Why Learn History?
This is a question I occasionally get from older children (and not a few childish adults). Despite the anti-intellectual motivation that is usually behind it, this is not an unreasonable question to ask. Basic questions are sometimes the best ones.
Diplomatic historian Walter A. McDougall has an answer that I can happily endorse:
The Three Reasons We Teach History
….The sterility of the current debate over history may be explained by the failure of combatants of all political stripes to acknowledge and grapple with the fact that the teaching of history serves three functions at once. One, obviously, is intellectual. History is the grandest vehicle for vicarious experience: it truly educates (“leads outward” in the Latin) provincial young minds and obliges them to reason, wonder, and brood about the vastness, richness, and tragedy of the human condition. If taught well, it trains young minds in the rules of evidence and logic, teaches them how to approximate truth through the patient exposure of falsehood, and gives them the mental trellis they need to place themselves in time and space and organize every other sort of knowledge they acquire in the humanities and sciences. To deny students history, therefore, is to alienate them from their community, nation, culture, and species.
The second pedagogical function of history is quite different, and often seems to conflict with the first. That is its civic function. From the ancient Israelites and Greeks to the medieval church to the modern nation-state, those charged with educating the next generation of leaders or citizens have used history to impart a reverence for the values and institutions of the creed or state. The post-modern critic may immediately charge that to do so amounts to a misuse of history and the brainwashing of young people: just think of the sectarian history taught in religious schools, the indoctrination imposed by totalitarian regimes, or the flag-waving history that hoodwinked young Americans into volunteering for the Vietnam War. But to cite such examples is to beg the question. The civic purpose of history cannot be abolished, since all history— traditional or subversive of tradition–has a civic effect. So the real questions are whether American schools ought to tilt toward extolling or denouncing our nation’s values and institutions, and how the civic function may be fulfilled without violence to the intellectual function of history.
Those questions are painfully hard to resolve, and are a matter of conscience as much as of reason—which brings us to the third, moral, function of history. If honestly taught, history is the only academic subject that inspires humility. Theology used to do that, but in our present era— and in public schools especially— history must do the work of theology. It is, for all practical purposes, the religion in the modern curriculum. Students whose history teachers discharge their intellectual and civic responsibilities will acquire a sense of the contingency of all human endeavor, the gaping disparity between motives and consequences in all human action, and how little control human beings have over their own lives and those of others. A course in history ought to teach wisdom— and if it doesn’t, then it is not history but something else.
UPDATE:
HG’s World weighs in on McDougall with “History Has a Trinity” ( Lex would say “Quadrumvirate”)
March 6th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
A fourth reason: the pleasure and excitement of historical learning and discovery. If this did not exist there would be no foundation for the others since there would be no historians or hisstory teachers — no one goes into it for the nonexistent money or prestige.
Good teachers can inspire this response in students, or cultivate what is already there.
Whatever utilitarian justifications you may come up with, people persevere in studying history out of love for the subject and the intellectual pleasure it provides.
March 6th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
An inspiring definition that in the age of post-modern navel gazing, clearly reminds us of the function of history and the reason it has survived and flourished in every civilization.
Lex’s fourth reason beautifully stated, is the cognitive root element that stimulates us to learn for the sheer pleasure of knowing.
March 6th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
It is a great point, that Lex raised and very true. However, it is also self-referential because the person asking " Why learn History" hasn’t experienced the intrinsic reward yet so they need extrinsic reasons until they " get it" firsthand
March 6th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
But if you tell the person, you study it because it is exciting and as you learn more the pleasure of learning grows. So, I think it is a fourth answer to the "why?" question: Try it, you’ll like it.
Poor teaching is a curse in this, as in all areas. The part of a kids brain that could respond is crushed by a boring and mailing-it-in presentation. Very sad to see.
On a related point, I note that people who are middle aged or older who start getting interested in intellectually challenging topics often say the same sort of thing: This is really exciting stuff, I wish I had known about it sooner.
March 7th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
I agree with all of the above, but I am a very practical person. History is a toolbox. True, the tools usually don’t quite fit the situation you face right now, but they can sort of be manipulated around and maybe give you some ideas that you wouldn’t have otherwise.
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I must say, however, that I regarded learning history as something of an imposition, particularly in college, when I felt that my time could have been better spent on another science course than in learning dates. But I got through.
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It was many years later, when I began looking at medieval history in detail (to deal with some practical questions, well, strategic planning anyway), that it occurred to me why learning dates is important. If this happened before that, the problematic chain of causation could only go in one way.
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History gives us all those case studies that can be turned over and examined from so many viewpoints to show analogies and things that worked and didn’t. And the difficulty of applying any of it can also teach humility.
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But I’m not sure how you say this to anyone who’s looking at it from the bottom up.
March 8th, 2008 at 4:40 am
"that it occurred to me why learning dates is important. If this happened before that, the problematic chain of causation could only go in one way."
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Causation is the Holy Grail of History. Unless you nail that correctly you are not really a historian, merely a journalist who pontificates. The reason a lot of scholars who are otherwise impressive can’t hit this high note is usually cognitive dissonance when the evidence conflicts with their normative biases. Instead of running with their honest conclusions all kinds of interpretive gymnastics begins as to why their findings are not what they seem to be.
Two cases: Bruce Cumings and Eric Hobsbawm are both prominent Far-Left/ Marxist historians. While the former knows more about the Korean War in terms of data points than perhaps anybody else alive, Cumings is unable to admit that the Communists started the war and will tie himself into a logical pretzel to ecape that simple factual conclusion. Hobsbawm, who remains a Soviet apologist and Marxist dreamer to this day on the moral level, when faced with a mountain of evidence regarding the Soviet economy, nevertheless flatly conceded that it didn’t work and was unable to compete with capitalism’s ability to improve living standards after around 1962, however he might wish that things had worked out to the contrary.
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Hobsbawm is probably a lot further Left than is Cumings but I’ll give him a fair hearing because he can get to causation.
March 9th, 2008 at 3:42 am
History is taught all backwards. We start with the long ago and no history course I’ve had ever got to today, not even contemporary history courses.
When I taught History (a very brief time), we started with now and worked back. We covered more territory and the students were very engaged as the method allowed them to ask ‘Why?’ more often. Finding the answer to ‘why’ was more exciting for the students than learning the dates. There were vastly more answers, too.
March 9th, 2008 at 4:26 am
Hey Indigo,
I’ve taught history using reverse chronology several times and I agree with you. This approach does tend to raise objections from ppl who do not realize that they actually know next to nothing ( or at least, less than they think they do) about history or teaching methodolgy. I’d also have concerns if a given class was loaded with children who had yet to move to the abstract from concrete reasoning – the reverse order sometimes causes them problems in understanding causation.