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    Meaning Over Memory: Recasting the Teaching of Culture and History
    Meaning Over Memory: Recasting the Teaching of Culture and History
    Meaning Over Memory: Recasting the Teaching of Culture and History
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    Meaning Over Memory: Recasting the Teaching of Culture and History

    By Peter N. Stearns

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    In the midst of the heated battles swirling around American humanities education, Peter Stearns offers a reconsideration not of what we teach but of why and how we teach it. A humanities program, says Stearns, should teach students not just memorized facts but analytical skills that are vital for a critically informed citizenry. He urges the use of innovative research as the basis of such a curriculum, and he offers specific suggestions on translating curriculum goals into courses that can be taught alongside or instead of the more conventional staples.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe University of North Carolina Press
    Release dateAug 1, 2016
    ISBN9781469619637
    Meaning Over Memory: Recasting the Teaching of Culture and History

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      Meaning Over Memory - Peter N. Stearns

      Introduction

      Battles swirl around American education in the early 1990s. This conflict over schooling is hardly unprecedented, for the United States has long maintained something of a love/hate relationship with teaching, but there is no question that some of the recent controversies have reached significant, perhaps troubling, intensity. Many college campuses are newly politicized after a decade or more of relative tranquility following the end of active student protests in 1973. New demands from minority students, international students, women, and gays are supported by certain faculty members for whom political agendas coincide with new scholarly approaches that emphasize diversity and relativity over the presumably less mutable verities of a white, male, heterosexual establishment. Many university administrators, eager for calm, anxious to appeal to new sources of students in a demographic trough period, and sincerely convinced of the justice of many minority claims, contribute to an intellectual climate that can range from foolishness to oppression. In late 1990, Newsweek wrote of a new canon of political correctness that insisted on banning even somewhat humorous sallies against any of the protected campus groups. A law school was prevented from discussing a case involving custody rights of a lesbian mother, because students thought that even imagining arguments against the mother’s claims might be hurtful to the group in question. Several colleges urged a new spelling, womyn, to make the separateness and equality of the genders crystal clear.¹

      But it takes two sides to politicize an issue, and although the demands for reform won the greatest attention, they followed, in part, from new conservative strictures on academic life that generated additional expressions simply in response. In their zeal to make capital out of politically correct campus excesses, too many journalists neglected this context. During the 1980s, a growing percentage of scientific funding, even into such areas as psychiatry and psychology, came from the Department of Defense. DOD projects were by no means necessarily tainted or restricted, but they cast at least potential shadows on free scientific inquiry. More direct was the goals redefinition of the National Endowment for the Humanities, begun under William Bennett and substantially maintained by his successor, Lynne Cheney. The NEH frowned on innovations in key disciplines such as history and English, arguing that new scholarly interests like social history should be jettisoned or at least downgraded in favor of reexaminations of the great traditions of American and Western society, primarily meaning official political experience and great ideas. Bennett, for example, specifically condemned projects that studied the working-class experience as irrelevant to the real past.² By the mid-1980s, several individual scholars had joined the crusade, lamenting the dilution of attention to the great classics of Western philosophy and literature or the great men of American democracy and producing lists of facts, derived mainly from these areas, that every educated person should know.³

      The gauntlet thrown down, it was hardly surprising that, toward 1990, revived academic radicalism generated additional conservative efforts to define a humanistic canon that could resist change and challenge. The American Association of Colleges won NEH support for a Cultural Legacies project that, although not entirely monochrome, focused largely on disseminating core curricula that touted classical great works and the values they presumably represented. Dissident groups and other traditions need not apply. A conservative historian at the University of Wisconsin founded the National Association of Scholars to defend university traditions, criticizing special efforts at minority hiring and urging colleges to instill a solid knowledge of American history and culture before turning to such specialties as Afro-American history—thereby implying, of course, that a standard American history could be defined apart from the latter themes.

