HISTORICITY (was already taken)

The American public education system and history teaching

So, here is part 2 as promised. I should, however, warn you that although I started off by writing about the problems with how American history (I’m not even going to touch on Ancient, Hellenistic, Medieval, Early Modern, Modern, and non-Western history) is taught in American public schools, I realized as I was typing that I was acturally addressing a much larger issue. As a result, this post ended up being about the structural problems in the American public educational system as they relate to the teaching of history instead of simply the teaching of history. Thus, this post is kind of more public policy-ish than academic. I promise you, next post I’ll be back to posting pure history.

There are two main structural issues at play here: the decentralized nature of the public educational system, and standardized testing. Public education is not run, as such, by the national government; it is run by state governments. The curricula are set by the state governments, and there are in-state variations by county and district.

Further, curricula are often determined by textbooks, and textbook content is often determined by Texas, a state with no historians on its state Board of Education (for more on the influence of the Conservative segment of the Texas Board of Ed on textbooks and curricula, check out this article). This creates a situation in which curricula setting is not only out of the hands of historians, but in the hands of people who strive to insert modern political ideologies into history curricula, and in which no two schools in America are teaching their students the exact same thing.

This problem is compounded by the fact that public schools are funded by property taxes, meaning that public schools pretty much exist in a state of legal economic segregation. So if you can’t afford to live somewhere with high property taxes, you live in a district without a lot of money for things like resources and teacher salaries, and are thus distinctively not on a level playing field with students whose parents can afford steep property taxes.

This leads us to item number two: standardized testing. Now, I’m just going to put it out there: I hate standardized testing. In my opinion, standardized testing is to education what Toby Flenderson is to the paper industry, but worse.

Standardized testing forces teachers to teach to a pre-set body of material which de-emphasizes critical thinking and emphasizes fact regurgitation. The material teachers are forced to convey to students in preparation for these exams, are thus, as far as history goes, are often problematic, inaccurate, and force events into false black and white dichotomies. And this does not just go for state standardized tests; it goes for AP exams as well. I can’t speak for IB because my school didn’t offer IB.

The United States uses certain standardized tests to determine which schools will receive funding. Schools are closed and teachers are fired if they don’t produce satisfactory results from their students. This functions to further victimize impoverished districts.

And that is how you get students in a college level American History course at a very selective university who don’t know what the Protestant Reformation is, where/when slavery began, and anything about the First Nations in the pre-Revolutionary period. This is how you get a nation full of people who think that criticism of Columbus Day and Thanksgiving is PC bullshit, and this is how you get a political party which pushes to remove slavery from the curriculum.

I also think that American History should be taught from the Native American perspective, but that’s another post entirely.

Now before I finish this, I just want to clear two things up. First, I am not anti-public education. I think public education is amazing. I attended public schools from second through twelfth grade, I attended a SUNY school for college, and I am currently attending a public university. It is because I value public education so much that I am criticizing it so harshly.

Second, I am not criticizing teachers. I think teachers are some of the most, if not the most, undervalued professionals in the United States of America. I think that, if they were allowed to follow a curriculum set by experts which made room for critical thinking and did not force them to teach to a test, and if they were allowed to teach in systems which existed on level playing fields, they’d be able to get far better results and produce students who understand how to think critically about the world around them.

I welcome the input of American educators, non-American educators, policy-types, soon-to-be educators, current students, and non-American students on the content of this post. And now I am going to quit History and Library Science and enroll in the School of Public Policy…

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Yes, history is important

A job application I submitted last month asked me to write an essay about why history is still relevant today.

Every day when I am cruising the history/everything tag looking for stuff to feature, I see all these posts which say things like “I just don’t understand why history is important,” or which quote anti-intellectual post-modernists and philosophers in order to prove that studying history is worthless.

It was those posts in mind that I began to write my essay. And for that reason, I’ve decided to post a shortened version of that essay (it was for a museum archives position so the part I cut out is all about archives) to this blog.

What I’ve written below is why, in my opinion, history is necessary. Even if those philosophical and post-modern types are right about ~reality~, this is why we should still try our damnedest.

