Abstract: This is a dangerous moment, globally, for the liberal arts, education and research, for democratic values generally, and for history and history education specifically. The deep forces of destabilization include increasingly polarized wealth, migrations from desiccated equatorial regions, and new modes of communication that are increasingly rapid, accessible, dispersed and subject to manipulation.
DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2017-9343
Languages: English, Deutsch
This is a dangerous moment, globally, for the liberal arts, education and research, for democratic values generally, and for history and history education specifically. The deep forces of destabilization include increasingly polarized wealth, migrations from desiccated equatorial regions, and new modes of communication that are increasingly rapid, accessible, dispersed and subject to manipulation.[1]
A New Era
Perversely, ascendant ideologies foster policies that promote the acceleration of all of these trends. Whilst the threat to liberal traditions is global, nowhere is it more palpable than in the United States, after the surprise election of Donald Trump. “From this day forward,” he promised, “a new vision will govern our land.”[2]
Many of the modern, liberal traditions that have been challenged by Trump and his fellow travelers were, until recently, so fundamental that history educators barely gave them a passing thought. Academics hardly needed to rally to defend the idea of truth, because the only threat was from some of our own poststructuralist provocateurs, delivered in prose so tortured that it had little apparent impact on the broader public sphere. When a serial liar became the United States’ President and an advocate of “alternative facts” was retained as his assistant, the game changed.
The implications for history education and its scholars, internationally, are profound. If we need to revisit our stances on truth and facts, so too do we need to re-examine those of research and knowledge, interpretation and evidence, community and nation, identity and difference, and citizenship and solidarity.
Positionality, Knowledge, Interpretation
One hardly need mention the attention, in recent decades, to positionality in knowledge production.[3] But where does “positionality” leave knowledge in relation to the purveyors of “alternative facts,” who claim they are the truth from their own position in Memphis or Moscow? Of course, people’s varieties of experience and belief, and differences in relation to power and privilege, are at the core of the social, educational, and historical sciences. But building knowledge must ultimately emerge through dialogue, debate and discussion, as a common project conducted on a common basis of civility and with a shared respect for evidence. In the current climate, we cannot afford to toy with separate islands of identity-based theory.
The problem of teaching about historical interpretations, similarly, needs to be examined through a new lens in this political environment. Most history education scholars in recent decades, myself included, have sought to destabilize students’ belief that what is in the textbook—or any contemporary account—is the story of what happened. We have focused on the categorical difference between interpretations of the past and the past itself. That difference has not vanished in the age of “alternative facts,” nor has the importance of teaching it. But the burden is upended. That is, our central challenge will be to help students understand the limits of interpretation, the constraints that bind what we say to the evidence that we have, and the importance of defending interpretations that are supported by the weight of evidence, not as just one among many possible ways of seeing things.
The Narratives We Teach
The triumph of Trump, the ballot on Brexit, and the popularity of Le Pen have made visible a tectonic shift in popular narrative templates (to use Wertsch’s term).[4] As with geology, the hidden forces of change have long been at work beneath the surface, building pressure. The earthquake that is Trump rattled the world with a dire picture of Americans wracked by pain, carnage, depletion, disrepair and decay, robbed by post-War allies, and impoverished by parasites within. Le Pen and Wilders imagined their countries overrun and their cultures besieged by non-white hordes. Those pictures apparently resonated with a large number of their fellow citizens. How will their populist vision affect the academic history and history education communities, whose scholars have focused on the flaws and cracks in the grand narratives: in the United States, imperialism, the economic foundations of slavery, genocidal policies towards Native Americans, the persistence of Jim Crow since Reconstruction, the growth of economic inequality since the 1970s; and in Europe: the history of colonialism and, varying with national setting, collusion with Nazis during the Holocaust? Perhaps we will find ourselves countering the alt-right’s nightmare by a new appreciation for a qualified narrative of progressive opportunity and open democracy, both of which have long been the staple of school teaching and textbooks.
This does not mean shuffling systemic racism, colonialism, homophobia, and gender inequality back into obscurity, much less silence, but it does call for remembering the promises and obligations of democratic rule, the achievements of a peaceful post-War European system, the importance of institutional norms, and, not least, the moral virtues and qualities of character that enable both good leadership and active participation in a democratic state.
