The Full Text of “The History Teacher”
The Full Text of “The History Teacher”
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“The History Teacher” Introduction
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"The History Teacher" first appeared in Billy Collins's 1991 poetry collection Questions About Angels. The poem depicts a history teacher who strives to preserve his students' innocence by telling them sugarcoated, fictitious versions of historical events with all suffering or cruelty removed. Despite his efforts to hide the truth about history—or perhaps because of them—his students become cruel and violent, bullying and beating up their peers on the playground. The history teacher remains unaware of the negative effects of his lessons, seemingly happy to live within the idyllic world that he has created for his ignorant pupils. Collins mixes his traditional wry sense of humor with a striking, serious message about the dangers of keeping learners from the truth.
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“The History Teacher” Summary
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The history teacher wants to preserve his students' innocence, so he refers to the Ice Age as the Chilly Age—a time period when everyone simply wore sweaters to stay warm.
He also deems the Stone Age the Gravel Age, explaining that this was just a time period when people had long driveways.
Similarly, he tells his students that the Spanish Inquisition (an infamous period of religious intolerance and persecution) was simply a time when people asked a lot of questions about Spain—questions like the distance to Madrid or the proper term for a bull fighter's hat.
He also tells his students that the War of the Roses (a series of 15th-century English civil wars) had to do with gardens, and that the Enola Gay (the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima) only dropped a single, itty bitty atom on Japan.
After their history lessons, the students would bully and beat up their weaker and more studious peers on the playground.
Meanwhile, the history teacher would walk home—through neighborhoods dotted with little flower gardens and white picket fences—and wonder whether he could convince his students that the Boer War (fought between Britain and South Africa) simply involved telling really boring stories until enemy soldiers fell asleep.
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“The History Teacher” Themes
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Innocence vs. Ignorance
The history teacher’s attempts to preserve his students’ innocence result instead in transforming his students into ignorant young people who lack the skills to act with kindness or intelligence. The poem implies that understanding the realities of the world, however dark or uncomfortable, is part of what allows young people to grow into better, kinder human beings—even if this process ultimately constitutes a loss of innocence.
From the start of the poem, Collins make his protagonist’s motivations clear: he is “trying to protect his students’ innocence.” The teacher believes that if he provides his students with alternative versions of history in which there is no unkindness or violence, they will be shielded from the horrors of the world and their innocence will remain intact.
The poem then provides a series of examples of how the history teacher reframes the world events he is supposed to be explaining to his students. The teacher often uses childlike wordplay to recast these events, as if mimicking how a child might try to put unfamiliar terms in familiar contexts. For example, he tells his students that the Spanish Inquisition—a period of intense, deadly religious persecution—was a time when people just asked a lot of questions about Spain, and that the atomic bomb—which killed thousands of people—dropped only one atom.
Yet instead of remaining gently innocent, the students, with no worldly context for understanding their actions, become the ignorant perpetrators of unkindness and violence themselves. Children become bullies who “torment the weak and the smart.”
Ironically, then, in trying to preserve his students’ innocence, the history teacher himself proves naïve and ignorant of the effects his teaching has on his students. In the final stanza of the poem, the history teacher sees only what he wants to see—the classically idyllic peaceful still-life of “flower beds and white picket fences”—and completely misses the cruel bullying perpetrated by his own students on the playground.
These final lines reveal the history teacher’s own unwillingness to confront the horror and cruelty of the real world, suggesting that his sugar-coated curriculum is as much to protect himself from the harsh reality of the world as to protect his students. In ostensibly trying to keep his students ignorant of the truth, he has kept himself ignorant of who his students really are.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Line 1
- Lines 2-13
- Lines 14-16
- Line 17
- Lines 18-19
- Lines 20-22
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History and Compassion
“The History Teacher” demonstrates that depriving students of historical truth will also prevent students from acting with compassion and empathy in the real world. The poem thus suggests the importance of fully remembering, and learning from, the past.
The poem seems to draw a line between the misinformation that the history teacher provides his students and the behavior that the students then exhibit outside the classroom. On the playground, the students “torment the weak and the smart”: their education (or lack thereof), the poem suggests, has contributed to their transformation into bullies.
