"Does Anybody Really Know What Time, er Truth Is?"

Part of the context in which learning takes place is the culture to which the students belong. From our culture, students derive a number of fundamental misunderstandings about historical truth.

Probably the most common misconception among my students is that there is in fact some agreed-upon set of historical “facts” that constitute objective history. This stems from the way history is taught in most public schools, and from the limited exposure most students have to history books, as opposed to school texts. Very few students understand that historical scholarship consists mainly of reviewing surviving documents and artifacts in an attempt to write a (hopefully) more accurate, but still inconclusive version of the past. No doubt they’d be disappointed, if they only knew!

A second misconception has to do with the purposes of history. Virtually no one remembers what Herodotus and Thucydides, who wrote the first attempts at historical research, set out to do in their writing. Especially among minority students, I’ve found that it is more important to them that history be inspiring than true. Exposed as they are to multicultural texts and little else, it does not seem strange to them that history should be written mainly to make them feel good about their ethnic or racial background. This is of course why so many fight so hard over what is included in school history texts (see Ravitch’s The Language Police for a lively version of the culture wars and their effects on educational publishers).

Finally, two related misconceptions color students’ understanding of the past: that movement through time represents progress, and that the past should be judged by the standards of the present. I often wonder what the point is to making moral evaluations of long-deceased historical personages. (Was Helen Keller inspiring or a communist? In fact, she was both. There’s a scary thought for many Americans: an inspiring communist!). I suppose every generation sees itself fit to judge its predecessors, because every generation sees itself as an improvement on the examples of the past!

It is very difficult to correct these misconceptions, and not just because the depths of history (and truths about history) are so difficult to plumb. These ideas are in fact cultural biases and therefore part of the human condition. Let’s start with the last two: the notion of progress and evaluations of the past. In some cultures, Ancient India and in Mesoamerica, for example, history was used to reinforce a concept of time that was cyclical. But Western notions of time are linear. Every monotheistic religion in the West has been introduced as a historical correction and improvement on a past set of religious beliefs, right from the time of the Golden Calf in the Old Testament. Christianity is a New Covenant with all of mankind; Islam is Allah’s final message to mankind, and so on. One can hardly wait for the next Ultimate Revelation; doubtless we’ll all disagree on that one, too.

Related to this conception of time is the idea that not only is there an objective reality, but that it also has a purpose. You’ll often hear it said – sometimes by historians – that everything happens for a reason. Many people suppose that if you study history, you’ll know the reasons for major events. And it’s true that causation is an important part of historical understanding. Whole books of history have been written to “prove” theories of Divine Providence and Eternal Moral Truths. But any decent modern historian will admit that most of what happened in the past didn’t have to happen the way that it did. That is to say, most historians don’t believe in Fate. But even the most sanguine of historical researchers, while they hold fast to the idea of objective truth, will not contend that it can actually be known, except in the collective sense of a culturally agreed-upon version of the past that is incomplete, flawed and subjective.

This brings us to how students objectify the past, often in hopes of finding inspiration. If I can drive a wedge between any one of these misconceptions and another, it may be possible to overcome all of these student misconceptions. I remember reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a major work of revisionist American history about the Indian “wars” of the American West. My high school library stocked it behind the librarian’s desk, and I needed my mother or father to sign permission for me to take it out. It was, of course, a book that posed a danger to commonly held beliefs about the past among the white majority. Yet I could take Mein Kampf right off the shelves, and so I did! In another time and place, the situation has no doubt been reversed.

Probably the best way to overcome students’ misconceptions of history (given that we are free to believe any sort of claptrap about history we choose) is simply to give students enough time and enough versions of some familiar set of events to get them to start questioning their own biases. That is to say, history teachers should give them more dangerous books of different types. David Bowie once sang, “Where there’s trouble there’s poetry.” Something similar may be said of teaching history: Where there’s real history being taught, there’s probably trouble. But then without trouble, there would be no thinking, would there?