The Personal and the Local
Historians and history education scholars have welcomed the introduction of the personal and the local in recent years. Ironically, there is a parallel to the populist denigration of distant experts and cosmopolitan elites. The lineage from social history through the “cultural turn” to memory studies has a populist trajectory: the past belongs not just to expertly trained historians, but also, in Carl Becker’s term, to “everyman.” Similarly, post-Foucaultdian academics had a tendency to see historiography as no more than one among many ways to understand the past, the use of historical sources just another kind of myth, and the use of reason just another act of faith; moreover, one whose undeserved position of power occluded the rightful voice of the non-expert, the untrained, and the anti-scientific. This position increasingly becomes a luxurious indulgence we cannot afford.
And so…
This is a historical moment at which academics and intellectuals need to take stock; namely, of the liberal national and international order that the populist autocrats intend to tear apart, of what is worth defending, even if we never felt called upon to defend it before, indeed, even if we built our careers on criticizing it.
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Further Reading
- Brooks, David, “The Internal Invasion,” New York Times, Januar 20, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/opinion/the-internal-invasion.html (last accessed 3 March 2017).
- Frum, David, “How to Build an Autocracy,” The Atlantic March 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/ (last accessed 3 March 2017).
- Lilla, Mark, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” New York Times November 20, 2016, SR1, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html (last accessed 4 March 2017).
Special Recommendation
- Wineburg, Sam. Stuck in the Past: Why Learn History When It’s Already on Your iPhone? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2018.
Web Resources
- The Historical Thinking Project: http://historicalthinking.ca/ (last accessed 26 April 2017).
- The History Education Network THEN/HiER: http://thenhier.ca/en.1.html (last accessed 26 April 2017).
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[1] A longer version of this article will be published as the Foreword in: Scott Alan Metzger and Lauren McArthur Harris, eds., International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming 2018).
[2] “Inaugural Address: Trump’s full speech”, http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/20/politics/trump-inaugural-address/ (last accessed 3 March 2017).
[3] Peter Seixas, “Schweigen! Die Kinder! Or Does Postmodern History Have a Place in the Schools?,” in: Knowing, Teaching and Learning History: National and International Perspectives, edited by Peter Stearns, Peter Seixas and Samuel S. Wineburg (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 28-29.
[4] James Wertsch, “Specific Narratives and Schematic Narrative Templates,” in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, edited by Peter Seixas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 49-62.
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Image Credits
Minneapolis against Trump © 2017 Fibonnaci Blue, CC-BY 2.0.
Recommended Citation
Seixas, Peter: History Educators in a New Era. In: Public History Weekly 5 (2017) 20, DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2017-9343.
Weltweit erleben wir einen gefährlichen Zeitpunkt für die Geisteswissenschaften, für Bildung und Forschung, für demokratische Werte allgemein und insbesondere für Geschichte und Geschichtsdidaktik. Die starken Kräfte der Destabilisierung umfassen zunehmende wirtschaftliche Ungleichheit, Migration aus ausgedörrten Gebieten um den Äquator und neue Formen der Kommunikation, die immer schneller, zugänglicher, verstreuter und manipulierbarer sind.[1]
Ein neues Zeitalter
Paradoxerweise werden durch aufkeimende Ideologien Strategien gefördert, die alle diese Tendenzen beschleunigen. Obwohl die Bedrohung der liberalen Traditionen weltumspannend ist, ist sie nirgends spürbarer als in den Vereinigten Staaten nach der überraschenden Wahl von Donald Trump. “Von diesem Tag an” hat er versprochen, “wird eine neue Vision unser Land regieren.”[2]
Viele der modernen liberalen Traditionen, die Trump und seine AnhängerInnen in Frage stellen, waren bislang so grundlegend, dass sie von GeschichtsdidaktikerInnen so gut wie nicht wahrgenommen wurden. AkademikerInnen wurden kaum aufgerufen, die Idee der Wahrheit zu verteidigen, weil die einzige Bedrohung von einigen unserer eigenen poststrukturalistischen ProvokateurInnen stammte, verpackt in derart gequälte Prosa, dass sie wenig sichtbaren Einfluss auf die öffentliche Sphäre hatte. Nachdem ein Serienlügner Präsident der Vereinigten Staaten geworden ist und eine Befürworterin der “alternativen Fakten“ als seine Assistentin eingestellt hat, hat sich das Spiel geändert.
Die internationalen Auswirkungen für die Geschichtsdidaktik und ihre WissenschaftlerInnen sind tiefgreifend. Wenn wir unsere Haltungen zu Wahrheit und Fakten neu überdenken müssen, dann müssen wir auch Forschung und Wissen, Interpretation und Beweis, Gemeinschaft und Nation, Identität und Unterschied wie auch Bürgerschaft und Solidarität untersuchen.