      Thus have the lines seemingly been drawn, focusing on basic questions about how education and scholarship are to be defined. Humanistic disciplines in particular are engaged in this debate because their research methods are harder to pinpoint than those of the sciences and some social sciences and because they deal most directly with values. Innovations in humanities scholarship, dating back to the 1960s, have also provoked concern and uncertainty, leading some conservatives to advocate a return to teaching with no specific scholarly agenda at all.

      Controversies also engulfed primary and secondary school education. Though these battles had receded somewhat from public view by the 1990s following a series of dire reports in the mid-1980s, they were still of considerable potential importance, and they related—as too few observers noted—to the more public arguments at the university level.

      Thus, if colleges owed their students a prolonged exposure to the great canons of Western literature and history, so too the high schools had a primary responsibility—along with their duty to inculcate the skills necessary to redeem us against the Japanese economic challenge—to civilize the savages by introducing them to Western and democratic values. History, wrote one critic of recent scholarship, must provide students with examples of heroic behavior, so that students could in turn model their lives appropriately; other information about the past was irrelevant to this high purpose and might even dilute it.⁴ To the civilizing argument was joined a more familiar but unquestionably anguished lament about how few of the necessary facts of educated life students seemed to know. Not only were they unfamiliar with most of the items on the new pedagogical knowledge lists; if the lists were located in Florida these students would apparently, given their poor map skills, be unable to find them in the first place. (Over 40 percent of American high school students could not find Florida on an unlabeled map, according to one survey.) Clearly, students needed to be drilled extensively in basic skills and data and tested carefully on their level of mastery. Teachers’ latitude must be curtailed lest they stray from the essential education diet, and increasingly detailed curricula, tied to the omnipresent tests, ruled the classroom agenda.

      By the early 1990s many of these developments, it must be noted, had passed from controversy to virtually established wisdom at the precollege level. Lively discussion still surrounded such issues as how much minority history to teach in a mainstream U.S. survey course, or how to introduce students to data about the wider world without losing an essential Western flavor. Despite these gray areas, however, precollege teaching increasingly emphasized drills, factual retention, and centrally prepared, machine-gradable tests that were, in the humanities and social studies areas, primarily focused on conventional literary and historical themes. Textbooks both reflected and reified the process; in so-called world history, for example, the most venturesome basic high school text risked devoting only 25 percent of its total space to distinctly non-Western areas, while U.S. surveys made some gingerly bows to women and African Americans—usually in feature sections unrelated to the central, testable text coverage.

      As far as many students were concerned, the battles that radicals of various stripes purported to wage over college curricula had already been largely lost during the preparation of the middle school and high school years, before college was more than a glimmer in a loan officer’s eye. These students already knew, when they got to college, that U.S. history equaled democracy, equal opportunity, and unprecedented social mobility, and that literary study consisted of memorizing character names and plot lines. They certainly knew that history consisted almost exclusively of one damned thing after another—though they did not know that it was Woodrow Wilson who first said this. They might not like what they knew—indeed, they commonly professed active hatred of history memorization—and they might well find what they knew in-applicable to their own life experiences, but it would be hard to wean them from their machine-gradable molds. They certainly, as one scholar put it, possessed a massive, uniform subsurface reef of cultural memory that severely constrained further learning.⁵ Knowing that history consists of names and dates, they would be extremely skeptical of claims to the contrary.

