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History is a relatively easy subject to teach and learn, once everybody agrees on what bits are important and should be taught. A hundred years ago we had this

by hugh3 15y ago

History is a relatively easy subject to teach and learn, once everybody agrees on what bits are important and should be taught. A hundred years ago we had this all figured out --we might have had an excessively narrow perspective on history, but at least we all agreed about it. With the ongoing "death of God", as Nietzsche would put it, all the old certainties have been swept away without anything sensible to replace them. So the history syllabus has become a political battleground for partisans of all sorts of folks to play with. If students are forced to spend weeks at a time studying the dude who invented peanut butter or some dispute over bus seating, is it any wonder that the big picture gets lost? As a first step, I would split history into two sections: "overall chronology" and "detailed studies". In "overall chronology" we'd study the basic flow of human history over the last five or seven thousand years, trying not to overly stress any particular event or group of people. Picture a giant wall chart with time along the x axis and all the major human civilizations plotted up and down the y, and then we sit down and learn the dates of key events. Start of the Han dynasty. Fall of Constantinople. Founding of Buenos Aires. Not worrying too much about what they mean, though. In the second, we could pay attention to the details. Individual people, events, what it was like to live at a given time. We could never cover the entire chart at a detailed level, but at least we'd know the details were still there.

enemieslist 15y ago
You make some good points, but..."some dispute over bus seating?" I assume you're talking about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, widely considered to be the first major victory of the Civil Rights Movement? The one where a young 25-year-old preacher named Martin Luther King first rose to national prominence? The one where the non-violent protest tactics of groups like the SCLC, which would go on to dominate the struggle for civil rights until the 1970s, were given their first serious test on the national stage? The problem with the approach you suggest is that students do not, and will not, care about or engage with material devoid of meaning and context. How will you get kids to memorize the "dates of key events" without getting them to care about "what they mean?" I can barely get my history classes to sit down. History is all about meaning and context. Dates are inherently meaningless; it's the stories that history tells us about ourselves that give it worth. We need dates, and we need chronology; it just seems like your approach would lead directly to me (a history teacher) getting beaten up.
- scott_s 15y ago
  Thank you for giving me the opportunity to plug "The Children" by David Halberstam: http://www.amazon.com/Children-David-Halberstam/dp/0449004392/ http://www.amazon.com/Children-David-Halberstam/dp/044900439... Instead of following the historical figures that you know best, such as King, it follows the students who were the ground troops in the civil rights movement. What Halberstam makes abundantly clear is how dangerous what they were doing was. Simply, they could have been killed. Some of them very nearly were. And there were people killed, but they obviously weren't around for Halberstam to interview. The corollary to that is he drives home how naked some of the violence against the protestors was. Something I took away is how sanitized the teaching of the civil rights movement has become. By doing that, we diminish what those young people actually did, and we conveniently forget how cruel humans can be. Personally, I think history is best taught when it has a narrative. Hence, textbooks are not good at teaching history. Books with a focused topic - which hopefully implies a focused narrative - are much more compelling. I recognize that's probably not helpful to a high school teacher. I started reading history books, on my own, in college.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    Personally, I think history is best taught when it has a narrative. Hence, textbooks are not good at teaching history I disagree. Teaching history as a narrative is the most dangerous thing you can do with history, because there's always the temptation to shoehorn it into a narrative. Good guys vs bad guys. Heroes and villains. Plucky underdogs vs arrogant empires. The human mind is stupid, and there's only a certain number of narratives which "feel" right to us, and the moment you start reducing reality in its vast complexity so it sounds like a good story, you've lost most of what was going on. For example, what you just said: What Halberstam makes abundantly clear is how dangerous what they were doing was. Simply, they could have been killed. Some of them very nearly were. And there were people killed, but they obviously weren't around for Halberstam to interview. The corollary to that is he drives home how naked some of the violence against the protestors was. What about the violence committed by the protestors? Were there no evil acts committed by folks on the "good" side of this conflict? I assume there were (there always are) but these get left behind in the search of the simplified one-liner version of the "Civil Rights struggle" narrative. History as narrative is more entertaining than real history, but it's also a lot less accurate. You might as well just watch Star Wars.

by hugh3 15y ago

enemieslist 15y ago

You make some good points, but..."some dispute over bus seating?" I assume you're talking about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, widely considered to be the first major victory of the Civil Rights Movement? The one where a young 25-year-old preacher named Martin Luther King first rose to national prominence? The one where the non-violent protest tactics of groups like the SCLC, which would go on to dominate the struggle for civil rights until the 1970s, were given their first serious test on the national stage? The problem with the approach you suggest is that students do not, and will not, care about or engage with material devoid of meaning and context. How will you get kids to memorize the "dates of key events" without getting them to care about "what they mean?" I can barely get my history classes to sit down. History is all about meaning and context. Dates are inherently meaningless; it's the stories that history tells us about ourselves that give it worth. We need dates, and we need chronology; it just seems like your approach would lead directly to me (a history teacher) getting beaten up.

scott_s 15y ago
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to plug "The Children" by David Halberstam: http://www.amazon.com/Children-David-Halberstam/dp/0449004392/ http://www.amazon.com/Children-David-Halberstam/dp/044900439... Instead of following the historical figures that you know best, such as King, it follows the students who were the ground troops in the civil rights movement. What Halberstam makes abundantly clear is how dangerous what they were doing was. Simply, they could have been killed. Some of them very nearly were. And there were people killed, but they obviously weren't around for Halberstam to interview. The corollary to that is he drives home how naked some of the violence against the protestors was. Something I took away is how sanitized the teaching of the civil rights movement has become. By doing that, we diminish what those young people actually did, and we conveniently forget how cruel humans can be. Personally, I think history is best taught when it has a narrative. Hence, textbooks are not good at teaching history. Books with a focused topic - which hopefully implies a focused narrative - are much more compelling. I recognize that's probably not helpful to a high school teacher. I started reading history books, on my own, in college.
- hugh3 15y ago
  Personally, I think history is best taught when it has a narrative. Hence, textbooks are not good at teaching history I disagree. Teaching history as a narrative is the most dangerous thing you can do with history, because there's always the temptation to shoehorn it into a narrative. Good guys vs bad guys. Heroes and villains. Plucky underdogs vs arrogant empires. The human mind is stupid, and there's only a certain number of narratives which "feel" right to us, and the moment you start reducing reality in its vast complexity so it sounds like a good story, you've lost most of what was going on. For example, what you just said: What Halberstam makes abundantly clear is how dangerous what they were doing was. Simply, they could have been killed. Some of them very nearly were. And there were people killed, but they obviously weren't around for Halberstam to interview. The corollary to that is he drives home how naked some of the violence against the protestors was. What about the violence committed by the protestors? Were there no evil acts committed by folks on the "good" side of this conflict? I assume there were (there always are) but these get left behind in the search of the simplified one-liner version of the "Civil Rights struggle" narrative. History as narrative is more entertaining than real history, but it's also a lot less accurate. You might as well just watch Star Wars.