Many state legislatures have passed laws banning the teaching of “critical race theory,” even though most legislators don’t know what it is. Many have banned the use of “The 1619 Project,” which puts the African-American experience at the center of U.S. history. Many have prohibited teaching “divisive concepts,” which presumably means anything controversial. The people passing these laws say they want “patriotic history,” the kind they learned as children, where America was the land of the free and brave, where nothing bad ever happened and all the heroes were white men.
History, think the Neanderthals, is a list of facts and battles and names to be memorized and recited.
But, writes Peter Greene, that’s not history at all. History, he writes, is a conversation.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Years ago, when my father retired, he took on the family tradition of diving into our ancestry. One day in he burst into the room all excited that he found evidence that we were descendants of William the Conqueror. We all laughed and someone replied, “Who isn’t?” The bulk of the Hillside 1776 Curriculum is based on a fear that humans are far messier and more complicated than we can handle. The academic presentation of history too often ignores the back story that brings the biographies and failed empires to the fore. History is fascinating if the ugliness and complexity of cultural movements are allowed to seep into the story helping to explain the contradictions that we navigate today. If history is just dates, ideology, and conquering heroes, then we miss the opportunity to see the wonder of the whole. We lose the narrative of how we become who we are despite the machinations of a brutal man such as William the Conquerer.
I sure don’t remember our Government, History, and Social Studies being taught that way — not even in Texas — in the 50s and 60s. In the midst of Atomic Anxiety, the Cold War, Joe McCarthy, the Red Scare, ad nauseam … I remember our teachers doing their level best to set us on course through all those times with the values of democracy, the arts, humanity, and science. A bit glossed over here and there for sure but the ideals shone through and showed us the way to realize them better in the future.
I wonder if the Neanderthals did history. I mean the real Neanderthals. Did they tell stories of their past. Did they say: “You should have seen me beat up that Cro Magnon man.” Did the women suggest: “I was lucky. I had a Denisovan mate.”
Greene claims we are hard wired for history. I think he is correct. We are also hardwired to the pack behavior common in the animal world. History is a part of that pack behavior. That is why we had to wait so long for modern history to be born in the person of Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, and the other Analles historians of the 1920s. They believed that history should seek truth, take all things seriously, and lead to a deeper understanding of humanity. Similar movements in academic history gave birth to modern study of the past. Today, history is an argument about what really happened. To those of us who love it, the argument can be at once great fun and very serious. It is a way to define the values of society in terms of the idea of fairness and morality.
This last aspect of history is where the controversy comes from. Groups want to emphasize the things of history that they feel are important to their group. We are, after all, pack animals. Stories important to our pack is what we want to hear. Perhaps we are not so far from the Neanderthals when it comes to history. To be civilized, we should learn to hear each other’s history. But what is some history supports hate?
“Today, history is an argument about what really happened.”
“About what really happened” is a falsehood that can never be turned into a truth. At best, we get glimpses into the past, always incomplete as to “what really happened.”
Now that doesn’t mean we ought not attempt to “get history straight”–as we can with what we have learned. But we should realize that it is never complete and “about what really happened” as we don’t have all the information available to be able to do so and there is always the possibility that later information may crop up to alter, add to said history.
I suspect that you are close to “what really happened” with the Neanderthals in regards to history.
Duane: I agree completely with the idea that we cannot know reality in any past. Still, historians in the modern tradition care about a clear picture of history, whereas writers in the past of historical remnants like Song of Roland (a medieval heroic tale) are not written as the same type of literature. Modern historians suggest that their research has given them a specific picture of the past, and they invite the reader to follow the footnotes they provide as see if they get the same picture. there is a difference.
That said, you could not be more correct. History as a perfect picture of the past is an impossibility. Stories, however, are impossible to avoid. We are hard wired to tell stories, some of which are about the past.
It is impossible to know with certainty what happened in the past, even relying on eyewitnesses. Historians put together the facts and theories that make sense to them, and then they debate with historians who see the events differently. That’s why history is a discussion
Once again, people who don’t support the existence of public schools are imposing more ridiculous mandates on public schools.
Just once, could we get public school policy set by people who actually value public schools and public school students? People who intend to contribute something positive to our schools?
Let’s review the ed reform “contributions” to the public schools they don’t support since the start of the pandemic. Mask controversies, vaccine controversies, ginned up panic over “CRT” and more expansion and mindless cheerleading of charter schools and private school vouchers.
