More Uses and Abuses of History
A recent visit to the store brought me and my daughter face to face with the latest Halloween decorations. But not for long. The sorts of images lining the shelves there were so demented, so revolting, that I ushered my girl away from them just as fast as I could. Long gone are the standard witches and ghosts of Halloweens past; now, it seems like there is a competition to see which company can produce the most disturbing, psychopathic displays to strew across America’s neighborhoods. The goal no longer seems to amuse children with a fright, but to torment their imaginations with the most extreme ugliness that adults can conceive of.
I know how liable this is to make me sound like a curmudgeon, but these kinds of displays are just one more example of America’s disregard for the inner well-being of its children. In and of themselves, they might be dismissed as tokens of poor taste, but taken in conjunction with a host of examples from our media and culture, they serve as evidence of the almost inhuman hostility of our society towards the innocence of our children. And it is only against the backdrop of that hostility that we can understand the recent controversies regarding the teaching of American history.
These controversies have obviously given rise to incredible dissention among the public, with some claiming (falsely) that recent efforts to rewrite the curriculum merely represent an attempt to redress gaps in the historical record concerning the issues of slavery and racism, others responding (quite accurately) that in fact they constitute a poisonous ideology aimed at exacerbating racial tensions in the here and now. But what might be most revealing is what all parties to the debate seem to agree on: that the history students learn in class should and must contain a full accounting of all the horrors carried out in our nation’s past, without gloss or restraint. Even in those states that have passed laws against the teaching of so-called Critical Race Theory, the legislators passing those laws have gone out of their way to highlight the continuing mandates to teach about things like Jim Crow and segregation.
Grant that the evils of history – including the evils of our own nation’s history – should be taught, the manner and timing with which they should be taught are crucial. Too early and too explicit a relation of torture, massacre, and oppression can have a genuinely corrosive effect upon the spiritual development of a child, yet I have known first and second graders who have been taught in some detail about the atrocities of slavery and colonialism. This is as perverse as those plastic serial killers and rotted corpses I saw at the store, and demonstrates the same insouciance towards the healthy development of a child’s imagination. Who really believes that elementary school children are prepared to learn the details of such atrocities? Who doesn’t recognize the obvious need to shield them from learning too early about the cruelties men are capable of inflicting upon men? Anyone who cares about the spiritual equilibrium of a child strives to preserve their minds, for as long as possible, from the squalor, viciousness, duplicity, and brutality endemic to human life. That the persons in charge of our schools – like those in charge of our culture – are in a rush to acquaint young minds with these things betrays how little they care for the inner well-being of their students.
So there are obviously weighty qualifications that must be attached to any injunction concerning the teaching of the evils of our nation’s past. It is remarkable how small a place in the national conversation is given to the consideration of these qualifications. The first and most evident qualification concerns the proper age at which to introduce such material into the curriculum. It is not until high school, at the earliest, that students possess anything resembling the requisite maturity to digest such material. Yet even after this stipulation, there remain many important qualifications to make.
The whole tenor with which we present the record of man’s inhumanity is one such qualification. If we acquaint students with the savagery and masochism of which human beings are capable in order to alert them to the viciousness latent in human nature at large, then there is an important developmental aim to be derived from such instruction. But if the goal of teaching about past evils is to single out certain classes of people as the villains of history, and pretend that villainy is not within the potential of all classes of people, then such instruction is clearly pernicious. The only possible justification for teaching young minds about the horrid injustice that men have inflicted upon one another is to awaken them to an awareness of their own potential to carry out such injustices, and to begin to cultivate in their souls some resistance to that propensity. By classifying whole sections of the public as the victims of history, we actively prevent the youth belonging to those sections from arriving at such awareness, and insinuate into their minds a reflexive conviction in their own incapacity for injustice. The self-righteous violence which so many of our youth now readily resort to is perfect evidence of just how morally corrupting this mode of education can be.