The history teacher’s lessons thus seem to be sculpting students with limited compassion for their peers. Deprived of the true history of human suffering—no wars or violence, no climate disasters, no religious persecution—students have lost the opportunity to practice empathy on the historical figures they study. In examining history, the poem implies, students learn to think critically and to understand the past ethically as they consider the decisions made by leaders and civilians in the wake of major world events. In the history teacher’s sunny revision of history, students no longer have the ability to put themselves in the shoes of the oppressors or oppressed people of the past: this is a timeline that is essentially story-less with no real conflict, no real risk, and no real stakes (for example, the most dangerous outcome in this retelling of the Boer War was falling asleep with boredom).
If, unlike their “weak” victims, the history teacher’s students show strength instead of smarts, why do they feel empowered by their miseducation? Having never encountered stories of people who were oppressed or witnessed oppression around them, the students may feel invincible. If they have never been presented with true stories in which individuals face real consequences, nor learned about the harm that individuals can inflict, the history teacher’s students have no knowledge or understanding holding them back from punishing those whose greater wisdom makes them more hesitant to engage with violence or conflict.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-13
- Lines 14-17
- Lines 20-22
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The Danger of Misinformation
The history teacher’s classroom functions as a broader warning about the dangers of a misinformed and under-educated community. The poem depicts, with a tongue-in-cheek style, a small group of individuals given false information by a (mis)leader. Even in such miniature conditions, the impact of this avalanche of misinformation is significant, since the kids turn against their peers from other classrooms (who, the "smart" descriptor implies, presumably have more accurate historical knowledge than they do). If this small-scale iteration of false teaching has an effect, the poem seems to suggest to the reader, how much more damage could be done in a society where misinformation about the past is widespread? What are the consequences in an adult world where people do not understand nor even seek the truth?
By keeping his students in the dark, then, the poem implies that the history teacher does what any leader hopes to do: keep his constituents (his students) happy and uncomplaining, but at a cost. As long as the students do not learn the truth, the status quo will be maintained—a status quo in which the ignorant may "torment the weak / and the smart ..."
The history teacher understands that he must generate misrepresentations of history that will be persuasive to his students. In the final stanza, the history teacher wonders “if they would believe” (line 20) that the Boer War has to do with being bored. This glimpse into the history teacher’s thought process demonstrates that he is not merely impulsively hiding the truth to protect his students but is actually planning to deceive them.
Without understanding the past sufficiently to act in order to prevent history from repeating itself, the students act according to their basest, most uncaring instincts. The poem suggests that it is this lying that spurs on the behaviors of those who engage in acts of purposeless violence and cruelty.
The history teacher’s act is, therefore, political. By misleading his students (his citizens, in a sense) and turning a blind eye to the suffering that they inflict as a result of their ignorance, the history teacher contributes, unknowingly, in this case, to the formation of an unstable and dangerous community. Understood on a larger scale, “The History Teacher” lays bare the violence that results when leaders deliberately keep historical truth away from their followers.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-4
- Lines 5-13
- Lines 14-16
- Line 17
- Lines 20-22
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The History Teacher”
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Lines 1-4
Trying to protect ...
... to wear sweaters.The first stanza of "The History Teacher" introduces the poem's central conceit: the title character takes upsetting or violent events from history and describes them for his students in much more child-friendly, sugarcoated terms. In this first example, the history teacher re-titles the Ice Age as "the Chilly Age," stripping away the environmental devastation of the era and its detrimental effects on human life so that it seems only to have forced people to wear warm clothing.
From the first line of the poem, the history teacher's motivation is made explicit: he is "trying to protect his students' innocence" (line 1). The history teacher seems to believe that if he shields them from the unhappiness of the long-ago past, they can then remain blissfully unaware of all human suffering. While he may make the Ice Age more conceptually accessible to young students (although his students' age is never specified, it seems from their "playground" use that they are likely elementary or middle school students) by connecting the era to the familiar experience of a chilly day, the history teacher completely misrepresents the facts and reality of history.