They contribute nothing of practical value to our schools. It’s a real disservice to public school students. They deserve actual advocates instead of an ideologically driven “ed reform movement” that works against their schools.
Now that we’ve spent the last year on the ed reform priorities of starting fights in school districts over masks and and vaccines and “CRT” and expanding charters and vouchers, perhaps some of the tens of thousands of public employees we’re paying in state government could actually contribute something positive to any public school, anywhere?
Is this it? This is what we’re paying for from people who work on “public education”? We need new employees. I suggest looking for them outside this echo chamber. Haven’t gotten a real good return on our investment in terms of public school students.
The conversation metaphor is a good one. Why? Because in conversation, new facts and perspectives emerge, and these provide a check on mythmaking. Many years ago, Hayden White wrote an important essay called “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” in which he made the provocative claim that we assume that we understand a historical event when we impose upon the facts a narrative structure, with a protagonist and antagonist(s) and a plot that is the working out of a conflict (inciting incident, rising action, climax (point of highest intensity of the conflict), crisis (the turning point in the fortunes of the main character), falling action, resolution, denouement. David Coleman got it completely wrong when he denigrated the writing of personal narratives in school, for he failed to understand (he failed to understand a lot of things) that narrative is a primary means by which we make sense of the world. But the fact that we understand history by turning it into narrative, by mythmaking, is not the entire story, of course. Our narratives are checked by facts. That’s why the current push by the Republican Party to prevent facts of U.S. history from being taught is so dangerous. This legislating of what cannot be taught turns history to propagandistic purposes by preventing the vetting of historical narratives in light of verifiable facts.
As I write this, the Ukrainian people are fact checking the mythical version of Russian/Ukrainian history that Putin has been peddling.
You sure that the Ukrainians aren’t fact choking on that Putin history. Choking on their own blood!
The murder by Russian forces of Ukrainian citizens, including children, continues unabated.
When you see the brutal shelling and destruction of Ukrainian villages that have no military assets, it is sickening.
“…that narrative is a primary means by which we make sense of the world.”
How true. So many stories. Some seem more important than others. Some seem to validate the present and its zeitgeist. Others are just a fascination.
Friday night a group of us old time music folks got together for a bit of music. My old friend Bill told me a good story from his distant youth. Bill is about 80, I guess. He was born in Chickamauga, Georgia. He told me of a man who was about 90 when he was 6. For some reason this old man told him of going onto the battlefield during this civil war battle. He had, disobeying his mother, gone down to where the fighting was. I guess he must have been reminded of this memory because he had done this when he was about the same age as Bill was when he was telling the story. He recalled touching a man he thought was dead, only to hear the man cry out. He left quickly and ran home.
It reminded me of a short story by Ambrose Bierce.
That Bierce story is one of the finest ever written. Extraordinarily powerful.
The conversation about human existence
is never, ever settled. But, oh, how we
love to settle it. We decide the “true”
story of human existence, the “steps”
to be fully human, to become our best
selves , and we use that story to define
ourselves. We fight like hell against
any different information, any different
interpretations, any new perspectives.
Even though we can never view any moment,
any event, any slice of human experience
in 360 degrees and infinite time, we
insist, as per Dewey’s Pedagogic Creed
statement of 1897,
Every teacher is a social servant set
apart for the maintenance of the proper
social order and the securing of the
right social growth. In this way the
teacher is always the prophet of the
true God and the usherer in of the
true kingdom of heaven.
So when it comes to
checking narratives with “facts”,
does the “proof in the pudding”
indicate who benefits and who
suffers? Is this the
“proper social order, the right
social growth”?
Say, whatever happened to those Neanderthals, anyway?😀
We’re still around. We just blend in better now, what with modern shaving equipment.
😀
I’ll say this: I will likely spend the rest of my life trying to figure out what exactly happened in 2016. I will never succeed. History is a puzzle with missing pieces.
It’s easy. Many were persuaded (conned?) into believing that the tRump was a “game changer”, an outsider who would take down the powers that be. I can understand why many voted for him the first time, especially with Americans’ mind-numbing adoration of the celebrity world. Celebrity must be good!
Now, after four years I have no idea why anyone would vote for the conman again. Delusional? Cult followers? Insane?