Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Comment & Questions re Wineburg Reading
"Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts" Introduction and Chapter 1 from Wineburg. Available online at http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kwin9903.htm
In reading this article, 2 cliches came to mind. The first one was about being doomed to repeating mistakes. "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." (George Santayana). The second was that you cannot know someone without walking a mile in their shoes.
Why, indeed do we teach history? To ask this question, is to open up a debate on why we do or do not teach other subjects as well. Education has many purposes. My own perspective is that society's primary goal in educating our children is to prepare them to be successful adults. That success can be defined in a number of ways. How can the study of history benefit students most? How can the study of history benefit society most?
Mr. Wineburg posits that studying history "holds the potential, only partially realized, of humanizing us in ways offered by few other areas in the school curriculum." The study of literature also holds this potential, as does the history and literature of any discipline. But in order to truly walk in someone else's shoes, we must abandon the ease of applying our own present and experiences onto another person's experience." Can we really do this?
It is difficult enough to walk in someone else's shoes who we know in the present, let alone the past. But by attempting to do so, we do gain the historical perspective and understanding of our membership in the human race and it's limitations. In books and film we can and are often and easily drawn into another's life and time. Indeed, some movies seem to quite expertly convey historic context and character development in the framework of that historical moment. Thinking back on a couple of films I saw in the past year, I found that some of them were especially interesting from a sociological perspective. Good Luck and Good Night, a story about William R. Murrow and the 'McCarthy era' was one such movie. The movie chronicled events and captured a period of recent US history that was eerily familiar. The details of the setting, what the corporate workplace was like in the 1950's, the concerns of the players, the societal impact of a single television broadcast, the delicate balance of popular opinion, righteous indignity, saving one's own proverbial ass, financing (advertisers), and protecting the livelihood of those close to you, gave new life to this slice of time and allowed viewers a unique glimpse of what it was like to actually be there.
Wineburg quotes Collingsworth, "all history is the history of thought," and Ginzburg, that historians must "destroy our false sense of proximity to people of the past because they come from societies very different from our own." From Robert Darnton, he offers us that "Other people are other. They do not think the way we do. The more we discover about these people's mental universes, the more we should be shocked." All of this is true.
The study of history must also provide facts: names, dates, places, actions. This gives us a framework for further investigation. Why did they act that way? How did they communicate? What were they thinking? What facts did they have, or not have? How did they live? Why didn't they do this or that? What would we do in their place? Obviously, exact history does not repeat itself, but many analogies can be found. Can the study of history help us as individuals to navigate today's world? What is it about the past that we really need to learn?
Wineburg also writes that, "The relevance of the past may lie precisely in what strikes us as its initial irrelevance." We do have a lot in common with all of our ancestors. We are sentient, we have feelings. The vignettes the author told were quite interesting. The daily trivia of everyday life may seem irrelevant, but for each one of us, it reflects the nature of our times. The story of A Midwife's Tale may contain abundant trivialities, but it is precisely those trivialities that connect us to each other. If this person lived fifty years later she probably would not have been a midwife - maybe she would have been a nurse, maybe she would been a seamstress. The point is that she had a life befitting her times, she lived, loved, worked, ate, slept, communicated, consumed, learned, traveled, thought, acted in accordance with her beliefs and within societal norms of the time. Through her journals one can, in fact, time travel to a community that is "so foreign, and yet so similar to own."
Biologically speaking, man has changed little. We are no smarter than men of 5,000 years ago, we just have more knowledge available. On the most basic level, feelings are what we have in common with every generation. Fear, love, belonging, estrangement; desire for power, knowledge, wealth, trying to create a life that provides us with necessities, food and shelter, first and foremost, then to satisfy other needs and desires. This does not change over time. How we accomplish these things does change, however. "To be or not to be" is not the question; the question really is, how to be. History gives us many examples and analogies to draw upon.
The argument about which history to teach, though not the topic of this article, does place an inescapable bias upon us. One of my friend says, "we teach history so that people are completely brainwashed as to where our society came from, where it is and where it is going. Teaching history, using standardized text books, is an opportunity to rewrite history in the way our government wants us to perceive it. We can see history being rewritten in our daily newspapers. So how easy is it to rewrite history of the distant past where there are no surviving witnesses?" Is this why society teaches history? The government funds public education, it is in its own best interest to promulgate the culture it deems most acceptable.
I found this quote most interesting, and, perhaps most aligned with my own thinking:
Gerda Lerner:
"What we do about history matters. The often repeated saying that those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them has a lot of truth in it. But what are 'the lessons of history'? The very attempt at definition furnishes ground for new conflicts. History is not a recipe book; past events are never replicated in the present in quite the same way. Historical events are infinitely variable and their interpretations are a constantly shifting process. There are no certainties to be found in the past.
"We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events."
A couple of other quotes I found interesting:
George Bernard Shaw: We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
George Wilhelm Hegel: What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles.
These last two quotes have, alas, too much truth in them. Wineburg mentions Woodrow Wilson and his committee which decreed that the study of history can "achieve its highest aim by endowing us with the invaluable mental power which we call judgment." Is this possible? Perhaps it is. But I have to agree with Wineburg, that historical study can, and should help us to achieve "the understanding that each of us is more than the handful of labels ascribed to us at birth," that it "teaches us the limitations of our brief sojourn on the planet and to take membership in the entire human race."
