Education post #4 - History

In my experience, American history is taught with a focus on people and a stoic, immobile history. The myth of progress influences the tone of history, making it a calmer, almost intrinsically educative narrative from which to read and learn. If we are always progressing, all the decisions of the past must be good ones, making American history a morality tale with lessons for our lives today. Telling the story in terms of well-developed characters makes it easier to identify with, personal and potentially open to further change by people like those depicted. The second feature of American history teaching is the focus on people, partially a result of a representative democracy system that evaluates political choices primarily in terms of people and leaders. The most frequent decisions produced by political discourse involve those concerning the competence and character traits of individual people, elected as leaders. This pattern appears in discourse surrounding history, which looks at individual people as the movers and shakers of the political past. It sustains a myth of liberal individualism by identifying the locus of change in individual people, erasing from history the development of economic and cultural trends that lay the foundation for political possibility.

The degree to which this practice may have benefits is a function of the degree to which historical events are a product of the choices of specific people. Abu Ghraib, and Japanese Internment are both events which occurred as a result of the overwhelming influence of specific people. In a certain sense, teaching history through individual agents empowers pressure groups and protest on the people who do have their hands on the levers of power, who are susceptible to pressure. The human element of political tragedy makes them open to being read as contingent. However, the underside of this is the rhetoric of evil that suggests that catastrophic atrocities occurred as the result of a corrupt psyche or pure evil of one person. In many ways, the people committing terrible acts are just making what seems to be the right decision at the time, trying to get by. Who and what we see in historical events matters to the meaning and potential for events in the future.

Duncan