This first stanza also establishes the poem's consistent absence of metrical regularity or rhyme scheme. Collins writes in blank verse, and the first stanza is a single sentence featuring enjambment that separates each line from the next. The enjambment emphasizes the reveals of the pair of punch lines in the stanza, with line breaks serving as momentary drum rolls before the discoveries of what name the history teacher used ("the Chilly Age," line 2) and how he described this era (the sweater-wearing in line 4).
Despite the poem's ultimately dark moral, the opening lines also establish a wry sense of knowing humor: the reader is invited to laugh at the history teacher's wacky creativity in the classroom but also to laugh at the kids who are presumably duped by this rather lame, pun-based historical explanation. At the same time, how would the history teacher's students know any better without previous exposure to the truth? From the poem's first lines, Collins positions the reader as an educated onlooker to the miseducation of a classroom of "innocent" students.
The fleeting use of assonance and consonance in the words "million" and "Chilly" in line 2 serve to accentuate the history teacher's attempts to make his lessons palatable and innocent. The presence of such sonic devices throughout the poem suggests the history teacher's attempts to pepper his lies with sing-song, catchy phrases.
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Lines 5-6
And the Stone ...
... of the time. -
Lines 7-10
The Spanish Inquisition ...
... the matador's hat?" -
Lines 11-13
The War of ...
... on Japan. -
Lines 14-17
The children would ...
... breaking their glasses, -
Lines 18-22
while he gathered ...
... enemy nod off.
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“The History Teacher” Symbols
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Playground Violence
The students' violence on the playground, apparently a result of the history teacher's derelict teaching method, seems to symbolize the chaos and suffering caused by the suppression and deliberate obfuscation of historical information. By depriving citizens of the ability to learn from historical truths, the oppressive leader (the history teacher, in this case) creates a vacuum of understanding. In this state of ignorance, the people may cause suffering and move to violence, unable to lean on the past to learn from examples of morality and immorality or to comprehend the mistakes of past generations. When the students encounter peers who understand history better than they do, they take violent action against them, choosing "to torment the weak and the smart" (lines 15-16). Without the moral compass of history to guide them, the history teacher's students, like any under-educated or ignorant population, act against their fellow citizens who claim to know more than they do.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 14-17: “The children would leave his classroom / for the playground to torment the weak / and the smart, / mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,”
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Flower Beds and White Picket Fences
In the final stanza, as the history teacher walks home, ignorant of the playground violence he has helped to incite, he strolls "past flower beds and white picket fences" (line 19). These images are clear clichés of a serene, suburban American scene: it is as if the history teacher has walked into a painting of an old-fashioned vision of a peaceful neighborhood. These staples—the flower beds and picket fences—seem to stand for the innocent version of the world in which the history teacher wants his students to live. As the poem reaches its conclusion, it seems increasingly clear that the history teacher has constructed this fantasy world not only for his students but for himself as well: he cannot see the destruction his students cause but only the "flower beds" and "white picket fences," the sugarcoated, strife-less perception of an ideal American life.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 19: “past flower beds and white picket fences,”
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“The History Teacher” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
The most prominent example of alliteration in "The History Teacher" occurs in the poem's final stanza. A series of words beginning with /w/ ("while," "walked," "white," "wondering," "would," and "war") in lines 18-21 transport the history teacher into his idyllic vision of his neighborhood and then into the similarly sugarcoated lesson planning. The repeated /w/ sound creates a softening transition from the hard /b/, /k/, and /g/ sounds in line 17 (in the words "breaking" and "glasses"), swiftly contrasting the violent reality of the playground with the placid fantasy taking place within the history teacher's mind. Line 19's tour of the history teacher's route with its "flower beds" and "fences" also pairs the alliterative /f/ sounds to further this sweetening effect.
