Teaching History Backwards

Monday, 14th May 2007

Kevin Drum has a truly dreadful idea for the teaching of history. In some desperate (and almost certainly futile) bid to make it (dread word) "relevant" to the modern teenager, history should be taught backwards:

"Current events are intrinsically interesting, and learning about them make you genuinely curious about why the world ended up the way it did. If the lessons are structured with curiosity about causes in mind, this will make you interested in the Cold War, which in turn makes you interested in World War II, which in turn makes you interested in the Great Depression, etc. It's a solution to the most obvious problem of teaching history: without any context, why should a 16-year-old care about dusty topics like the Missouri Compromise or the rise of the labor movement?"

Where to begin? Daniel Larison has already taken a swing at Mr Drum:

"The job of the history teacher is to cause the students to take an interest in things that they would otherwise not be interested in. Some might call this process “education” and others might call it “broadening” the “minds” of students...Teaching isn’t supposed to be spoon-feeding students what they already like and then hope, miraculously, that this translates into an interest into other things."

Quite.

Drum's recommended approach, as Larison also points out, is profoundly ahistorical and misleading. History does not in fact travel along a straight line. It is not a series of linked events, each attached to its predecessor and successor in an endless chain that stretches back to the dawn of time. It's risky enough moving forwards through history, suggesting that event A caused event B which in turn led to event C. To do so in reverse - C was caused by B therefore B was caused by A - is even worse. It betrays history.

Because it doesn't work like that. To take but one obvious example, this backwards view of history brings pernicious hindsight to bear upon every significant historical event. It makes the past appear simple and, consequently, its inhabitant seem like simpletons when they take what we now perceive to have been disastrous decisions. Invading Russia! How could Napoleon have been so stupid? Didn't he know about the winter? Or, to take a particular favourite of mine, how could Neville Chamberlain have got it all so terribly wrong at Munich? As though it was obvious that he should or could have declared war upon Nazi Germany at that point.

This bastardised, backwards - and popular! - view of history, for instance, tends to trace the rise of the Nazis back to the Versailles Treaty but rarely remembers to contemplate the psychological impact of WW1 on Britain or France as though WW1 only had an impact on one country. This is many things but it's not proper history. Similarly, any attempt to understand the rise of the Nazi party without reference to a century of German nationalist thought is doomed to inadequacy, even if some of the intellectual currents disappeared from view for years at a time. One could go on...

And there's the rub. History is a messy, unpredictable place. Events and their consequences can disappear only to bubble up again unexpectedly. This can be tough to follow even if you approach history in a chronological fashion (not a necessary approach incidentally) let alone in some sort of reverse chronology.

I can't speak for how history is taught in American schools but if Drum is right and it's one of the most unpopular subjects then that reflects terribly upon American high school teachers and, frankly, absent any other considerations, would on its own be enough to convince me of the urgent need for proper school choice programmes.

In an previous post on this, Mr Drum asks "Which is more important: understanding the American Revolution or understanding the Cold War?" Well, I didn't know it was an either/or proposition, though I'd be reluctant to spend too much time on any post-1945 history simply for the very good reason that it's not really history yet.

Mr Drum also says it's hard for teenagers to "get very enthused" over long-ago debates that have "only the most tenuous connection to the present day". Well, again, I can't speak to the American curriculum, but thinking back to my own teenage history studies (granted, at boarding school, where we studied only three or four subjects in our final two years, taking four exams in each of them to gain our A-Levels) it seems to me the connections to today's world were clearly there, even if there was, mercifully, no effort made to push them down our throats.

Two survey courses stand out in particular: one on 16th century European history, the other on Tudor England. At first glance these might not seem terribly relevant (if you must insist upon that useless measuring stick) but, of course, they are (though if they weren't they would till be worth learning about for their own sake). This, after all, was the beginning to the modern nation state, complete with the first modern administrative systems and civil servants, the era of Reformation and Counter-Reformation in which religion, politics and imperial power were wrapped together in a complex world of shifting alliances; a world subject to dizzying new technologies and opportunities the impact of which could scarcely be guessed at. A world in tumult indeed, stretching from the Phillipines to the Baltic, from the Ottoman Empire to the New World... An earlier era of globalisation in fact...

It takes, I'd suggest, a pretty rotten history teacher to make this stuff boring. Maybe I was lucky. Maybe there really are just a lot of rotten history teachers out there.

But the joy of history is not to be found in working forwards or back in time, it's in the pleasure of understanding (or trying to at any rate) another time for its own sake; in empathising with the past and, sometimes, in seeing, in a flash of illumination, how two seemingly very distant and different events might be connected by an invisible chord or how perfectly sane, sensible decisions might produce entirely unintended and disastrous consequences twenty or thirty years later even if there's no straight line connecting them. In some respects history can't help but be an attempt to impose some sort of order upon chaos; but if it's to be true to itself it must respect that chaos and, in fact, relish the excitement of the hurly-burly of past events.