Positionalität, Wissen, Interpretation
Man muss die Aufmerksamkeit der letzten Jahrzehnte für Standortgebundenheit in der Wissenserzeugung kaum erwähnen.[3] Aber wie verhält sich “Standortgebundenheit” zu Wissen in Bezug auf die Lieferanten von “alternativen Fakten“, die von ihren eigenen Positionen in Memphis oder Moskau behaupten, sie seien die Wahrheit? Natürlich bilden Differenzen aufgrund des Erfahrungshintergrunds und des Glaubens der Menschen sowie Unterschiede in Bezug auf ihr Verhältnis zu Macht und Privilegien den Kern der Gesellschafts-, Bildungs- und Geschichtswissenschaften. Aber der Aufbau von Wissen muss letztlich durch Dialog, Debatte und Diskussion entstehen, als ein gemeinschaftliches Projekt, das auf einer gemeinsamen Basis von Anstand und einer geteilten Achtung vor Beweisen durchgeführt wird. Im heutigen Klima können wir es uns nicht erlauben, auf voneinander getrennten Inseln der identitätsbasierten Theorie zu spielen.
Gleichermaßen muss in dieser politischen Umgebung das Problem des Unterrichtens von historischen Interpretationen neu untersucht werden. In den vergangenen Jahrzehnten haben die meisten ForscherInnen der Geschichtsdidaktik, auch ich, versucht, den Glauben der Studierenden zu erschüttern, dass das, was im Lehrwerk – oder jeder zeitgenössischen Erzählung – steht, die Geschichte dessen sei, was passiert ist. Unser Hauptaugenmerk lag auf dem kategorischen Unterschied zwischen Interpretationen der Vergangenheit und der Vergangenheit an sich. Dieser Unterschied ist im Zeitalter der “alternativen Fakten“ genauso wenig verschwunden wie die Wichtigkeit, ihn zu lehren. Aber die Last hat sich gedreht. Unsere zentrale Herausforderung wird daher sein, den Studierenden dabei zu helfen, die Grenzen der Interpretation, die Beschränkungen, die das, was wir sagen, mit den Beweisen, die wir haben, zu verbinden und die Wichtigkeit der Verteidigung von Interpretationen, die durch das Gewicht der Beweise unterstützt sind, zu verstehen, und sie nicht als eine von vielen möglichen Lesarten zu betrachten.
Die Narrative, die wir unterrichten
Der Sieg Trumps, die Abstimmung zum Brexit und die Popularität Le Pens haben eine tektonische Verschiebung in den populären narrativen Schablonen (um den Begriff Wertschs zu verwenden) sichtbar gemacht.[4] Wie in der Geologie sind die versteckten Kräfte der Veränderung schon lange unter der Oberfläche am Werk; sie bauen Druck auf. Das Erdbeben namens Trump hat die Welt mit einem düsteren Bild der AmerikanerInnen erschüttert: geplagt von Schmerz, Gemetzel, Auszehrung, Verfall und Verderb, beraubt durch Nachkriegsverbündete und verarmt durch Parasiten im Inneren. Le Pen und Wilders stellen ihre Länder als überfordert und deren Kultur als von nicht-weißen Horden belagert dar. Diese Bilder haben offensichtlich bei einer großen Anzahl ihrer MitbürgerInnen Widerhall gefunden. Wie wird ihre populistische Vision die Gemeinschaften der akademischen Geschichte und der Geschichtsdidaktik beeinflussen, in denen ihre ForscherInnen den Fokus auf die Mängel und Risse der großen Narrative gelegt haben: in den Vereinigten Staaten auf Imperialismus, wirtschaftliche Fundamente der Sklaverei, genozidale Strategien gegenüber den Native Americans, die Fortdauer von Jim Crow seit der Reconstruction, das Wachsen wirtschaftlicher Ungleichheit seit den 70er Jahren; und in Europa auf Geschichte des Kolonialismus und, mit unterschiedlichem nationalen Umfeld, geheime Zusammenarbeit mit den Nazis während des Holocaust? Wir werden uns vielleicht dabei ertappen, den Albtraum der Alt-Right-Bewegung durch eine neue Wertschätzung eines qualifizierten Narrativs der Fortschrittsmöglichkeit und der offenen Demokratie zu bekämpfen; beide sind seit langem Ausgangsmaterial von Schulunterrichts und Fachbüchern.
