Harry Marks wrote:DWill, you ignorant slut. Interpretation is "meaning" and "relevance." However, I think a strong case could be made for letting students construct opposing interpretations. "Wilson was enlightened and ahead of his time on collective security, even if he was socially reactionary." vs. "Wilson was arrogant and obsessed with his own righteousness rather than working with the forces acting in history," or some such contrast. Neither should be endorsed by the teacher, and that way they begin to learn that there are many ways to interpret a set of facts.
Well pardon my sluttishness, Chevy Chase! You're the one who might be wading into history teaching, not me, and I think that's a good thing. I might go nuts with internal debating before I could ever broker this subject with 25 adolescents. Needing to take into account the differences between freshmen and seniors, intellectually, plus the variations of learning styles, literacy, and analytic ability within a grade--I wish you luck and success if you do it. History seems the most difficult of subjects to me. I can understand why teachers want to make it rather cut-and-dried, just the facts, ma'am. I'm not set against that approach entirely, either. How does anyone get into her head the basic outline of what happened, so that she doesn't end up completely clueless telling Jay Leno that Churchill was a great Civil War general?
Harry Marks wrote:DWill wrote:I also have enjoyed the Big History approaches of Jared Diamond and Noah Yuval Harari.
Ha! See, interpretation is wonderful. Actually, I am thinking I also enjoy finding flaws in those "big history" sweeping narratives. Though often that amounts to finding the exceptions that prove (i.e. "probe") the rule.
Now I have to wriggle out of an inconsistency (gulp). Big History is the biggest sweeper of all. With my fuzzy use of the word 'interpretation' I think I had in mind
moral interpretation, which BH seems to avoid pretty well since it hardly mentions individuals at all and floats above moral judgment.
Harry Marks wrote:DWill wrote: The gain, if any, would have to relate to national heritage. The textbooks aim to give students a sense of our heritage, and there seems to be little sense if the heritage is not presented as positive.
Yes, I suppose, some positive heritage is a valuable resource, for each of us as well as for the mutual commitments that hold us together. I appreciate the Howard Zinn-ish critiques of the heritage narratives, but I don't think the critique is very valuable if you don't understand the basis for the claims of the patriotic view.
Another way of looking at the heritage question would be to, for example, speak of our treatment of native peoples as much a part of our heritage as our great Declaration. That would hurt, but maybe it should. What troubled me most about Zinn was the lack of context, the implication that America's flaws were unusual aberrations in societies and showed America as being worse by comparison. History should be taught comparatively. There, I've got something to stand on (for now).
Harry Marks wrote:DWill wrote:I'd like to see textbooks draw no general conclusions about any figure, not attempting to reconcile contradictions, because usually they can't be reconciled.
I see. This is perhaps the basis of your view that I objected to above. I agree with you up to a point. Because there are many things going on at once, no single fact or incident represents confirmation or disconfirmation of a general tendency.
How about trying on this as a distinction to guide teaching: is history class to be about historiography or history? I'm thinking that in a basic sense historiography increases with the age and intellectual ability of the students. Earlier on it is mostly about what we think we know of the facts.
Harry Marks wrote:DWill wrote: I can see that it would be rewarding for students to explore the forces and pressures that existed to make Wilson think a suspension of basic constitutional rights was needed. Emphasis being as much on these forces as on Wilson himself as leaning toward tyranny.
Yes, I think this is exactly right. Ability to understand the forces at work, and to put oneself into the mindset of the various players, is a vital skill for critical thinking, about history but also about human interaction going forward.
Perhaps related to this point, history is going to make students have strong feelings of sympathy or antipathy and of side-taking. Those are signs of engagement, at least. How does a teacher avoid stifling these feelings while encouraging students to go deeper, where they might find reasons to acknowledge feelings others have about the matter? I was thinking about the Southern argument that the CW was about state rights, not slavery. I'm pretty sure that slavery was the key point of conflict, but was state rights just something the South cooked up for cover? I don't think that is true, either. All of us need to be willing to take an empathetic look at the other side.
Edit: In the first line of the post, I should have said, of course., "Dan Aykroyd." So does historical error creep in.