An earlier example of alliteration in the poem can also be seen in the second stanza in which the history teacher's fictional questions that might be asked in the Spanish Inquisition pair two Spain-themed words — "Madrid" and "matador"—with initial /m/ sounds (lines 9-10). The jauntiness suggested by this alliteration supports the sense of childlike innocence that the history teacher intends to convey in these questions that gloss over the realties of the Spanish Inquisition.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 9: “Madrid”
- Line 10: “matador's”
- Line 15: “to torment”
- Line 18: “while ,” “walked”
- Line 19: “flower ,” “white,” “fences”
- Line 20: “wondering,” “ would”
- Line 21: “War ”
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Allusion
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Assonance
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Consonance
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End-Stopped Line
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Enjambment
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Irony
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Juxtaposition
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Metaphor
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Pun
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"The History Teacher" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Ice Age
- Stone Age
- Spanish Inquisition
- Matador
- War of the Roses
- Enola Gay
- Mussing
- Boer War
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(Location in poem: Line 2: “Ice Age”)
Although there have been several "ice ages" in the history of the planet—an "ice age" is any era of expanding glaciers of ice due to the Earth's surface becoming colder—the period usually referenced by the term "Ice Age" is the Pleistocene Epoch (which began 2.6 million years ago and ended about 12,000 years ago). In the poem, the history teacher deliberately misleads students about the mass extinctions of the Ice Age (a period of over two million years, more than twice as long as he suggests), making the era sound much more manageable: the "Chilly Age."
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The History Teacher”
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Form
"The History Teacher" does not follow any formal poetic structure. There are 22 lines broken up into five stanzas: three quatrains (four lines) alternating with one couplet, one tercet (three lines), and one cinquain (five lines). All five stanzas are unrhymed.
Most of Collins's poetry employs similar free verse that does not follow a particular form, but, in "The History Teacher," the unpredictable shape that the poem's formlessness creates seems to match the sense of the history teacher's formless meandering through history as he constructs his lessons. The uneven stanza lengths may also suggest the velocity through which the history teacher hurtles through major events—the petite second stanza (lines 5-6), for example, emphasizes how quickly the history teacher dismisses and downplays the significance of the Stone Age.
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Meter
"The History Teacher" is written in free verse with no fixed meter. Due to the enjambment throughout the stanzas, the poem, read aloud, sounds basically like prose.
While this is the case with most of Collins's poems, the poem's unmetered prosiness contributes to the choppy, improvised nature of the history teacher's lessons. Without truth guiding his teachings, there is no way to predict how they will sound or where they will go. The poem's fleeting moment of metrical regularity arrives in the fifth stanza as the history teacher's students show up on the playground to bully their peers (lines 15-16):
for the play- | ground to tor- | ment the weak
and the smartThis quartet of anapests (poetic feet with a da-da-DUM rhythm) seems to capture, ever so fleetingly, the rhythms of a playground chant (or taunt) as the bullies attack their prey.
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Rhyme Scheme
"The History Teacher" does not follow an overarching rhyme scheme. There are, however, a trio of significant instances of internal slant rhymes, built through assonance and consonance, that seem perhaps to accentuate the history teacher's child-friendly, sing-song approach to history.
In the first stanza, "Chilly" is echoed by the first syllables of "million" (line 3). Imagining the history teacher describing these chilly million years, it is easy to hear the soothing, song-like phrasing that such an explanation might carry.
This carries over into the third stanza's cheery question, "What do you call the matador's hat?" (line 10) with its internal rhyme of "mat/hat" suggesting the innocent playfulness that the history teacher intends.
In the final stanza, the history teacher considers teaching his students about the "Boer War" (line 21), a conflict with an already-rhyming name. Part of the appeal to the history teacher may be that the name already sounds danger-free because of its nursery rhyme quality. Rhymes, so closely associated for his students with the safety of their childhood, may every so often assist the history teacher in cloistering his pupils from the harsh realities of the outside world.
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“The History Teacher” Speaker
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The speaker in "The History Teacher" appears to be an omniscient narrator who shares both what motivates the teacher inside his mind and what happens on the playground when the teacher's back is turned. The narrator shares some of the history teacher's internal life, explaining that the teacher is "trying to protect his student's innocence" (line 1) and also visiting the history teacher's thoughts to reveal that he is "wondering if they would believe" (line 20) the teacher's latest historical fiction.