Dies bedeutet nicht, dass systemischer Rassismus, Kolonialismus, Homophobie und Geschlechterungleichheit zurück in die Dunkelheit, noch weniger ins Verschweigen, geschoben werden sollen. Die Situation ruft vielmehr dazu auf, an die Versprechungen und Verpflichtungen einer demokratischen Herrschaft zu erinnern, an die Errungenschaften eines friedlichen europäischen Nachkriegssystems, an die Wichtigkeit von institutionellen Normen und nicht zuletzt an die moralischen Tugenden und Charakterqualitäten, die sowohl gute Führung wie auch aktive Teilnahme am demokratischen Staat ermöglichen.
Das Persönliche und das Lokale
HistorikerInnen und GeschichtsdidaktikerInnen haben die Einführung des Persönlichen und des Lokalen in jüngster Zeit begrüßt. Ironischerweise gibt es eine Parallele zu der populistischen Verunglimpfung von abgehobenen ExpertInnen und kosmopolitischen Eliten. Die Linie von der Sozialgeschichte über den cultural turn bis hin zur Gedächtnisforschung weist eine populistische Zeitschiene auf: Die Vergangenheit gehört nicht nur fachgerecht ausgebildeten HistorikerInnen, sondern auch, wie Carl Becker sagt, “jedermann“. Ebenso neigten postfoucault’sche AkademikerInnen dazu, Historiografie als bloß einen von mehreren Wegen, die Vergangenheit zu verstehen, zu betrachten, ebenso die Verwendung von historischen Quellen als bloß eine andere Art der Sage und die Verwendung von Vernunft als bloß ein andersgearteter Vertrauensbeweis. Desweiteren betrachteten sie Historiografie als ein Gebiet, dessen unverdiente Machtposition die berechtigte Stimme der Nicht-ExpertInnen, der Ungebildeten und der Antiwissenschaft zum Schweigen brachte. Eine solche Position wird zunehmend zu einem luxuriöser Genuss, den wir uns nicht leisten können.
Und daher…
Dies ist ein historischer Augenblick, in dem AkademikerInnen und Intellektuelle Bilanz ziehen müssen: für die liberale nationale und internationale Ordnung, die populistische AutokratInnen auseinanderreißen wollen; für das, was die Verteidigung lohnt, auch wenn wir uns bislang niemals aufgerufen fühlten, es zu verteidigen, selbst wenn wir unsere Karrieren auf seiner Kritik aufbauten.
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Literaturhinweise
- David Brooks: The Internal Invasion. In: New York Times vom 20. Januar 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/opinion/the-internal-invasion.html (letzter Zugriff 3. März 2017).
- David Frum: How to Build an Autocracy. In: The Atlantic März 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/ (letzter Zugriff 3. März 2017).
- Mark Lilla: The End of Identity Liberalism. In: New York Times vom 20. November, S. SR1, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html (letzter Zugriff 4. März 2017).
Besondere Empfehlung
- Sam Wineburg: Stuck in the Past: Why Learn History When It’s Already on Your iPhone? Chicago 2018.
Webressourcen
- The Historical Thinking Project: http://historicalthinking.ca/ (letzter Zugriff 26. April 2017).
- The History Education Network THEN/HiER: http://thenhier.ca/en.1.html (letzter Zugriff 26. April 2017).
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[1] Eine längere Version dieses Beitrags wird als das Vorwort veröffentlicht in: Scott Alan Metzger/Lauren McArthur Harris (Hrsg.): International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning. Hoboken 2018.
[2] Inaugural Address: Trump’s Full Speech: http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/20/politics/trump-inaugural-address/ (letzter Zugriff 3. März 2017).
[3] Peter Seixas: “Schweigen! Die Kinder! Or Does Postmodern History Have a Place in the Schools?” In: Peter Stearns/Peter Seixas/Samuel S. Wineburg (Hrsg.): Knowing, Teaching and Learning History. National and International Perspectives. New York 2000, S. 19-37, hier S. 28-29.
[4] James Wertsch: Specific Narratives and Schematic Narrative Templates. In: Peter Seixas (Hrsg.): Theorizing Historical Consciousness. Toronto 2004, S. 49-62.
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Abbildungsnachweis
Minneapolis against Trump © 2017 Fibonnaci Blue, CC-BY 2.0.
Übersetzung
Translated by Jana Kaiser (kaiser /at/ academic-texts. de)
Empfohlene Zitierweise
Seixas, Peter: Geschichte lehren in einem neuen Zeitalter. In: Public History Weekly 5 (2017) 20, DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2017-9343.