History will always maintain its relevance because the present will always be the result of history. Every person, every construct, every nation, and every conflict extant today exists as the direct result of the centuries of interactions which preceded them. If these interactions which make up history are not understood, the present cannot be understood, and if the present cannot be understood, the lives and experiences of billions of people will not be understood.

Last week I was reading about the Second Congo War. Despite the words on the page in front of me, I had no idea what the conflict was really about, what its causes were, and what it truly meant to the people involved. I could not comprehend the conflict because I do not know the post-colonial history of the Congo region. Due to my lack of historical knowledge, the lives and experiences and sufferings of millions of people are gone from my consciousness, simply because I didn’t know the history. 

This sort of erasure and misunderstanding fueled by historical ignorance happens every day. Schoolchildren are not taught about the extent to which the United States was built on the backs of African slaves, Native peoples, and indentured servants. Longtime residents of New York State have no idea that it was once a slave state and that slave owners worked very hard to keep humans enslaved after they were legally emancipated. People of both genders undervalue the feminist movement because they are not taught about the history of women and gender relations.

The examples are endless, but the common theme in all of them is that historical ignorance breeds erasure, and that erasure perpetuates the marginalization of historically oppressed peoples.

For this reason, a full, honest understanding of history is necessary to the development an honest, equal, meritocratic society, the type of society the United States of America and other “Western” nations purport themselves to be. In that sort of society, no person is denied their past, and no person is denied the ability to read about their racial, ethnic, or gender past in the classroom.

A society in which the mainstream historical canon is limited to the story of the wealthy elite is a society populated by people who will never understand why certain populations remain marginalized. Today is the result of history, and an honest understanding of history is absolutely vital to the development of a society free from systemic oppression. 

Thus, even if reality isn’t real and everything is an impenetrable construct, it is better to try to use history as a tool of liberation and as a way to create a well-educated and responsible populace than to allow students to graduate from our high schools thinking that slavery was begun in 1620 by the Dutch in Jamestown.

And on that note, I think this post is secretly part 1 of a larger post, so next up I’ll talk about things that are wrong with history education, at least in the United States of America.

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soapbox time

If you can, please sign this petition. Lawmakers in Arizona have banned public schools from teaching any courses with racial or ethnic themes. This is incredibly dangerous and (obviously) racist, and though I don’t know how much of an effect this petition will have I still urge you to sign it.

On a related note, the Tennessee Tea Party is fighting to remove mentions of slavery from textbooks, because they don’t want to see the Founding Fathers portrayed in a negative light. A nation which tries to erase unpleasant historical truths and keep the youth ignorant is an oppressive, unfree state, and I urge you all to fight this push for erasure in whatever way you can.

I will post about any further actions which can be taken against these initiatives as they come to my attention.

#occupyhistorycurricula?

Historical Narratives Regarding Class Structure in Medieval Western Europe

I was reading one of my favorite books—The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000 by Chris Wickham—the other day, and I came upon a certain passage. Now, before you read the passage, I want you to think back to the history you were taught in elementary school or primary school or whatever you want to call it. What were you taught about the Middle Ages in Western Europe?

I was taught about it in my seventh grade Social Studies class. They showed us charts like this one

and this one

to explain the Medieval socioeconomic power structure. After showing us the charts, they had us read maybe ten boring textbook pages, and then fast forwarded into the Renaissance. This left students with the idea that the entire Medieval period was homogeneous in terms of the distribution of power.

Obviously that idea is bullshit, but the passge below sums up how and why it is bullshit so beautifully that I just had to type it into this post:

Neustria, particularly the well-documented Paris region, where estates tended to be large blocks of land…peasants less often owned their own land, and village autonomy would have been quite difficult. Most of the villages we know about around Paris are indeed documented as a result of monastic estate surveys—polyptychs—which are a feature of the Carolingian period. The estates of the monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Pres in the Paris suburbs often contained whole villages…which were entirely dependent on their landlord…The peasants listed in them would have lived their lived largely by landlordly rules, and even the markers for local status would largely have depended on the different relationships each peasant family had with its landlord, the amount of land it held, the amount of rent and services it paid, and the free or unfree status of each of its members.

