Truth, Justice, and the American Way

I did decide to stop reading the Shakespearean Whodunits.  Alas, they just aren't well written enough! But I may go back to them in the future, so I'm hanging on to the book.

I'm about 2/3 done with Telling the Truth about History, and so far it's pretty interesting, though a bit slow-going for the bus because it requires more concentration that the typical narrative. It's argument is that history as a subject has undergone changes over the centuries, especially since the 18th century in Europe (and by transfer, America), where the "Enlightenment," as it was called, made it possible for people to study the world around them without the restrictions of (mostly Christian) religious doctrine, and that those changes have brought us to a place where unchecked relativism (this was in 1994) is undermining the power of science to help us understand our world and ourselves.

The Enlightenment's promotion of empiricism developed science into what the authors call Hero-Science, a discipline that rescued learning and knowledge of the universe from the dark ages of the past when people were not encouraged to describe the physical world as it was, when people like Galileo could not publish his findings about the true nature of the heavens without serious consequences from the religious establishment.

The belief in science as heroic continued to dominate Western thinking well into the fifties, when nuclear science and its terrifying power started to change people's attitude toward science.  Perhaps science wasn't as heroic as they thought; maybe the applications of scientific inquiry and experimentation and discovery required intervention from humans, some restrictions placed on how far and how fast science could progress. According to the authors, how this relates to history is this: at the turn of the 19th century, when history was becoming a legitimate subject for school study (along with English), Hero-Science was also predominant, so scientific principles and the scientific method were applied to the study of history, with the result that history became the search for factual truth rather than a collection of stories about the past.

You may think that this is how history has always been taught--it's certainly the way I learned it in school--but it is in fact an invention of the 19th century.  Dickens' character Thomas Gradgrind is only a slightly exaggerated figure--many a teacher of the past believed that memorizing the dates and places and "facts" of battles, territorial conquests, and political contests was the proper way to study history. A great example of that is in one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books: as a high school student trying to get a teaching certificate in 1880s South Dakota, young Laura is expected to memorize a long, fact-filled account of American History and recite it in front of her classmates. Even today, though we no longer go in for recitation, this fact-digesting-and-regurgitating method of studying history is employed by public school teachers.

Since the 1960s, however, that approach to pedagogy has changed.  Now there is a much more skeptical eye trained on the past; the civil rights era taught us how many people's stories had been left out, how many facts of the past (some sad, some sordid) had been ignored or actively obliterated. The drive to include those stories and facts changed the discipline of history to something more akin to social history.  And once included, the voices of some of those previously left out of the official history (minorities and women, for instance) made for a much less heroic account.  The standard, monochromatic story of our nation's founding, development, and attainment of greatness slowly becomes a bit tarnished, disappointing and, in some instances, frightening. 

Multiculturalism remains controversial, but there's no mistaking its impact on how we see ourselves and our past as a country. One result, for instance, is that we are now ambivalent about Columbus Day: once seen by many as a celebration of the founding of our country, it's now also seen as marking the beginning of the end for indigenous Americans.

According to Appleby et al, all this has brought us to where we were in 1994, the year Telling the Truth About History was published.  The understanding that the history we all learned in school is incomplete and therefore wrong led us to think that all history heretofore written by the dominant groups of our society--mostly white, male, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class folk--must be discarded as biased and even harmful.  The authors believe this sea-change has happened, but they also believe that this new way of looking at mainstream teaching has gone too far, that truth can still be obtained from scientific inquiry, even considering the biases of those who do the investigations and tell us about them.  This is where I am in the book right now.  I'm looking forward to learning about how we can have it both ways: both truth and justice, if you will, in the American way of learning.

I'll let you know how it turns out.  Until next time . . .