At the same time, the speaker narrates a scene beyond the history teacher's knowledge, showing how his students "torment the weak and the smart" (lines 15-16) as the history teacher walks innocently, ignorantly home. The speaker maintains an impartial distance, presenting facts without arguing in favor or against the history teacher's methods. If Billy Collins's intention is to condemn the history teacher for allowing his students' ignorance to foment into violent bullying, he allows readers to reach that conclusion on their own without the speaker's voice explicitly directing their opinions.
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“The History Teacher” Setting
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"The History Teacher" appears to be set in a relatively well-off rural or suburban neighborhood. The history teacher walks home "past flower beds and white picket fences" (line 19). The poem provides little other information about the community or the school in which the history teacher works, other than the brief glance at the playground where the history teacher's students bully and attack their peers. It is possible, too, given the history teacher's own tendency to sugarcoat the world he presents to his students, that those flower beds and white picket fences are merely the landmarks that the history teacher notices: he may, as he does in his classroom, ignore the less-than-idyllic realities around him.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The History Teacher”
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Literary Context
"The History Teacher" appeared first in Billy Collins's fourth published collection Questions About Angels in 1991. The book was Collins's most successful yet: it was published through the National Poetry Series and catapulted Collins to greater prominence than he had previously experienced.
The poem is representative of Collins's humorous, colloquial, accessible style. A 2006 review in The Guardian of a reprint of an early Collins book argued that "whimsy is rare in American poetry ... so one looks in vain for obvious ancestors or influences in Collins ... a stubbornly distinctive voice." As Collins's fame has exploded (he served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001-2003), the easily identifiable tone and voice in his work have remained the same.
Collins himself cites the free verse of the Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti as significant influences in his development as a poet. He also describes the modernist 20th century poet Wallace Stevens as a major source of inspiration. (Collins has said his "life goal" as a young poet was to be seen "as a third-rate Wallace Stevens.")
Historical Context
While "The History Teacher" cites myriad examples from the historical past, the poem does not explicitly connect to any current events of the time of its composition (1991). However, a combination of cultural and political conversations at the time around education, history, and school violence may have contributed to the poem's urgent message about grounding education in morality and truth.
Across the decade prior to the publication of "The History Teacher," Howard Zinn's book A People's History of the United States (1980) became increasingly influential: Zinn's text retells American history from the pre-Columbian era to the 20th century in order to undo the sugarcoated patriotism of mainstream historical narratives. While the traditional sanitized, mythologized versions of history in classrooms that Zinn was, in part, responding to may be less overt than the history teacher's flagrant fictions, the book similarly emphasizes how the dominant versions of history fail to provide an accurate portrayal of the forces of oppression, marginalization, and colonialism. The poem may respond to Zinn's work with this satirical vision of pedagogical malpractice.
In the late 1980s, many educators increasing attributed a rise of violence in schools to the impact of music and movies which glorified violence. The poem poses an alternative explanation for the violence: the space for that violence is not created by the entertainment consumed by students outside of school but by the failures to properly educate about the past within classroom walls.
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More “The History Teacher” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Out Loud — Watch a video of "The History Teacher" read aloud and accompanied by a series of illustrations.
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The Boer War — Learn more about the war referenced in the end of the poem (which had nothing to do with "boring" soldiers!).
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Collins's Voice — This video provides an opportunity to hear Billy Collins's dryly witty delivery of his own poetry followed by a lengthy interview.
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The War of the Roses — The real story of the War of the Roses, which did not take place in a garden (but did inspire the Game of Thrones series!).
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Biography of Billy Collins — This biographical portrait of Billy Collins offers a thorough chronology of his work and a variety of responses from critics.
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The Spanish Inquisition — Read what the Inquisition actually entailed (hint: it was not about matador hats).
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The Enola Gay — Read about the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.
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New York Times Review — This New York Times review of a 2001 Billy Collins collection that reprinted "The History Teacher" quotes and analyzes the poem's impact at length.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Billy Collins
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