Comments on: Why teach and study history

By: Neville Morley

Neville Morley — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:15:59 +0000

I’m not sure whether this is cynical or idealistic, or a bit of both, but I regard my task as, at least in part, subversion: the students (or some of them, anyway) are simply here to jump through hoops in order to get ‘their’ 2.1 – but that means I get to mess with their minds and open their eyes to the world, whether they like it or not.

By: Richard Baron

Richard Baron — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:56:05 +0000

Ah, but how far to push the empathy thing, and how to define it? We are, of course, getting into Verstehen territory. I am reminded of Max Weber’s comment at the beginning of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, that one does not have to be Caesar in order to understand Caesar. But he does acknowledge that Nacherlebbarkeit can be useful.

On the other hand, perhaps one should not demand such philosophical precision when the question is the practical one of the techne of teaching history.

I am not sure that I would be too worried about different motives on different sides of the desk. After all, we get along well enough elsewhere in life by having different motives to participate in the same transaction. In the marketplace, the seller wants the money and the buyer wants the goods.

By: constantinakatsari

constantinakatsari — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 06:41:06 +0000

Richard,
in an ideal world I would havve liked the reasons for teaching to be the same as the reasons for learning. I like your views on empathy. Maybe I should strive in my classes to create more empathy. Sometimes we take for granted that the students are interested in the topic the same way as we are.

By: Richard Baron

Richard Baron — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 15:54:56 +0000

Constantina, I agree with your analysis, and with the contrast between the reasons that teachers may have and the reasons that students may have. Indeed, it may be hard for the students to appreciate the teachers’ reasons until they have studied quite a lot of history, and had quite a lot of experience of life, themselves. So one question is, Is there a connection between the two sets of reasons, or is it just a lucky co-incidence that teachers and students are differently motivated to engage in the same activity?

I think that there is a connection, but it is rather indirect. People do get excited by the past, when it is well-presented. Witness the crowds at Stonehenge with their audio guides, lapping up the little information that we have about its construction and use, or the audiences for television programmes. Why do people get excited? I think it is because we can empathise with people from the past. We could have been them, even though we could not now become them because we are aware of things of which they had no inkling. The past of Martians could not excite us in the same way, because we could never have been them.

That makes the connection. We can learn about ourselves, and make ourselves wiser, by considering other lives at other times. We explore possibilities in our current context by considering actualities in earlier contexts, actualities which have key features, but not everything, in common with our current situation. We could have faced the questions that people faced in the past. So we can learn something, although not straightforward answers to our current questions, by reflecting on the decisions that were taken in the past and on the outcomes. The same effect can be produced by reading novels, but history has extra psychological impact because it actually happened. On the other hand, history is constrained by the evidence, so novelists can explore more possibilities.

Or is there a closer, or a stronger, connection, between the reasons for teaching history and the reasons for learning it?

By: Manolis

Manolis — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 11:31:07 +0000

In my opinion history IS useful for the reasons mentioned in this analysis. And students are not studying history beacuse of these reasons, but this is irrelevant. True, these are “fantasies of an idealistic teacher”. But keep in mind that a student may choose this topic for a number of reasons, none of which may actually be serious! Students may choose to study history for any reason they want. But the important thing is how the teacher will teach history to his/her students, for whatever reasons these students have chosen history. History does make good citizens when it is taught correctly, and it does not matter that students do not enter the classroom with this aspiration.