Recently, I was lucky enough to talk to one of the truly transformational educators of the previous generation. They’re getting older and starting to have some real health challenges, and they are someone who deserves all the flowers and thank yous for creating schools that changed the parameters of what many people – students, parents, educators, policy makers – thought school could be. But I also am aware that many young educators wouldn’t know their name. More importantly, they probably don’t know what they’ve done.

I worry that we are a profoundly ahistorical profession.

I worry about that because it makes us deeply susceptible to every fad that comes along, it also makes us far too quick to fall in love with ideas we think are new, and it creates the conditions by which we can think that we are the first or the only generation of educators to face down challenging times in our schools.

For the last hundred and fifty years, American educators have been involved in one of the most ambitious projects any government has ever undertaken. We have tried to educate every young person in America. The project has been flawed, it has been imbued with every original sin of this nation from racism to sexism to elitism and more. And yet, it may also be the most ambitious government program the country has ever attempted. And throughout that time, brilliant men and women have worked tirelessly to make the lives of our country’s children better. And throughout that time, educators have written down the best of their ideas so that we could learn from them.

But how many educators today know their names, let alone the ideas they gave us?

I have said to anyone who will listen that there are almost no original ideas powering SLA. Everything we do has its roots in the educators who came before us, either it is the idea of inquiry-driven learning, project-based learning or creating cultures of care using systems like Advisory. All of these ideas were “creatively borrowed” from schools and educators who came before and blazed a trail for us. Perhaps the mashup of all of the different ideas and the new technologies we leverage created something new at SLA, but I also know that when educators like Deborah Meier have come through our school, they recognized our school as part of the long tradition of progressive education in this country. And that matters to me, because without the educators who came before us and left a trail for us to follow, there would be no SLA.

At a moment in time where we face some of the most profound questions about what the purpose of school is, we need our elders’ words more than ever. Without understanding how the educators of the past hundred and fifty years incorporated technological advances – both the innovations they created and the mistakes they made, how will we make thoughtful decisions about the changes we see all around us? Without looking at how brave and thoughtful educators handled teaching through moments of societal crisis, how can we make sense of how to handle the current moment?

As I was trying to write this piece, I listened to the incredibly thoughtful discussion between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates this week, and what struck me was how often Mr. Coates centered himself in the long tradition of resistance and struggle that is the Black experience in America, and how that struggle informs everything he does now, and how it allows him to frame today’s crisis in the context of a much longer fight. And I think there’s something really powerful in that idea for educators.

Creating authentic schools has never been easy in this country. And there are so many educators who have worked to create the kinds of learning opportunities and experiences for their students that light a path for us to follow. Understanding who has come before us, and what they have done, and the struggles they faced, allows us to contextualize the moment we are in, not to undersell it, but to understand it, and to place ourselves in a much longer struggle to make schools better for children.

So we should read about Deborah Meier and see what it took to create schools like Central Park East Secondary School inside of a huge bureaucracy like the New York City Board of Education.

And we should read Angelo Patri’s Schoolmaster of the Great City and learn about how he asked (and answered) many of the same questions decades earlier one borough away in the Bronx.

And we should read bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress so we can understand that the best teachers have seen education as liberation — as a way for students to see beyond the limits that others would place upon them, whether for reasons of race, gender, class — and understand how we can be truly free.

And we should read Radical Equations and learn how Robert Moses took the lessons he learned from the Civil Rights movement and Freedom Summer to create the Algebra Project and change the way we think about teaching underserved students math.

And we should read Cuban and Tyack’s Tinkering Toward Utopia so that we can have a better understanding of why reinventing our schools remains so stubbornly difficult.

And we should read Audrey Watters’ Teaching Machines – so we understand how the promise of educational technology has never lived up to the reality of its implementation.

And we should read Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars so that we can understand the link between the labor movements and school reform and how the teaching profession has been one of the most controversial jobs for as long as there have been public schools in America.

And that’s just a start. And I want to know the books I didn’t list, and the educational history that you think people should read — to inform our work, to give us hope or strength, or to give us the context to be the teachers the kids need us to be today.

Because for me, this is the path towards both humility and hope — and they are linked. When we understand what has come before us — when we understand the fight that others have waged, and when we understand how brilliant educators met their moments and taught well, we understand the shoulders on which we stand, and we make better choices about how to meet the challenges we face – both in and out of our classrooms – today.