      All sorts of educational issues properly concern both policymakers and the interested public, and what follows by no means delves into all of these areas, though many are evoked at various points. Options for school organization, including tracking, or problems of teacher rewards and training are vital concerns that are not entirely unrelated to my subject, but I do not directly explore them. The same holds true for the ongoing problems of racial balance and integration. The focus of this essay is on the curriculum and curricular goals. Even that coverage is limited, with my primary attention going to a broadly construed definition of the humanities: the disciplines of literary study, philosophy, history, and some of the kindred social sciences such as anthropology and sociology. Educational problems in science have more to do with teaching techniques than with curricular goals per se. This was not always the case, of course. In the nineteenth century, battles were fought simply to establish the place of science in the curriculum, and then the conflict between evolution and creationism propelled science to the center of major debates about the relationship between education and values. While echoes of these discussions linger, unquestionably, the main arguments have faded, though an important discussion of general education science teaching—including its cultural assumptions—is beginning to gain ground. It is in the humanities area that we now confront the most agonizing issues about the purposes and directions of the appropriate curriculum, and though the resultant contests are less stark, they evoke some parallels with the earlier creationist controversies. It is vital to improve our understanding of the debates now raging, sometimes out of the public eye, and in my judgment it is vital to resolve some of the major debates decisively and imaginatively lest other efforts at educational improvement, even in organizational and training areas, bear stunted fruit.

      The humanities embraces a broad spectrum of disciplines that form the core of much research and most teaching about the nature of society and cultures—the principal relationships among people that go beyond the strictly biological or economic. History and English constitute the core of the teaching humanities, but foreign languages and philosophy also enter in, particularly beyond the basic skill levels. Foreign language study logically flows into the teaching of literature and, once some fluency is acquired, into history and anthropology as well, and in what follows cultural study is not meant to be confined to works written in English or to students reading in English; we will return to the confusion with the first stages of language training in a later chapter. Also included here, though not usually labeled as humanistic disciplines, are cultural anthropology and many branches of sociology that rely wholly or in part on impressionistic data for generalizations about human social relationships.⁶ Humanities, then, includes important parts of the social sciences, and interdisciplinary connections in research methods and in theory will play an important role in my assessments. The disciplines share the task of finding newly solid bases on which to build their educational programs.

      Because my focus is on the humanities generally and broadly defined, I do not spend a great deal of time worrying about how much of which discipline should appear at what level. Educators concerned with the high schools have recurrently fulminated (since the late 1930s) about the dilution of history amid a more general social studies amalgam. The issues involved are important, but they have been widely discussed elsewhere.⁷ A variety of sensible recent statements has boosted the historical core once again. The debate is particularly relevant to this essay when the dilution involves not just including some sociology along with history but also moving away from the serious study of society entirely (through whatever disciplinary combination) by injecting training in social skills such as checkbook writing or the other embellishments of commercial economics. The inadequacy of most of our foreign language education, which far too often compels numbingly basic training at the college level, is another perennial controversy relevant to this discussion but not elaborately explored. In order to focus on the main thrusts of humanistic analysis in relation to educational goals, I have relegated important subsidiary problems to one side, though they can be integrated into my the central argument without great difficulty.

      This is a book, then, about defining teaching goals and appropriate strategies in American education at various levels, with major emphasis on the disciplines that study human and social values and behaviors. It argues against the extreme positions currently available, in part espousing a middle way but primarily searching for a distinctive alternative not adequately explored in the extensive and often challenging recent literature on similar topics. The humanities, particularly, have been badly represented in discussions of educational goals and implementations; agendas have been needlessly polarized, while—still more important—the implications of new humanistic research have been unduly ignored in the educational realm.

      I need to call attention briefly to the complex combination of compromise and radicalism in my treatment. In dealing with the current furor over conventional humanistic coverage versus multiculturalism, I join a few other recent observers in offering intermediate positions and certainly in rejecting the extremes urged from both sides. A purely white, elitist cultural diet is no longer tenable or desirable, but neither is Afrocentrism the only valid alternative. Other issues, too, will find degrees of compromise in the following pages, and on some points I’m quite content to be seen as a reconciling voice eager to combine genuine elements of both the polarized approaches. My mugwumpery is not, I hope, cosmetic. I share skepticism about some recent attempts by conservative educators to acknowledge the inevitability of multiculturalism while urging that it be done right. Without concrete demonstrations of real commitment to cultural diversity, these gestures may be, whether intentionally or not, fraudulent; where I deal with compromise, I try to offer substance along with honeyed words.

