I was taken aback; in academic circles fun is not supposed to be part of the equation. Rewarding, important, essential but certainly not fun. Fun trivializes the subject matter, stunts one’s intellectual growth and flies in the face of our puritan tradition of grim self-determination. After all, the purpose of teaching history and social studies in secondary schools is to build a responsible citizenry for the republic – quite serious business.
I also felt exposed, for Schlesinger had found me out. I didn’t become a history teacher because I thought it important; I became a history teacher because there’s nothing more fun than history. I was preventing a confrontation with my great fear in life – boredom – by casting my lot with the story of humankind. And having a hell of a time, I might add.
Of course I tried to conceal my enjoyment from those in the profession who saw teaching as a mission, since exuberance in the workplace implies a lack of seriousness, making one suspect by the morally inclined. Also I did not want to make friends and relatives, who put their noses to the grindstone in more commercial pursuits, feel bad. Schlesinger confirmed my inclinations, and since then, I have never doubted what history should be.
Unfortunately history as subject matter has joined the ranks of the other disciplines in which the focus is on factual inputs and outputs – a student learns the facts and returns the information on a quiz or test. This is not all the teachers’ fault, for there is much to cover.
In U.S. history we have to get from Columbus to the end of the cold war; in world history we have to follow human progress from prehistory through the modern era. This includes not only the great people and great events, but the new social history that examines how people lived. At the same time we teach skills; research, analysis, synthesis and how to support an argument in a spirited essay. The problem is that with all the knowledge we try to put into students’ heads, the skills we’re trying to develop are more applicable to law school – we lose the narrative, the ability to see history as story.
There is no better story than history. The cast of characters in the human race gives us plenty of sex, violence and knavery, with occasional acts of genius and nobility that propel the race forward in spite of itself. In fiction, who could come up with people as intrinsically good as Jesus, Moses, Muhammad and the Buddha? Who do we find today as noble as Socrates, Abraham Lincoln, Chief Joseph, Clara Barton or Frederick Douglass? Who has the complexities of nature that were King David or Thomas Jefferson? How can we contemplate through the imagination the horrors that befell the 14th and 20th centuries?
Yet we continue to bore students with meaningless multiple-choice quizzes (it’s 50 percent of the advanced-placement exam, teachers tell you earnestly) and essays that emphasize cause-effect relationships such as ““Examine the effects of the Enclosure Acts on the English Industrial Revolution,’’ or compare-and-contrast questions as ““Compare and contrast the emergence of the welfare state in 19th-century Britain and France.’’ Who cares? Where is the story and how much fun is this?
No doubt history has to include rational analysis to strengthen one’s ability to make logical conclusions, create intellectual order out of the material and to develop a healthy skepticism. However, history is also the intuitive, the visceral, the imaginative. Otherwise it becomes just another subject geared toward inputs and outputs. No wonder we lose students.
I want a story. I want to know how Themistocles outsmarted the Persian navy at Salamis. I want to know about Henry V and his longbowmen at Agincourt. Tell me about the terror one felt in looking over the one-mile field before Pickett’s Charge, or being thrown out of a landing craft on a Normandy beach. Don’t make it easy on me – make me feel the guilt and shame of owning slaves in the plantation South or exploiting immigrant workers in late 19th-century America. Inspire me with stories about courage and sacrifice so that when I hit my own Thermopylae somehow I can stand fast.
And don’t lie to me. The slave South was not ““Gone With the Wind’’ and the frontier was not ““Dances With Wolves.’’ Tell me the story with integrity like Solomon Northup’s ““Twelve Years a Slave,’’ Simon Schama’s chronicle of the French Revolution, ““Citizens,’’ as with Michael Shaara’s depiction of Gettysburg in ““The Killer Angels’’ or with Joanna Stratton’s ““Pioneer Women,’’ on the hardships faced by families on the Kansas frontier. Ken Burns, with his Civil War epic, and Steven Spielberg’s version of ““Schindler’s List’’ both capture a riveting story with honesty and clarity. And don’t trivialize the human condition. Very few people are as evil as Hitler or Stalin or as good as Mother Teresa. The rest of us, as with historical figures, are somewhere in between – we need to acknowledge our inherent ambiguity.
We can all share in the glory and disasters that are our own. Refusing to share in either risks the loss of our own humanity, for the lens to our individual soul becomes unfocused. Kenneth Clark said that we need to learn from history because it is ourselves. But without a leap of the imagination and a willingness to be part of the collective human race, there is little that history can do for us. I want to experience that true story and to make the ultimate connection with someone in another place and time. If I’m not careful, I might in the process learn a little more about who I am. And God forbid, I might have more fun than academia should allow. But don’t tell anyone.
