teaching american history

I suppose at the foundation of any history curriculum must be the articulation of the basic value of such a curriculum. The basic value of the California standards is unstated, at least on the page I cited in the previous essay, but I think it is fairly clear--the purpose of history education is to enable the student to become a functioning member of a democratic society, with an understanding of how the system "works" or has worked and of the central characters and events involved in the shaping of this society. This essay will argue, in contrast, that the purpose of history instruction is to introduce students to the methods and materials of historical knowledge. I will further argue that the end of historical knowledge is ignorance, and that when ignorance is presented in a careful manner, leads to intellectual maturity and insight that is transferable to other disciplines and to life in general.

The Nature of Historical Knowledge

Historical (past) knowledge is someone else's present and practical knowledge. It is knowledge that ought to be as simple to understand and explain as a fairly simple conversation. Whenever history seems too difficult it is because the presenter has not taken the care to divide the "chunks" of the past into an easily grasped conversation. We often don't have all, or many, of the "missing links" in order to tell a story that has a sense of completness to it; the next point deals with this dilemma. But there often is enough information to give us a window into the practical issues confronting people at various times and places in the past.

I would introduce students as quickly as possible into hand-written and printed accounts of things from the past. These hand-written accounts would be letters, diaries, newspapers, pictures, posters, and a host of other documents that were products of the period which you are studying. For example, when I was studying the role of Catholic and Protestant missionary work in the shaping of the Oregon country, I ran across a pleasant chart, called the Catholic Ladder, which was used as a teaching tool to evangelize the Indians by Father Francis Blanchet beginning in 1839. I could imagine making large copies of this Ladder, working through the specifics of it, and using it as a window into the world of mission work in the late 1830s. The idea of the Catholic Ladder is rarely if ever mentioned in standard histories even of Oregon, much less of the United States, but it is through a detailed document such as this that a window into worlds that only are words on paper in secondary sources can be opened.

That is, mission efforts are often briefly described in survey histories, and sometimes even respectfully handled, but are usually mentioned as follows: the missionaries came, they tried to convert the Indians, they failed and ended up educating the children of the White people. Ho-hum. Yawn. Back to sleep. But if you have an artifact from that era, along with a teacher with an interpretive capacity, you open horizons that have never been opened to the student.

So, What is The Goal?

If you pursue the method I suggest long enough, you end up having lots of particulars but not too many overarching explanatory texts or documents. That is, the student wouldn't leave my class with a sense that this democratic experiment had to turn out like it did or even that this democratic experiment was, necessarily, the best or even a wonderful system of government. You might know, however, that there were Catholic and Protestant Ladders, that the Whitman Massacre was interpreted in various ways over the years, that 19th century handwriting was not standardized until late in that century, that transcriptionists of primary documents often make mistakes, that 19th century statutes were drafted in ways different than the way laws are drafted now, and 101 other things that give one a genuine "look" into a past time and place. But every time you look at a specific document, you end up coming up with dozens of more questions that the document opens that you may or may not be able to answer with further research. That is, by examining the Catholic Ladder you are led to ask about the nature of the Catholic mission to the area, the way that mission contrasted with the Protestant, the ways that the missionaries from each tradition "got along" with each other, the nature of daily mission life, the way the missionaries related to or encouraged further settlement of the area, the role the played in the struggle for independence or statehood, etc. You answer one question and a dozen more open.

The end result of my method of historical investigation, then, is a deep sense that you know very little, if anything. You can identify some factoids, of course, that you know, but each of these factoids is only the tip of a larger iceberg of knowledge that may forever be hidden from you--either because you lack time to investigate, or texts and other testimony about the issue just aren't available to you. Rather than having that lack lead to despair, it can help us understand the limits of human knowledge, the way to ask critical questions of texts and ourselves, the humility that each of us should cultivate when faced with the huge and amorphous area of knowledge called "the past." We will be hesitant to jump on the band wagon of easy explanation not only for past things but also, probably, for present things. And, surprisingly enough, that capacity might make us more valuable citizens of this Democracy than a curriculum that explicitly tries to teach us a partisan and ideological approach to American history.

1984