      At the same time, I insist that my intentions go far beyond peace-making. My goals are more radical than the radicals’ in that I seek to reshape the discussion of the humanities by moving away from debates about which groups it would privilege—essentially a turf fight, however recondite its phrasing—and toward a determination of what kinds of analyses it should further. I aim for a real transformation of humanities education in light of the kinds of analytical perspectives—the habits of mind—it should inculcate. Teaching in the humanities should above all foster a critical imagination—and this point is not recognized in most of the current debates.

      The middle course steered through this book is easy enough to state using a specific case in point. Although trained to teach Western civilization courses, and having benefited greatly from such a course in my own collegiate past, I was converted some years ago to a world history approach. The international context in which Americans now operate, as well as the increasingly international sources of American immigration, call for knowledge of traditions and processes beyond those of Western Europe. Happily, after considerable self-education, I discovered that world history offers not only vital information about diverse historical trajectories, but also a host of challenging analytical themes; I also discovered that it can be presented in manageable form, albeit with massive departures not only from the subject matter but also from the detailed national coverage instilled in the Western civilization teaching tradition. While granting that it is difficult to convey, in world history, some of the rich flavor of the specifically Western past, I remain convinced—against the partisans of a more traditional insistence on teaching respect for our own presumed values above all others—that the larger canvas is essential. Indeed, it was the lack of an adequate non-Western perspective that drove me to my self-improvement project in the first place. My evolution parallels that of a growing number of other historians who are persuaded that studies of single major areas, and particularly of the West, must yield to a more genuinely international context. The resulting world history is measurably different from Western history in concept as well as coverage, and it must not be misrepresented by simply relabeling as global a course or a textbook that still maintains a primarily Western focus—an impulse all too prevalent in American education at several levels.

      Yet—consistent with this middle way—I dissent also from those radicals who want to leave Western civilization out of history requirements entirely, so that students can be properly socialized to, say, the African experience. And I dissent from world history scholars, not necessarily radical in other respects, who seek to downgrade essential Western coverage in their eagerness to convey alternative values and to combat the undeniable tendency to emerge from history studies with a West is best outlook. Western history, particularly from the fifteenth century onward, is a vital part of the world experience—at times even a predominant part, though never to the exclusion of other important areas. The need for balance, quite apart from questions of showing due regard for the traditions of a civilization particularly important to our own institutions, requires integration of Western history into the world panorama in approximate proportion to its international role.

      The middle way in today’s educational thicket has too rarely been spelled out, partly because it is less dramatic and more complex than either/or alternatives. In survey history teaching, one is either for Western civilization or for a somewhat de-Westernized world history, with scant in-between. Efforts to spell out compromise positions do exist. A recent report by the Bradley Commission on History in the Schools seeks to emphasize both standard political experience and the new social history (though it tends to push the latter more at the grade school than at the high school level), and it makes appropriate noises about both the West and the world.⁸ Yet the report does not fully face the hard question of how to cover all these issues manageably and coherently, and thus it can be read as a fuller endorsement of present curricular emphases than its authors intend. A good section on world history follows a previous Western civ framework, with no discussion of the hard stuff of integrating, relegating, and establishing priorities. And the report obscures its interest in a middle way by adopting titles such as historical literacy, designed to appeal to those authorities who view history as a parade of mostly conventional, testable facts. In an educational environment that is heavily polarized—though with most of the chips on conservative tables—establishing a viable set of compromises remains a useful task, and a portion of my work is targeted to this end.

