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This week, I'm finding some of the best writing in the academic blogosphere that I've seen in a long time. See, there's an excellent meme making its way around the academia and education blogosphere: "Why I teach history." The responses on some blogs have been so terrific and, I think, important that I thought I'd offer a round-up here.
New Kid on the Hallway writes,
I also teach history to help students learn that there's more than one way to view the world and that they themselves and their experiences are not the measure of all things. One of the things I've started telling students is that when a source confuses them, that's probably one of the best signs that it's telling us something important about how people in the past are different from people today. Because while I think history requires skills and you can't just "do" history just because you can read a history book, I also don't think history is like nuclear physics; the readings I assign are not usually incomprehensible (my apologies to nuclear physicists). When students are confused by something, 99% of the time it turns out they're not really confused by what the source says; they're just confused about why someone would act that way/think/say such a thing. Et voila - a teachable moment, as the saying goes.
[...]
I firmly believe that to be a responsible, respectful citizen of the world, you have to be able to recognize that not everyone sees the world the way that you do - and that doesn't make them wrong. In fact, they probably have just as good reasons for seeing the world the way they do as you do for seeing the world that you do. So I want students to understand that historically, there have been a lot of ways to organize society and live life that don't look a lot like the modern U.S., and that each of those have been reasonable responses to the circumstances in which those people found themselves. This doesn't mean I require students to accept all ways of living as equally desirable; just because I can understand that there are cultural reasons behind, for instance, female genital mutilation, doesn't mean I accept it as a valid practice. Even though I don't, however, I think you have to understand something in order to change it. Academic freedom is crucial to this - we need to be able to understand even practices we disagree with on their own terms. So we can't just label something "evil" and not try to understand it further.
Squadratomagico weighs in with another very thoughtful post--you should go read all of it--but here's an excerpt:
I love teaching history because I believe it implicitly raises the possibility of counterfactual narratives. I don’t explore counterfactuality in the classroom, but I know some students are thinking about these issues on their own. The ability to imagine alternate social, political, economic, religious, etc. directions within history can, I think, lead to the ability to imagine alternate configurations for current social, political, economic, religious, etc. conditions. The study of history can train the individual to question reality; to question the authority of received cultural (and parental) expectations, hopefully in productive ways. I believe this can be empowering.
Historiann's first response is an interesting and compelling one:
Because I love my country, and know that it is strong enough to reckon honestly with the fact that it hasn’t always lived up to its own ideals, and that that reckoning will only make it better and stronger. Contrary to right-wing propagandists, most professional American historians have devoted their lives to researching and teaching a subject they love. Historiann has always thought that the accusation that the Professoriate were a substantial subset of the hate-America-first crowd was clearly a projection. Only right-wingers appear to enjoy obsessing about people and ideas they hate.
(Historiann appears to be a relative newcomer to the blogosphere, but she's off to a ridiculously strong start. Definitely go check out her blog.)
Tenured Radical also addresses politics:
Because it helps students who feel invisible or inarticulate among other students talk about their own ideas, become part of our community, and take a big step towards becoming engaged intellectuals. At a school like Zenith, this can often mean students from poor families in a population that is mostly made up of very privileged people; conservative students on a liberal campus, who are often reduced to bromides and declarations of belief