In reading this article, 2 cliches came to mind. The first one was about being doomed to repeating mistakes. "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." (George Santayana). The second was that you cannot know someone without walking a mile in their shoes.
Why, indeed do we teach history? To ask this question, is to open up a debate on why we do or do not teach other subjects as well. Education has many purposes. My own perspective is that society's primary goal in educating our children is to prepare them to be successful adults. That success can be defined in a number of ways. How can the study of history benefit students most? How can the study of history benefit society most?
Mr. Wineburg posits that studying history "holds the potential, only partially realized, of humanizing us in ways offered by few other areas in the school curriculum." The study of literature also holds this potential, as does the history and literature of any discipline. But in order to truly walk in someone else's shoes, we must abandon the ease of applying our own present and experiences onto another person's experience." Can we really do this?
It is difficult enough to walk in someone else's shoes who we know in the present, let alone the past. But by attempting to do so, we do gain the historical perspective and understanding of our membership in the human race and it's limitations. In books and film we can and are often and easily drawn into another's life and time. Indeed, some movies seem to quite expertly convey historic context and character development in the framework of that historical moment. Thinking back on a couple of films I saw in the past year, I found that some of them were especially interesting from a sociological perspective. Good Luck and Good Night, a story about William R. Murrow and the 'McCarthy era' was one such movie. The movie chronicled events and captured a period of recent US history that was eerily familiar. The details of the setting, what the corporate workplace was like in the 1950's, the concerns of the players, the societal impact of a single television broadcast, the delicate balance of popular opinion, righteous indignity, saving one's own proverbial ass, financing (advertisers), and protecting the livelihood of those close to you, gave new life to this slice of time and allowed viewers a unique glimpse of what it was like to actually be there.
Wineburg quotes Collingsworth, "all history is the history of thought," and Ginzburg, that historians must "destroy our false sense of proximity to people of the past because they come from societies very different from our own." From Robert Darnton, he offers us that "Other people are other. They do not think the way we do. The more we discover about these people's mental universes, the more we should be shocked." All of this is true.
The study of history must also provide facts: names, dates, places, actions. This gives us a framework for further investigation. Why did they act that way? How did they communicate? What were they thinking? What facts did they have, or not have? How did they live? Why didn't they do this or that? What would we do in their place? Obviously, exact history does not repeat itself, but many analogies can be found. Can the study of history help us as individuals to navigate today's world? What is it about the past that we really need to learn?
Wineburg also writes that, "The relevance of the past may lie precisely in what strikes us as its initial irrelevance." We do have a lot in common with all of our ancestors. We are sentient, we have feelings. The vignettes the author told were quite interesting. The daily trivia of everyday life may seem irrelevant, but for each one of us, it reflects the nature of our times. The story of A Midwife's Tale may contain abundant trivialities, but it is precisely those trivialities that connect us to each other. If this person lived fifty years later she probably would not have been a midwife - maybe she would have been a nurse, maybe she would been a seamstress. The point is that she had a life befitting her times, she lived, loved, worked, ate, slept, communicated, consumed, learned, traveled, thought, acted in accordance with her beliefs and within societal norms of the time. Through her journals one can, in fact, time travel to a community that is "so foreign, and yet so similar to own."
Biologically speaking, man has changed little. We are no smarter than men of 5,000 years ago, we just have more knowledge available. On the most basic level, feelings are what we have in common with every generation. Fear, love, belonging, estrangement; desire for power, knowledge, wealth, trying to create a life that provides us with necessities, food and shelter, first and foremost, then to satisfy other needs and desires. This does not change over time. How we accomplish these things does change, however. "To be or not to be" is not the question; the question really is, how to be. History gives us many examples and analogies to draw upon.
The argument about which history to teach, though not the topic of this article, does place an inescapable bias upon us. One of my friend says, "we teach history so that people are completely brainwashed as to where our society came from, where it is and where it is going. Teaching history, using standardized text books, is an opportunity to rewrite history in the way our government wants us to perceive it. We can see history being rewritten in our daily newspapers. So how easy is it to rewrite history of the distant past where there are no surviving witnesses?" Is this why society teaches history? The government funds public education, it is in its own best interest to promulgate the culture it deems most acceptable.
I found this quote most interesting, and, perhaps most aligned with my own thinking:
Gerda Lerner:
"What we do about history matters. The often repeated saying that those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them has a lot of truth in it. But what are 'the lessons of history'? The very attempt at definition furnishes ground for new conflicts. History is not a recipe book; past events are never replicated in the present in quite the same way. Historical events are infinitely variable and their interpretations are a constantly shifting process. There are no certainties to be found in the past.
"We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events."
A couple of other quotes I found interesting:
George Bernard Shaw: We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
George Wilhelm Hegel: What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles.
These last two quotes have, alas, too much truth in them. Wineburg mentions Woodrow Wilson and his committee which decreed that the study of history can "achieve its highest aim by endowing us with the invaluable mental power which we call judgment." Is this possible? Perhaps it is. But I have to agree with Wineburg, that historical study can, and should help us to achieve "the understanding that each of us is more than the handful of labels ascribed to us at birth," that it "teaches us the limitations of our brief sojourn on the planet and to take membership in the entire human race."
Labels: Article Commentary
