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.