Dr. Grauer's Column - Are Teachers Our Heroes?

Are Teachers Our Heroes?
By Stuart Grauer

In January 2021, near the end of his first-term presidency, Donald J. Trump announced the creation of the National Garden of American Heroes—a monumental outdoor park intended to honor 250 figures “who have contributed to America’s history, culture, and ideals.” The proposed site, according to the executive order, would be built on federal land near Washington, D.C., though a specific location was never finalized.

The list of honorees and the garden’s vision were outlined in Executive Order 13978, signed on January 18, 2021, and later published by the National Archives. The plan received wide coverage in major news outlets, including The Washington Post (“Trump names 244 people to his proposed National Garden of American Heroes,” Jan. 19, 2021) and The New York Times (“Trump’s ‘Garden of Heroes’: From Davy Crockett to Whitney Houston,” Jan. 19, 2021).

The project envisioned a grand landscape of statues representing a broad cross-section of American life—artists, scientists, soldiers, athletes, and educators—“to reflect the awesome splendor of our country’s timeless exceptionalism.” “Best-of” lists are so popular that they tend to be treated as fact, when they rarely are.

All the same, when I saw the list of honorees, and imagined the high profile they would be given nationally, my eyes immediately darted around to see if there were any teachers included. I know you’d probably read every name on the list if I covered just the athletes or performing artists!  But, in my reading of history, and no disrespect to athletes and artists, many of whom I also revere, that entertainment focus is an indicator of declining culture. What about a civilization that reveres its teachers? So I made up a sub-list of just the teachers on the Heroes list. And now, are you drawn to study my sub-list knowing it includes only teachers?...

So, I sorted the whole list, my way. And now: Here is a list of eleven elementary and secondary teachers from the National Garden of American Heroes, each with a concise note on what made them great, focusing on their enduring educational legacy, moral courage, and pedagogical influence. There are actually fourteen more educators, such as Albert Einstein, who made the list for their collegiate teaching, but I stuck to elementary and secondary school—our childhood teachers. I am happy to report that the nation seems to be including teachers among its heroes.

As noted above, I have tended to agree with the notion that a declining civilization is notable for primarily revering its athletes and entertainers. Further analysis of the Garden’s honorees reveals the following:

• Athletes: 21
• Performers / Entertainers: 39
• Educators: 25

That’s 60 individuals—nearly a quarter of all honorees—recognized for sports and entertainment, compared to 25 for teaching at any level. Even so, it’s heartening that educators are represented at all, given how often they’ve been left out of national monuments and halls of fame. Here is the list of educators:

Elementary & Secondary Teachers Honored in the National Garden of American Heroes

Christa McAuliffe (1948–1986) – High school social studies teacher, Concord, NH. Embodied the nobility of teaching by bringing education into space; her courage made every teacher a symbol of exploration and curiosity.

Dorothy Vaughan (1910–2008) – High school math teacher, Farmville, VA; later NASA mathematician. Broke racial barriers in education and science; championed learning as a path to equality and trained a generation of Black women mathematicians.

Mary Jackson (1921–2005) – Junior high math teacher, Hampton, VA; later NASA engineer. Taught and mentored youth in segregated schools, proving that excellence in education and engineering could defy the limits of race and gender.

Katherine Johnson (1918–2020) – Teacher before becoming a NASA mathematician. Her mathematical brilliance, rooted in classroom teaching, helped launch the U.S. into space; her story redefined what a woman teacher could aspire to.

Annie Sullivan (1866–1936) – Private teacher and lifelong instructor to Helen Keller. Transformed one student’s isolation into communication; her devotion made teaching synonymous with human connection and possibility.

Lucretia Mott (1793–1880) – Quaker teacher, Nine Partners School, NY.  United education with moral leadership; taught equality in an era that denied it, planting the seeds of abolition and women’s rights.

Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774–1821) – Catholic school founder and teacher, Emmitsburg, MD. Created the first free Catholic elementary school; her model of faith-based, inclusive education became the foundation of the U.S. parochial system.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) – Teacher, Hartford Female Seminary, CT.  Educated young women to think critically and act morally; later used her pen to teach a nation about slavery’s cruelty through Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) – Secondary teacher, Johnstown Academy, NY. Taught before becoming the nation’s leading suffragist; carried a teacher’s conviction into the classroom of our whole democratic society.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) – Teacher in Long Island schools, NY.  His teaching years shaped his vision of common humanity; his poetry became an education in freedom, compassion, and selfhood.  (Whitman first taught school in Oyster Bay, where I first taught.)

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) – Teacher and co-founder of Concord Academy, MA. Reimagined teaching as an act of conscience and inquiry; modeled experiential education long before it had a name.

In Sum

The Garden was conceived at a moment when the nation was deeply divided over the meaning of monuments—especially those tied to colonialism, racism, and the Confederacy. While the motivation was political—as monuments almost always are—the content of the list is surprisingly broad and, in some ways, inclusive. Including a wide range of figures—Martin Luther King Jr. and Antonin Scalia, Harriet Tubman and Robert Gould Shaw—may have been strategic. And there are 7 Native Americans on the list. The goal could have been to overwhelm criticism by breadth, to create a kind of patriotic collage so inclusive that questioning it (which I am doing now, and which is the basic role of any scholar) feels unpatriotic.

Who we choose to honor—and who we forget—tells a story about the America we hope to see reflected back at us. Unlike other national memorials (e.g., the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial or the National Women’s History Museum), no nonpartisan commission or vetting process existed for this project. The National Endowment for the Humanities, National Park Service, and Smithsonian were not consulted. So, in effect, the list represents the personal and political choices of the administration, reflecting a blend of historical, cultural, and symbolic figures that aligned with the White House’s narrative.

And yet, it looks like we’ll start this garden: perhaps in a coming generation, the list itself could evolve and/or reveal evolving truth about what we value as a nation. In that sense, it is ecumenical, at least in whom it names—more “big-tent” Americana than partisan. It’s heartening to think that roughly ten percent of our national heroes could be teachers, especially at a time when our profession is facing such profound challenges. The eleven, above, fairly exemplify the teacher as explorer, liberator, moral compass, and artist. They taught in classrooms—but their influence expanded far beyond them, redefining what “school” and “teacher” could mean in America.

Teaching tends to be a quiet kind of heroism. We don’t build monuments to classrooms, though they shape more of our future than the battlefield or stadium. Gardens of heroes are growing in our schools every day, always worthy of our recognition. If this list, and my sub-list, can do just one thing, I hope it will be to make us actively curious about great teachers, whoever they are, and the greatness of the field we are in.

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