{"id":2707,"date":"2002-05-13T14:25:58","date_gmt":"2002-05-13T19:25:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/?p=2707"},"modified":"2002-05-13T14:25:58","modified_gmt":"2002-05-13T19:25:58","slug":"dont_know_much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2002\/05\/13\/dont_know_much.html","title":{"rendered":"Don’t know much about History"},"content":{"rendered":"

JillMatrix comments <\/a>on George Will’s comments about why kids are still doing horribly at History.<\/p>\n

And George Will says, I sh*t you not, that a major reason that U.S. students are not good at history is that the information is being kept from them because “so many of the heros are white men.”<\/p>\n

She takes his comment as meaning that “American history studies have been diluted by including facts about women and people of other ethnicities.” She demurs, feeling that it’s mainly that people don’t value history.<\/p>\n

She may be right. But let me make a feeble stab at defending George Will. I wrote the first draft of this in her comments, but I wrote enough to prompt me to write it here.<\/p>\n

History, to be useful and interesting, must make sense. It must hang together, have meaning, create a tapestry. Threads and fabric swatches are interesting, maybe even pretty, but not real useful.<\/p>\n

In that sense, history as a Bunch of Dead White Guys may actually make some sense. That’s not a politically correct thing to say, but to the extent that history is about facts, not niceness or politeness or making people feel good, I think it’s true.<\/p>\n

Yes, it’s neat to know what life was like for a Jewish Lesbian of Color in 18th Century Vermont. I even daresay that people should <\/i>know about that person. People should know a lot of things, but there’s limited time (not to mention, to echo JillMatrix’s point, interest) to learn history, so you have to pick and choose your battles.<\/p>\n

The fact is, very few Jewish Lesbians of Color in 18th Century were elected President or had much influence outside of their immediate friends and family. That doesn’t mean our hypothetical subject wasn’t a good, valuable, worthwhile person, just not a good, valuable, worthwhile historic figure. It’s neat to know about people of all sorts, including this hypothetical person, but it doesn’t give you much sense of the flow of history outside of that one person’s life.<\/p>\n

Dead White Guys have been in charge of things, both in this country and outside of it, for quite a while. It’s not stretching a point to say that they’ve had a disproportionate amount of historical influence. That may be (in fact, certainly is) unjust, but so was the San Francisco Earthquake. Pretending that either didn’t happen doesn’t teach you anything.<\/p>\n

What Will may be driving at in a clumsy way is that by trying to make sure that half the people taught about in American History are non-white, non-male, non-Protestant, and non-rich, we’ve taught kids about a lot of fascinating individuals, but not much about history, or how the times of Squanto relate to the times of Frederick Douglass relate to the times of Susan B. Anthony (let alone to the times of a lot less significant individuals, carefully chosen for their ethnicity, gender, or interest to the writers of the history texts).<\/p>\n

That’s not to say that Squanto, Douglass, or Anthony, or a random slave, a random settler woman, a random Native American warrior, or a random Hispanic settler in 17th Century California weren’t good, useful and\/or brilliant people, or that students shouldn’t be taught about them. But if they are taught about them at the exclusion of <\/i>Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln or either Roosevelt, something’s pretty important is going to be lost from that historic tapestry. <\/p>\n

We’re not talking about memorizing dates and wars and Presidents — or maybe we are, because even though I sucked at doing that, it’s useful to know in what order things happened, if nothing else. Memorizing Presidents for the sake of doing so is kind of goofy — just like memorizing state capitols is. But it’s useful to know that Jackson came after Jefferson, but before Lincoln, because, damn, it’s hard to understand the Civil War, the Westward Expansion, or the international relations of the newborn US without knowing that.<\/p>\n

What’s happened in developing current history curricula is that it’s been a matter of picking and choosing folks on a basis other than “How does this person fit into the story of the US? How does knowing about who this person was and what they did help us understand what came before, and what came after?” Instead, people are chosen to fit in with Black History Month, or with other politically polite and esteem-enhancing criteria in mind. History thus becomes a way to make people feel good about themselves, or to provide role models to people of their own race, ethnicity, religion or gender.<\/p>\n

