Studying the courage of a Polish Nobel Prize-winning labor leader, a momentous workers’ uprising, and a fearless sainted pope who resisted tyranny would help topple the walls that block students from understanding our shared past.

Jamie Glas writes in The Federalist,

“The fall of the Berlin Wall makes for nice pictures,” said Poland’s Lech Walesa, the charismatic Gdańsk electrician who co-founded Solidarność (Solidarity), the first independent trade union behind the Iron Curtain. “But it all started in the shipyards.”

Labor Day is a good time to remember Walesa, who turns 75 in September and 35 years ago won the Nobel Peace Prize. He’s probably the most important labor leader of our era. Together, Walesa, Solidarity workers, Western leaders, and Pope John Paul II defied Soviet totalitarianism in Poland, playing a decisive role in ending the Cold War and expanding human freedom.

…Students should learn that, throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, the Soviet puppet government and 200,000 occupying soldiers attempted to crush workers’ protests in Polish cities. This Orwellian police state even tried destroying independent labor unions and the Catholic Church.

“[I]n Poland we have the very first revolution in the world conducted by the working class, directed not against a capitalist system,” the late American Federation of Teachers’ President Albert Shanker said, “but against a communist dictatorship…”

…“A shipyard is a window to the world,” Walesa said. American schoolchildren desperately need to acquire a heroic vision of the human spirit drawn from the hard lessons of history. Studying the courage of a Polish Nobel Prize-winning labor leader, a momentous workers’ uprising, and a fearless sainted pope who resisted tyranny would help topple the walls that block students from understanding our shared past.

Read more here.