high school girl, Sophie, who follows her college philosophy student brother Hans in getting involved in a German student resistance organization, The White Rose Society, that courageously opposed Hitler. My daughter was in the crew for the production (stage left props), as I once was (stage manager) for a production of Antigone when I was in college decades ago. Like Antigone, Sophie was a teenager who defended her brother honorably, following in his non-violent activist footsteps, doing the right thing in the face of a patriarchal authority who, like King Lear, raged with demands of loyalty.

“All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride”–Antigone

I thought the play was ambitious for a middle school, as it circled back from Nazi resistance to Sophocles’ play about the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta who insisted on defying King Creon’s order to bury her brother Polynices. Creon’s law forbidding the public mourning and burial of a member of one’s own family, a law punishable by death, is inhuman, immoral. I have taught Antigone before; this time I listened to a translation of the original play, read some of Anne Carson’s adaptation of it, and of course saw (and read) Claudia Haas’ play.

Philosophy professor Kurt Huber, who guided The White Rose Society, was executed for resistance to the Nazi state: 

“And thou shalt act as if
On thee and on thy deed
Depended the fate of all Germany,
And thou alone must answer for it.”

The Nazi regime also executed Huber’s student Hans and his sister Sophie Scholl on February 22, 1943. 

My teaching of writing class this semester read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and one small group project focused on student resistance to tyranny. My daughter and I went to the public library and got out various books about The White Rose Society and Sophie, and we are reading together Kip Wilson’s verse novel, White Rose.

I admired my daughter’s drama department’s ambition to stoke student activism through the production. The student body of my daughter’s school had staged a walkout this year protesting political inaction on school shootings. They made signs, wrote and signed petitions, and some of them were interviewed by the media. When I was in high school we shut down the school on a couple occasions, insisting that the curriculum reflect growing concerns with the Vietnam War, racism, the environment. We made signs, we wrote pamphlets, we created sit-down strikes, and we got some concessions and curricular changes.

I lived to tell my tale, but four students were killed for protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State during my time in school:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRE9v…

Here’s some recent Chicago student climate change protesters:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/c…

“Do not fear for me. Make straight your own path to destiny”―Antigone

David Schaafsma is a Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he directs the Program in English Education. He teaches courses in English teaching methods, graphic novels and young adult literature. He’s the author of five books, and is a former editor of the journal English Education. He’s published numerous articles on community-based literacy, but also increasingly increasingly writes fiction and poetry. He’s the father of five children, and has five siblings living in three states. He lives in Oak Park just outside Chicago.