2/5 Assignment Part A: Historical Thinking

Among this week's readings was a definition of Historical Thinking. Within the definition were summaries of two sets of standards for Historical Thinking. The US Department of Education, in its rubric for The Nation's Report Card assessment, divides history learning into three dimensions:

1. Major historical themes
2. Chronological periods, and
3. Ways of knowing and thinking about history. This last dimension is further divided into:

• Historical knowledge and perspective, and
• Historical analysis and interpretation.

As standards go, these strike me as reasonable.

I have a love/hate relationship with standards. On the one hand, none of us ever arrive anywhere if we don't have a goal and a roadmap. Clarity is Good. Furthermore, education is a fundamentally shared enterprise, in a way that driving is not, so having a shared goal and a shared roadmap is Very Good.

On the other hand, it is very easy indeed for the movement to define standards to devolve into this. And functionally, there is no difference between having 613 "priorities" versus having none at all. Setting goals entails making choices, selecting what's out as well as what's in. Clarity entails Brevity.

(Yes, I do recognize the irony in me, of all people, pointing this out.)

So while I see merit in the goal behind the setting-of-standards; and while I certainly also recognize that in the current climate of near-continuous hyper-testing, content standards are here to stay whether they have merit or not; I also see several potential downsides. If they're too high level, they're meaningless. If they're too detailed, they force a memorization-intensive, teach-to-the-test rote pedagogy that kills all joy in the subject. If they're a long committee-generated grocery list of many flavors of pablum driving nothing by timeconsuming paperwork.... well. The gulf between the goal and the practice can be troubling.

With all those caveats, the Department of Education standards above strike a balance that to me seems reasonable. Perhaps they err a smidge on the "too high level to be helpful" end of the spectrum, but better to err on that side than the other.

What they don't do, however, and which none of the other several sets of historical content standards that I've looked at thus far in the course do either, is speak to the very baseline question of what history is.

I mention this, because as a student, I always loathed history. Several (ahem) decades later, history is a passion which informs every day of my life. The transition from then to now bears deeply on my views of Historical Thinking.

Back in a prior millenium, when I was a student, "history" pretty much meant "lurching from one war to the next." It wasn't just that the pedagogy with which the subject was taught was heavy on rote memorization (though it was), or heavily textbook-reliant (though it was) or almost exclusively individually assessed (though it was). It was, more fundamentally, about what we studied: dates, alliances, political and economic factors leading up to war; battlefield strategies, key armaments and generals during war; shifts in boundaries, changes in regimes, and reconstruction after war. In the rapid sprints between one war and the next (which often we skipped entirely as we approached the end of the school year), we focused on emergent factors which set the groundwork for... the next war.

Year after year, in course after course, with teacher after teacher, this is what History was. The analytical core of the historical narrative was war.

This was unstated, of course; and I expect also unexamined; and therefore, perhaps, unintended. But that's what I always thought history was.

Naturally I dropped the subject the moment I got to college.

However, a couple of years into my economics degree, I had to take a course in economic history. As a declared history loather, I was cranky; but it was required.

In the opening lecture, my professor, Hugh Aitken, announced breezily something to the effect that "In this course, the center of our historical analysis will be technology. We will consider the ways in which technological innovations have affected economic structures, political movements, international competitiveness, superiority in war; and even such seemingly far-flung fields as religion, architecture, art and music. We could, of course, use any number of other constructs at the center of our study of history: political movements, religion, culture, even artistic ideals; and consider how these constructs affected everything else, including technology. And we wouldn't be wrong, because the study of history is the study of people, and all these things are connected. But something has to form the core, the dots that the rest of the narrative connects, and in this course, that core will be technology."

He went on, I'm sure, to say other things, but I did not hear another blessed word. My ears were ringing. At twenty-something years old, this was the greatest "a-ha!" moment of my life to date; and (ahem) several decades later it still rates among the Top Ten.

We could define the center of historical analysis?

We didn't have to lurch from battlefield to battlefield, memorizing dates and generals and how the topography shaped the outcome? We didn't have to consider, at each and every stage of human history, how what was happening was shaping the terrain for the next bloody conflict? We could look at the evolution of cultures, or languages, or religious concepts, or art, and it would actually be... history??!!

That was my personal breakthrough in Historical Thinking. That was the moment at which I was able first to engage in the subject. That was when I first experienced intrinsic motivation to study history, as opposed simply to working towards a good grade or a good test score.

Perhaps by now schools have all moved beyond the awkward lurching from war to war that I endured a millenium ago. Perhaps all history teachers now explicitly consider what construct they're placing at the center of the narrative they teach. Perhaps none of this even bears mention.

But if I'm going to think about Historical Thinking, that is where I have got to begin. With a little speech not unlike the one I heard in the opening lecture of Economic History.

Hugh Aitken died in 1994.

And... I never got around to telling him how fundamentally he'd changed my life.