I just submitted a proposal for a one-session class I plan to teach for the Osher Program in June. It’s called What is History and How Do We Teach It? I have also decided that I’m going to broaden this into a three-session class for the fall semester.
The idea for doing these classes was stimulated by the recent kerfuffle over what should be taught in history classes in our public schools. There is a huge argument over the purpose of teaching history: some people want classes to be simply a factual account of what happened in the past, while other people want the classes to be part of the process of making the next generation proud to be Americans. Still others want the classes to avoid “making children feel bad” about themselves or their heritage. Yet others want the classes to help us avoid making the same mistakes people made in the past.
So, the first question has to be – What Is History? A simple answer says that history is a list of facts about events in the past. Easy enough, right? But what facts? If you try to make a list of the things that happened just in your life and just in the last month, you would come up with a very long list of things like where you went and what you saw, what you bought and what you ate and what you wore, who you talked to and when you pooped.
So if it is obvious that History can’t be just a list of things that happened in the past, then what is it? It’s easy to say, “Well, I mean the important things.” But once you place a value judgment like “important” in your definition of history, you are making a decision to include some things and leave out other things.
Once you’ve decided what “important” things you’re going to include in your curriculum, the next thing you have to consider is “How We Know What We Know About History.” We have to think of evidence. It’s easy to decide, “well, I need documents to prove what happened in the past.”
There are some problems with this.
· Some classes of people are more documented than others, particularly as you move further back in time. In a largely pre-literate world of the 1500s, for example, documentary records tell us about the lives of the social and political elites. Weren’t the lives of other people also “important?”
· New records are being discovered all the time, and previously known but inaccessible records are now being made accessible through digitization and publication on websites. This new information has to be folded into what we think we already “know,” and sometimes it supplants that earlier information.
· The field of archaeology gives us additional evidence, as we begin to process our “material history” as well as our documented history. This also challenges our understandings of what happened in the past.
In other disciplines – like biology and physics, for example – newly discovered information is readily accepted, even if it supplants previously held understandings. We have learned a lot about how things work since the days when leeches were the acceptable treatment for a wide variety of ailments. We have welcomed advances in medicine and surgery even as we have shaken our heads and scoffed at the way people used to think about these topics. Why don’t we welcome new historical interpretations with the same open mind? Why do we call it “revisionist history” and not talk about “revisionist medicine?”
There’s a lot more to say about this – which is why I’m planning to teach these classes.
The next question is “How do We Teach It?” The book I featured at the top of this essay spells out a lot of the issues with the way we teach history in elementary and high school classes. The biggest problem is that these textbooks present history as if it were a set of accepted facts, while historians tell us that history is a vast set of unsettled arguments.
Historians develop hypotheses about causation in the past – and then test their hypotheses. Just like scientists do. Historians revisit and revise their hypotheses in the light of more information or restructuring of the “experiments” they run to test their hypotheses – just like scientists do. Historians change their minds after a series of experiments fails to confirm their hypotheses – just like scientists do. The public at large doesn’t choose to avoid the conclusions of new scientific experiments because they are comfortable with the “old” science. They recognize that the “new” scientific conclusions are based on better knowledge and accept those conclusions.
There’s a lot more to say about this subject. I plan to write about it in subsequent weeks.
This will be terrific! Looking forward to your ideas.
There's a lot more to say about this subject. #truth