The History Teacher's Manifesto: The Purpose of History in Education
"A spectre is haunting liberal democracy - the spectre of its own collapse. Democrats have everything to lose but for their education. Voters of all countries, participate."
A spectre is haunting liberal democracy - the spectre of its own collapse. Standing at a century's distance one can still hear the warning from Weimar. All the time, through our solidarity with Ukraine, the world is still living with the consequence of Russia's Provisional Government failing. Democracy does not extend in perpetuity. The combustion of democracy is always cataclysmic and the democratic process is diamond-precious.
Everyday since the 2008 financial crisis our societies have watered, weeded, and weighed our political fruits into the culture war garden. If a cohesive analysis of what went wrong had ever been achievable, then the pillars of bipartisanship splintered and shattered into shifting narratives of who was most at fault. As the walls of this not-so-wondrous hanging garden have crumbled from within, democracy has become besieged by blaming someone else: first it was social media, then it was the electoral system, finally it was hostile outside influencers. Now, the very reporting of fact is blurred into opinion that can then be cancelled.
The mirage of democratic inevitability was doused by the Syrian Civil War. The illusion of democratic invincibility eroded by the Capitol Insurrection. The fantasy of democracy in perpetuity destroyed three-fold by the CCP suppression of Hong Kong and Uighur populations, disintegration of the Afghan government and imperial Russian invasion of Ukraine.
For all the while, we have not yet reached the end of history; this Orwellian inversion of not democracy winning out - but instead that it is extinguished into autocracy. Our first line of defence in ensuring democracy continues is in our history classrooms. This is not a manifesto for the history curriculum, for the topics and/or themes that we might consider teaching, but fundamentally an acknowledgement of historical skills. It is this manifesto's belief that the world revolves around how we, as individuals and collectives, interpret the incomplete and ever changing information presented to us. This is the process of building history, but even more paramount it is the task of constructing our society of tomorrow.
Insofar as History is indelible, that is to say that something in the past once happened, it only lives through interpretations. In the history classroom, students need to interact with many different historians and breakdown how each historians has built their conclusion. Most fundamentally, students need to discover that the same data is used to construct contrasting narratives and that this is beneficial to our collective understanding. Historical happenings are fact; attributing an historical meaning is informed opinion. With students discovering the world through algorithmic TikTok micro-immersions, historical skills can navigate them on their path to democratic participation through social cohesion.
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Our first distinction to be drawn in a history classroom is the difference between a source from an interpretation. In real terms a source is the description of an event that we present our students. Whereas an interpretation is the judgement we impose on the event. We therefore need students to understand, and demonstrate, that historians use a collection of sources to build an interpretation. Oftentimes students will start with an interpretation and try and work back to front, jigsaw puzzling the sources to meet their own pre-concieved evaluation - what they need to discover is that history, like the present, is not going to fit into a complete and perfect narrative. Therefore students need to be taught to escape their own micro-immersion echo chamber through actively seeking to build their own interpretations of the world using a broad and varied selection of sources.
This means that how students are taught to analyse sources is front and centre to how they engage with the world around them. The process of teaching sources is remarkably straight forward, ask students to consider: content, own knowledge and provenance. Whether a student is interacting with a source in our classrooms, or interrogating their social media feeds it is essential for our democracy that they are thinking: 1) 'What is the content of this source?'/'What is this source telling me?' 2) 'How does my own knowledge help to prove, or disprove, how accurate this source is?' 3) 'What is the provenance of this source?'/'Who made it, when, where, why?'/ Finally, 'how useful is this source to me?'
When students in the real world have been confronted with a happening that has stimulated them into wanting to form an opinion, they need to realise that their opinion needs to become an interpretation: that they have engaged with multiple sources in a meaningful way and answered our content, own knowledge and provenance questions. It is then that they need to know that for their interpretation to be insightful they need to have identified distinguishing factors about the happening in question, as well as linking it with similar previous happenings. The process that the student needs to go on is to categorise this happening by recognising the causes, consequences and significance of what has happened. This then needs to be thoughtfully linked with similarities and/or differences, changes and/or continuities between the happening that the student is engaging with and other similar events. This takes students on a journey to identify, describe and explain the precedent that this stimulus is interacting with. Only then has the student's opinion ascended from opinion into interpretation. Only will thoughtful interpretations safeguard democracy and contribute to the advancement of our society.
Our classrooms must teach democracy. History is best placed to take a leading role.