But that’s not what history is about. History is about learning how we got to where we are today, and maybe where we’re headed tomorrow. It’s impossible, perhaps, to divorce history from ideology, but to simply give in and let ideology dictate history is to put us in the same camp as the old Politburo hacks, frantically erasing Trotsky out of the chronicles of the Revolution, and then changing the spin on Stalin after Kruschev took over, and then damning Kruschev when he, in turn, fell. Historical thought always evolves with time, but the more tinkering you explicitly do with it, the more of a house of cards you’re building.<\/p>\n

It may very well be that a coherent, useful, educational curriculum of history can be developed that studies (if not celebrates, because history is not about celebration, either) historical figures in proportion to their modern presence in the population. We’ve only been trying for thirty years to do so, and much of that effort has been distorted by political concerns outweighing historical ones. We should keep trying — but we should be realistic as well. Dead White Guys have run things for a long time (that’s kind of the point of a lot of rhetoric from the Left, right?). To then try to teach how things have been in the past while not <\/i>talking about Dead White Guys seems sort of … well, unrealistic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JillMatrix comments on George Will’s comments about why kids are still doing horribly at History. And George Will says, I sh*t you not, that a major reason that U.S. students…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2707","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-zt-pc"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5971,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/06\/15\/today_in_histor.html","url_meta":{"origin":2707,"position":0},"title":"Today in History …","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 15-Jun-04 8:52am","format":false,"excerpt":"Not. in 1802, Virginian farmer George Washington is elected to serve as First Chancellor of the North American Confederation. He serves for two terms, and is succeeded by his Iroquois...","rel":"","context":"In "Potpourri"","block_context":{"text":"Potpourri","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/potpourri"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":28061,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2012\/05\/31\/wheres-george.html","url_meta":{"origin":2707,"position":1},"title":"Where's George?","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 31-May-12 1:35pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Now this is a lot of fun. When you get a bill with the \"wheresgeorge.com\" stamp, you can enter in your city and some condition notes at the site, and then see a history of previous reports on that bill.I got one today that was first noted in Minneapolis in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2411,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2002\/06\/28\/waxed_pledge.html","url_meta":{"origin":2707,"position":2},"title":"Waxed Pledge","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 28-Jun-02 7:11am","format":false,"excerpt":"More interesting history of the Pledge of Allegience in the pages of Reason. Among other tidbits are indications that the Pledge may have been used to sell more flag, and...","rel":"","context":"In "Politics & Law"","block_context":{"text":"Politics & Law","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/politics-law"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":43245,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2014\/06\/24\/rt-historicalpics-george-vi.html","url_meta":{"origin":2707,"position":3},"title":"RT @HistoricalPics: George VI,…","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 24-Jun-14 5:23pm","format":false,"excerpt":"RT @HistoricalPics: George VI, King of the United Kingdom, being extremely serious (1938) http:\/\/t.co\/VaKfPGvL58","rel":"","context":"In "~Tweets"","block_context":{"text":"~Tweets","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/tweets"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":133415,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/07\/ah-blasphemy-laws.html","url_meta":{"origin":2707,"position":4},"title":"Ah, blasphemy laws","author":"***Dave","date":"Sun 7-May-17 2:07pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Stephen Fry is apparently under investigation by Irish police for an interview a few years back in which he suggested that the problem of pain in this world does not reflect well on God.Well, he put it a bit more bluntly, but, boiled down, that's pretty much it.The investigation is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":51833,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2015\/07\/24\/a-georgia-preacher-in-secular-scandinavia.html","url_meta":{"origin":2707,"position":5},"title":"A Georgia Preacher in Secular Scandinavia","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 24-Jul-15 2:23pm","format":false,"excerpt":"The video is worth watching, if only to see the huge cognitive divide here (\"Wow!\"), but +George Wiman's specific comments are just as important: folk who look toward a greater mingling of church and state in our own nation always seem to do so with the assumption that the church\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2707\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}