If we haven’t learned something in the last few months—about U.S. history, the inadequate health care system, economic inequality, flags, racism, policing—we haven’t been trying hard enough. These days there are lessons everywhere, and among them is the fact that our public education system pretty much fails us.

Take statues. Please.

That one topic is now covering a lot of ground left unearthed in our school-days history books. What do grandiose public statues mean? What are they for? Who are they for? When did they become fundamental pillars of the Constitution, as some have suggested? Are they really a preservation of our heritage amid the uprising that mostly is targeting Confederate symbols and sculptures of prominent slave owners?

One benefit to this uproar—as with the daunting coronavirus presence, Black Lives Matter protests, the Mississippi flag’s official rejection and Defund the Police rallies—is being forced to think about matters previously too easy to ignore. And learn a thing or two.

In a recent post on Medium.com, Australian Claire Baxter, whose master’s thesis was titled Conflict Archaeology & Heritage, argued that “the value of statues is not what they tell us about the individual being memorialized, but what they tell us of the society that created the statue and erected it….”

If these bronze and marble memorials “have the power to write history,” New York Times art critic Holland Cotter asked, “who, in any given case, is wielding that power? Was the history true when written, and has that truth changed over time? Does the history serve positive or negative ends? Promote inclusion or divisiveness? If monuments are, like history, intrinsically complex, not easily defined as ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ is complexity alone enough to justify a contested monument’s continuing presence?”

My past thoughts about statues never got much beyond the frivolous. During a long-ago assignment in Muleshoe, Tex., it was a giggle to be confronted in the main town square with the massive statue of a mule. Amid a reunion of University of Missouri newspaper pals, I made the trivial pilgrimage to the campus statue of Beetle Bailey—the comic-strip character created by Mort Walker when he was a Mizzou student.

This is different. Robert E. Lee, Andrew Jackson, Jefferson Davis and the like were not cartoon characters, and the toppling of images of blackguards and cads moved Yale history professor David Blight, in a New Yorker magazine essay, to compare such dramatic developments to the fall of the Berlin Wall 31 years ago.

Blight wrote of “some awe in seeing, during these past few weeks, Confederate monuments in America likewise reduced to pieces, relics of the collapse, after a hundred and fifty-five years, of the public vestiges of the Lost Cause tradition. The summer of 2020, like the autumn of 1989, could mark the death of a specific vision of history. If so, it has taken a long, long night—to borrow from Robbie Robertson and the Band—to drive old Dixie down.”

In a New York Times interview, art historian and John Jay College professor Erin Thompson noted that humans have been “making monuments to glorify people and ideas since we started making art, and since we started making statues, other people have started tearing them down….It’s not surprising that we are seeing people rebelling against ideas that are represented by these statues today.

“It’s not the statues themselves,” she said, “but the point of view that they represent. And these are statues in public places, right? So these are statues claiming that this version of history is the public version of history.”

What it feels like, to employ a terrible pun, is that these memorials have reached a statue of limitations. Cotter wrote: “Most of the commemorative statues now under attack across the land…have little visual charisma. They’re generic period images of white male power. You’re tempted to think: If they go, small loss. Let’s move on.”

As for “erasing the past,” Blight reminded that the “statues are being toppled, but the story that built them remains.” (He mentioned that he has bits of concrete from the demolished Berlin Wall. So do I. They still exist.) Just as true: Those statues weren’t going to leap from their pedestals. They needed a little push.