These Parisian villages were regarded as typical of the whole of Western Europe by historians of two generations ago. Now that other sorts of document collections have been looked at in more detail, however, they seem the opposite: they were highly unusual in the early Middle Ages in the degree to which peasants in them were dependent on landlords. In other parts of the Continent, the fragmented landowning of aristocrats meant that very few villages had a single landlord, and most such settlements had a mixture of inhabitants: unfree and free tenants, tenants who owned a little land as well, small peasant proprietors who owned all the land they cultivated, medium owners…who did not cultivate their own land (and were thus not peasants) but who were not rich enough to operate politically very far outside their own village…These mixed villages were dominated by their richest inhabitants, who were not necessarily peasants, but village collectivities could have a considerable practical authority, and peasants could have a voice in that.

So basically put, our entire understanding of early Medieval power structures up until about 20 years ago was the result of immaculate record keeping in one very specific area in Western Europe. That is like going to a wealthy suburb of Manhattan, observing class interaction within that suburb, and assuming that those interactions are representative of every single wealthy community in the United Sates of America. 

Fascinating really, to see where pervasive historical narratives originate.

Also, I know I have recommended it before on this blog, but you should all really read that book.

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Historical Societies, Living Museums, and Historical Revisionism

I am a big fan of historical societies and living museums. I think they are vitally important institutions and, at their best, help people experience and access history in a way they never could in the classroom. However, more often than not, they provide a highly idealized, one note, overly simplistic version of history which erases many of the colonial inhabitants of the area.

In the spring semester of my junior year of college, I took a class called Politics and Archaeology. The professor opened the class with a discussion of the Colonial Williamsburg living museum site. We discussed how, in the post-war era when patriotism was at an all time high, the site was perfect and pristine. There was not one rock out of place, not a mention of slavery, and white people as far as the eye could see.

As time rolled on, as the post-war shine wore off, people began to look at the Williamsburg site more critically. They asked why the streets of colonial Williamsburg were so tidy when that was not at all representative of what a colonial town would look like. They asked why there were no slave re-enactors and no real mentions of slavery.

The changes in Colonial Williamsburg’s presentation of history reflected the changing attitudes of American citizens towards their own past. And as American attitudes shape the presentation of history given by historical societies, historical societies, in turn, shape people’s understanding of history.

I live in a small town in the mid-Hudson Valley region of New York State. My town and the surrounding areas were settled by Dutch Walloons—now called Huguenots—in the mid seventeenth century who left Europe to escape from Catholic persecution and be able to practice their Protestant faith freely.

It is a small town, and there are still people walking around bearing the names of the founders—so to speak—of the town. We have a very active local historical society, and I have been volinterning (I trust that those of you who have taken a position with no salary in order to gain experience/because it was the only thing available understand what that word means) with them for about two months now. The other day I trained to be a tour guide, or “historic interpreter,” as those in the ~biz~ call them.

A big issue we discussed is how historical societies across New York State do a really terrible job of addressing slavery in their tours. The historical narrative taught in schools is that the South had slaves and it was bad and the North didn’t have slaves and it was good. And that narrative is perpetuated in the tours those societies provide to their visitors.

In reality, New York State was a massive slave state, and even considered siding with the South when they declared their intention to secede from the Union. When residents of New York heard that Emancipation was coming, many slave holders bought their slaves down to Long Island, and had them shipped down south so they wouldn’t be out the money. And then they fiddled with the laws and threw up road blocks that would keep many enslaved for another 49 years after they were supposed to have been freed.

Even my historical society in a town known for its progressiveness is only just beginning to directly implement the presentation of this reality into our tours. And that is disheartening; historical societies should be actively fighting against harmful narratives of history, not perpetuating them.

It is the responsibility of historical societies, like museums, to present all the aspects of a story to the public, and not just the ones which make us feel good about ourselves. And the fact remains that nobody seems willing to address the American Indians who populated the area before the Europeans showed up.

I do love my local historical society, and I think it’s doing an excellent job of combating the focus on and idealization of white men in American History, and this post is not meant as a bitchfest about that society in particular; it’s merely a critique of historical societies and living museums in general. Watch out for a similar post about the manner in which American History is taught in public schools.

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