One of the core principals of classical education is that no discipline is entirely partitioned from any other discipline, or from the superintending objectives of the school as a whole. No subject matter is to be approached without reference to the moral, intellectual, and spiritual development of students, which is the overriding imperative of all serious education. The content of a history curriculum is subject to this concern as much as it is subject to a concern for a factual relation of the past. After all, it is a shallow understanding of the discipline that supposes we can ever offer our students a wholly neutral record of the past, detached from any sort of philosophical commitments. There is always an act of interpretation that precedes the facts, and determines what is to be counted as a fact in the first place. A unit on the Great War might unfold in the context of illustrating the antiquated frailties of the old European alliances, in which case the facts prone to show up to the teacher will concern the diplomatic failures that precipitated and prolonged the conflict. Or it might unfold in the context of the rapid industrialization of the Western world, in which case the facts likely to show up will concern the ungodly slaughter carried out in the trenches by newly devised machines of war. Or it might unfold in the context of the spiritual sickness of the modern West, in which the testimonies of the War Poets will now show up as crucial facts. Of course, one could approach the topic in the light of all these concerns, attempting to encompass all these specifics, but then there will be less time to spend examining the Spanish Civil War, even though that conflict arguably captures the pattern of all subsequent Western politics and world affairs. There is simply no way to approach the facts of history absent some theoretical framework for recognizing them as facts – that is, recognizing them as worthy of attention – in the first place, and that framework ultimately determines what gets taught, and what does not get taught.
The theoretical framework through which the classical humanist tradition approached the reading of history, particularly in schools, was profoundly oriented towards ethical concerns. Authors as diverse as Herodotus, Tacitus, Joinville, Leonardo Bruni, and Macaulay all exhibit an unmistakable tendency to read history as a way of discovering the ordinary patterns of virtue and vice, in order to determine the sorts of things that make nations happy, and the sorts of things that lead nations to ruin. Those who taught these texts in schools assumed this meant that something could be extracted from the record of history – some design or form of human nature – that could be applied to a young person’s own moral development. They taught the past to learn how to benefit the present. If they leaned towards the heroic in the material they found fit for the consumption of their students, it was not because they wished to suppress the evils of the past or to distort the true record of the past. It was because they understood quite properly that young people desperately need models of the heroic to nourish their imaginations, that such models are few and far between – in contrast with cruelty and degradation, which are everywhere – and that some preponderance of goodness in education is required to remedy the preponderance of crudity in human nature. They dwelled at length on the virtues of certain historical figures, while giving short shrift – if any – to their vices, because they knew perfectly well that the imperfectly formed minds of their students would be inclined to dismiss the examples stemming from the virtues on account of the vices.
So in regards to the evils of slavery and racism in our own history, it would make very fruitful study for students to learn how a man as brilliant as Calhoun could have been deluded, by his refusal to question the premises of his own position, into defending the most inhuman form of oppression imaginable. It would certainly benefit students to learn about Frederick Douglass’ triumph over that oppression, and the exalted role he assigned to education in that triumph. An extremely enlightening conversation would ensue from questioning how Lee’s devotion to home and kin led him, through its single-mindedness, to embrace the more infamous cause in the war. There are indeed lessons of continuing application to be found in this material. The fact that such lessons play no part in the sort of curricula now being pushed in schools illustrates how little their advocates care for the sound development of young minds, and how preoccupied they are with advancing their own narrowly partisan prejudices instead.
The study of history – like the study of literature, or philosophy, or theology – is meant to improve the soul. The point of education is to improve the soul. The first principle of ministering to souls is the same as ministering to bodies: do no harm. Educators have a duty to prevent the psychological degradation of the children in their charge, and this means exercising a constant vigilance over the material presented to them. The fact that our schools are now under the dominion of persons with no sense of these fundamental duties – with outright contempt for these duties – is every bit as ghoulish and deranged as the most horrifying spectacle you are likely to encounter this season.