      As a middle-way statement, then, this book shares the radical contention that the Allan Bloom-NEH insistence on conventional humanities coverage closes American minds and neglects the growing pluralism of American society and its student bodies.⁹ But it rejects the most simplistic alternative, which is to produce curricula that list the achievements of minority groups and other cultures simply for their own sakes, for this approach can lack coherence and fails to rethink educational goals at sufficient depth. It can also, as insightful critics have already noted, lead to some dangerously mindless uses of culture to celebrate particular groups and to generate feel-goodness without generating any understanding of what society is all about.¹⁰

      But middle-way mugwumpery, even translated into doable educational agendas, is not the main point. What both conservatives and many radical critics have missed, in my judgment, is an appropriate emphasis on education as a process of discovery and debate. They have missed the implications of much of the most insightful scholarship in various humanistic fields. Thus, while conservative educators emphasize their desire to concentrate on Western and American traditions, their opponents (particularly when discussing high school or entry-level college courses) tend to urge greater coverage of alternatives. Don’t give us American great men, but make sure students know about some great women, or at least key aspects of women’s experience. Do less on the West, more on Africa. These appeals are correct to a degree, in that they redress the misleading narrowness of the conventional agenda, but they still view education as consisting primarily of a series of datapoints. It would be possible, following this view (and I confess to being tempted in this direction for a time), to prepare a better list of facts that everyone should know, using demography as well as demagogues, classes and ethnics as well as classical ethics—without thinking through the implications of the list concept in the first place.

      Better lists would still mislead, and it is best not to play this game at all. The purpose of education is to provide understanding—a pious sentiment with which most people would doubtless agree. It is increasingly possible, based in part on new discoveries but also in part on old principles, to envisage curricula that would promote understanding rather than overwhelming critical thought with memorization, whether old or new. Exploring this goal, which has been downplayed in the zealous discussion of whose coverage is best, is the purpose of this book.

      This is hardly a solo flight. Various historians, including three senior figures who contributed to the Bradley Commission report, have urged the salience of their discipline primarily in terms of the insights it provides, not the data it amasses. During the 1990s a new project, funded by two prestigious foundations, seeks to review high school testing procedures, to wean them away from machine-gradable, factual coverage and toward more reliance on special projects, written reports, and other performances that will better demonstrate the capacities to think and to organize rather than simply to regurgitate.¹¹ Also, a wealth of commentary on educational issues by historians and other humanists points firmly in the appropriate direction. David Bromwich, for example, emphasizes the folly of siding fully with either elitists or radicals in the hot debate over teaching literature. On the history side, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese similarly criticizes feminists who seek to throw out the canon in favor of teaching only about minorities and women, on the sensible grounds that: If you do not include a heavy dose of the history of elite white males, how do you explain why women and members of minorities are not running the world? How do we explain thousands of years of submission by those we claim to honor and respect?¹² Other scholars and teachers also offer insights of great strength. Signs of this sort are immensely cheering. They do go against the current grain, however, and they can only benefit from some further comment on wider educational purposes. The full statement, in my judgment, has yet to be made.

      For although an encouraging number of innovative efforts are being developed, they are not clearly winning the high ground, and they are not always coherently defined. For example, the portfolio evaluation schemes that are gaining popularity as alternatives to machine-graded testing can become mired in enthusiasm for technique and style over analytical content; students capable of presenting a vivid reenactment may not always be judged in terms of their grasp of the meaning of a past culture. Eloquence—surely to be rewarded as a general rule—may overshadow real perceptiveness. The portfolio plans, in other words, move in the right direction, but they need to be connected with a wider definition of the substantive fields involved.