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The assessments in this article reflect only the perspective of the author. PHW considers itself as a pluralistic debate journal, contributions to discussions are very welcome. Please note our commentary guidelines (https://public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/contribute/).
Categories: 5 (2017) 20
DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2017-9343
Tags: Civics Education (Politische Bildung), Fake News, Populism (Populismus), Teacher (LehrerInnen), Trump
Thought-provoking and reflective, as always. Just a few short comments to two of your statements:
“Most history education scholars in recent decades, myself included, have sought to destabilize students’ belief that what is in the textbook—or any contemporary account—is the story of what happened. We have focused on the categorical difference between interpretations of the past and the past itself.”
and
“… our central challenge will be to help students understand the limits of interpretation, the constraints that bind what we say to the evidence that we have, and the importance of defending interpretations that are supported by the weight of evidence, not as just one among many possible ways of seeing things.”
I fully agree that in these days we experience more deeply that it is not enough to stress the — ineluctible (!) — insight into positionality, perspectivity and — therefore — relativity of knowledge, but that alongside with it, we need to stress that this insight does not mean that any interpretation is as good as any other, that there is no total freedom of responsibility in interpreting. It was Jörn Rüsen, I think, who spoke of “relative relativity”, not absolute relativity.
In itself and on this level of abstractness, this should not be so complicated, while it may get much more intricate when focusing on concrete aspects. But nevertheless, not only a few people seem to have general reservations against it. And even some of those those who gain the insight theoretically, sometimes seem to feeld some inquietude with it. That seems to be the case, e.g., when people formulate that “unfortunately” there is no way of stating the absolute truth, that we are all are restrained in our insights into history by our different positions, perspectives and so on. While such formulations indicate correct epistemological insight, they also reveal a hidden longing for absolute, non-positioned and non-perspectival truth.
But there is more to it. Such positions may add an image of history as a field which is a) systematically limited in its ability to arrive at “hard knowledge”, b) does not have any criteria for “hard knowledge”, and therefore c) is not only prone to partisan distortion, but which d) ultimately has no criteria for detecting them — which of course is a distorted concept of history in itself.
From my point of view, the epistemological impossibility to totally represent “the past” and the character of historical knowledge as being ineluctibly bound to position and perspective, does not imply an inferior status of the discipline and its holding rather “weak” criteria and standards – but quite to the contrary a specific complexity of standards and criteria. The fact that we cannot just compare any statement (recount, accout or other) to “the past” does not devaluate these statements, but subjugates them to rather complex criteria of quality.
Therefore, I am not sure whether we should speak of “limitation” of interpretations, as if there was some border where any interpretation ended with regard to its value and function. I much more appreciate your other term of “constraints” — not of the interpretation, but of what can count as a real “interpretation” (and just a speculation).
From that point of view, then, I fully subscribe your call for re-reflecting on what might be called “epoch-typical key-questions”, as German educationalist Wolfgang Klafki, posited. Even “commited” historiography and history teaching is needed again.
What we have learned, however, within the last decades of reflecting on the diversity od positionalities, perspectives and interpretations, then (and not the least from your work), is that all reflections on general, supraindividual and societal questions, all commited history education, can not do without enabling the students to reflect, conclude and judge not only on the resulting histories, but also on their different components.
If such problem-oriented and commited history can be regarded as some kind of successor to earlier, affirmative and integrative concepts, it can not just conceptualize the learners in a class as unquestionably sharing a common perspective, common questions, interests and therefore arrive at commonly shared narratives, but has to enable the students to do their own historical orientating within such debates.
Peter, I like your call for a muscular liberalism. Trump, Le Pen, and Farage have succeeded in making neo-liberalism look good. However, that goodness is only in comparison to something demonstrably worse. So the question of what we choose to defend is key, as is the need to reimagine how we might live together in ways that promote peace and sustain life.
If post-modernists are correct when they argue that democracy rests on a set of beliefs or myths that are more aspirational than verifiable, so be it.
History education began as a form of moral instruction for the modern era. I believe that historical study can still serve that end if content is selected to engage students in thinking about the common good, empathy, egalitarianism, human rights, and the intrinsic dignity of all individuals and groups. These are values worth fighting for. Using historical accounts as moral platitudes is not very effective, however, nor is teaching the skills of historical interpretation, analysis and synthesis if they are not in some way connected to larger questions about living together in a democracy.
Do you agree? If so, what do you (and other readers) believe are those key questions?