Historical Thinking and other Unnatural Acts

My history 101 sections are going brilliantly well, for what it's worth. It won't get me a job and it won't change the world, and it all happens in a national, regional, and local context that constrains the outcomes. But we've been having fun, point one. And we've been engaged in the kind of historical thinking that all the right thinking people who think about history think we should be thinking. So I turned back to Sam Wineburg's Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (http://www.amazon.com/Historical-Thinking-Other-Unnatural-Acts/dp/1566398568) to review and see where the gap was between my class and nirvana. Here's what I found.

Wineburg writes in the context of the history wars of a decade ago and concludes, as many historians did, that the battle over what to teach in history obscured the more fundamental question of why teach history. We've already reviewed carefully what the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks say about teaching history (indoctrinate youth so they will be willing to fight and die to uphold Western Civilization, or at least pass a test). But Wineburg says it is something else: we study history to transcend ourselves, to be humanized in a way that, he argues, only history can humanize us. The only trick is the balance between studying people at another time and place and seeing that they are both exactly like us and nothing like us.

That's all well and good until we arrive at an essay near the end that recounts the supposedly transcendant class exercise about the so-called "Critical Period" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Critical_Period) in American history. The lesson culminated in a class discussion that ended up being about the question of whether there is moral law that superceeds national law. They revisited the Nuremberg Trials.

As recounted, the class discussion was wide ranging and energetic, but there's the rub: the students made repeated reference to specific historical events and questions in making arguments about whether there is indeed a higher moral law. Aha! Where and when did they learn these? One must assume that either they spent hours hearing them, or reading deeply contextualized references to them. In other words, they had loads of content in their heads before they started thinking historically, or doing what historians do.

Squaring the circle of student knowledge remains the fundamental problem. In lieu of deeply historical understanding of, say, Mesopotamian civilizations, I simply ask students about their own civilization. That alone takes us from them having lots of answers to them having lots of questions -- high school was about answers, college is about questions -- but we do all of this with the barest base of factual knowledge.

Wineburg's right in his critique of teaching history -- which he shows goes back nearly 100 years without change. But he celebrates the kind of well-informed students he thinks we'd all like to have at the table before the conversation begins.

What can we expect of working students?

This year's students seem to have more responsibilities outside of school than those I had last year. I've not run numbers, but I cannot think of a student last year who had children to care for but this Fall I've got at least a half dozen if not more.

But, as in the past, the most common responsibility outside of school is working for pay. Of course school is more important than working at Foot Locker (Someone came to class in their refs outfit from that shoe store and we learned that they have removed the peas from all of their whistles so that they are merely ornamental. A typical assault by corporate America on the freedom of the working woman!). Yet the immediacy of work conflicts with the importance of school.

Consider the example of a young woman who failed World History with me last Fall and is back for another go. Last year she never bought the text the class and didn't make a regular habit of attending class. This year, she still has not activated her Salem State email account and still has not bought the book. Then she fell ill. We spoke one evening last week about what she needed to do to avoid a repeat of last year. She's already missed two classes on account of the illness and needs to get ahold of the book. Equally important she needs to get well and come to class, I reminded her. The problem she tells me with both of these needs is work. She can miss class, but she cannot miss work.

That really hurts. Sure, it could be a dodge, an excuse for which any other would do as well. But knowing this student I don't think that's the case. Instead, the consequences of missing work are more immediate and potentially harsher than missing school. She's already given up playing sports for Salem State and has taken summer classes to get back on track. So somehow in America it is not worth the government paying a student $10.00 and hour to go to class, but it is worth letting Foot Locker pay that student $10.00 an hour to work at the mall. I guess we get the society we deserve.