      A number of high school and grade school history projects have been undertaken in various parts of the country, some of them linked to a general project called CHART (Collaboratives for Humanities and Arts Teaching). Many of these projects are founded on a goal of encouraging students to think and act like historians. The projects have accomplished all sorts of good things, including eliciting an impressive fund of enthusiasm and intelligence from the teachers involved. Beyond these individual projects, there are larger ventures as well that hold considerable promise. The recasting of California’s school curriculum in the social studies, for example, makes (or intends to make) grade school work more serious, builds real sequences of learning in a field too often treated as a scattered collection of individual courses, and attempts (though inadequately, I believe) some integration of multiculturalism and mainstream cultural interests. The College Board is developing Pacesetter models for achieving more analytical goals in high school English and world history courses (as well as in other areas), and the planning efforts have stirred great interest. Initiatives of this sort directly inspire many of my own proposals. But they also signal the twin difficulties of innovation in the present educational climate. First, they are hemmed in by the inescapable constraints of standardized, machine-graded testing; a South Carolina CHART project, for example, grinds to a halt every six weeks to give students time to memorize dates and names. Second, they are often based on an unduly limited understanding of what the proper analytical goals of the humanities should be and thus, although reaching bravely for higher attainment, they fail to reach far enough. Teachers’ conceptions of how to think like a historian, for example (apart from the phrase’s suggestion of a misleadingly professional goal), sometimes turn out to be inadequate, as we will discuss later on. The intentions are exciting, and the CHART projects and other brave experiments are definitely worth pursuing, but the terrain is not adequately mapped. Even for many innovators, the humanities need a fuller statement of purpose.

      Ventures in humanities education must and will be diverse. No single plan will suffice. Exciting innovations are already occurring; no reform approach should imply a virgin discovery, and certainly what follows is heavily dependent on ideals and practical classroom experiences in which many teachers are already involved. The desirability of a systematic statement, however, is clear.

      One of the more pressing needs in this area is demonstrated by the relative obscurity of some of the most exciting new teaching in the humanities, compared to the trumpet blasts of public argument between radicals and conservatives. It is easy to ignore constructive change amid the furor of the more dramatic debate, and for every member of the interested public aware of humanities reforms, there are five who know only the real or imagined problems of political correctness. Both sides attack not only each other but also real or (often) imagined realities in the present educational system. The recent conflicts thus make it easier to criticize than to project consistent and substantive alternatives. Some commentators have indeed made something of a career out of blasting first conventional text-books, then radical alternatives, then compromise proposals—all with great intelligence and with some suggestions of positive principles, but without risking a real plan. This book spends some time pecking away at other positions but seeks primarily to construct a feasible alternative to what now exists and to the major options currently at loggerheads.

      In the following pages, then, my goal is to provide fuller information on the relationship between teaching and discovery, and between teaching and scholarship. My path skirts between current stridencies, seeking both some conciliation and some real alternatives to the diverse, often belligerent statements currently available. I deal with some basic principles but also with some curricular practicalities. This book is not a formal study of education or of the learning process, though it will at points comment on such studies. Emphasizing mainly the humanities and softer social sciences, and history in particular, it will also venture some remarks on other disciplines and on various methodologies. The disciplinary focus derives, obviously, from my own experience, but also from the central position of humanities in the current educational debates. The questions to be explored seem, to me, fundamental: If American education, aside from training in obvious skills, is not primarily devoted to the explicit defense of Western civilization and American democracy, then what might its purpose be? If we don’t measure what facts students are mastering, how do we evaluate them, and what are teachers to teach? And can general sentiments about promoting understanding translate into feasible curricula of any sort?

      Amid such murky waters, the central arguments of this book must be kept in mind. It attacks some of the dominant beliefs about humanities teaching, chiefly—though not exclusively—those emanating from conservative academics and the Reaganite establishment and its successors. It points, however, to areas of substantial (if sometimes unrecognized) agreement and, above all, to the need to consider basic approaches in a framework different from those currently emphasized by several opposing camps.

      One other radical departure: This discussion does not depend on an argument that American students’ grasp of the humanities has deteriorated. Such may be the case, but the facts are not clear. Educational critics, most of them conservative, have made much of their claims of declination. Their purpose, of course, is to argue that we have already moved too far toward innovation and must pull back in order to regain the ground lost since the good old days. These arguments are suspect. Applied to literacy, they are often demonstrably incorrect.¹³ What is obvious, instead, is that we should not simply be doing better than we now are, but better than we ever managed in the past. Doing better surely includes retaining some current and past goals, but it must involve substantial change. It is not only misleading but factually incorrect to constrain discussion by pretending that, at some unspecified time in the past, students once gained more from the humanities than they now do. The goal—a challenging

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