The proposition that history is about questions often generates the refrain, "How can students think critically until they know something to think about?" If this were the case, then no one could ever think critically until they reached the upper levels of graduate school. The refrain is an excuse. "The notion that students must be given facts and then at some distant time in the future they will 'think about them,'" argued University of California at Berkeley historian Charles Sellers, "is both a cover-up and a perversion of pedagogy...One does not collect facts he does not need, hang onto them, and the[n] stumble across some propitious moment to use them. One is first perplexed by a problem and then makes use of the facts to achieve a solution."
This excerpt lays bare one of the fundamental problems with the way that
we think about history. The link between studying history and being a
successful contestant on Jeopardy! seems to be stronger than the link between
studying history and being a critically, meaningfully engaged participant in
American democracy. This passage also clearly shows what animates Bruce Lesh’s
work. Lesh is concerned with identifying questions that will foster student
curiosity and engagement, and also questions that will help students see that
history is more a way of thinking (and reasoning and arguing) than it is a body
of knowledge.
It is precisely this common misconception that Bruce Lesh seeks to
address in his teaching and in his work. Lesh begins from the position that
history is an argument and a quest to find the best answers for some of our
most difficult questions. Therefore, he writes, it is the responsibility
of the teacher to identify and develop questions that will help students to
become better historical thinkers. Lesh provides meaningful criteria to use in
developing and evaluating good questions; these criteria address importance,
debatability, amount of content covered, ability to generate and hold student
interest, appropriate match to materials, challenge and historical concept
addressed. These criteria leave room for many different types of
investigations, discussions and debates in any history course.
If you
want to build a ship, do not gather your people to give them orders, to explain
every detail, to tell them where to find everything ... If you want to build a
ship, inspire in the hearts of your people a desire for the sea.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The first
people had questions, and they were free. The second people had answers, and
they became enslaved.
-The Earth Wisdom
Teachings
In some respects, Lesh’s work is hardly groundbreaking. It aligns nicely
with much of what is in the NCSS Handbook and also with older works such as Teaching Democracy by Being Democratic.
In fact, it has significant overlap with Dianna Hess’s Controversies in the Classroom that was published several years
earlier. Read a different way, however, this book is quite refreshing. It is
the story of a teacher actually doing the work that many researchers have spent
time talking about. It is nice to see how this approach to history can and
should look in the classroom and I suspect that many teachers will be glad to
have a set of issues and questions from which to borrow.
In many ways, Lesh’s work aligns with my pedagogical commitments and my
beliefs about the purposes of education, particularly social studies education.
Lesh focuses intently on helping students develop critical thinking skills and
on teaching students that ‘history’ is not a settled matter. However, there are
two other concerns that I do not know are sufficiently dealt with by Lesh. One
is the same problem that confronts teachers of all disciplines: given that a
very small amount of your students will grow up to be
scientists/mathematicians/historians/writers how do you determine what will be
useful in the long-term? For social studies, the focus on the long-term
inevitably brings us back to the goal of creating thoughtful, engaged citizens.
While this is a likely byproduct of Lesh’s work, it is not a central aim. I
would suggest that “likelihood to advance citizenship” be included as an eighth
criterion for determining questions for use.
Secondly, I am concerned that Lesh overlooks the importance of helping
students to see that they live in a historical era. We recently discussed the
question of America being an ‘ahistorical’ society in class. There seemed to be
broad agreement that America is not ahistorical in that it is not a nation that
ignores its own history. Americans study their genealogy and are fascinated by
local histories and by events like the Civil War. However, we may be
ahistorical in another, far more disconcerting sense. Too many Americans
believe that where we are in the arc of human development today is somehow an
arrival point. Fukuyama wrote an essay on the end of history and, at the time
he wrote it, was quite serious about the idea that history had happened and now
we had arrived. Clearly, it was a silly premise, and now Fukuyama pretends that
that isn’t what he meant the first time; however, that idea that we are in a
period that is not capable of being shaped by historical forces (human action)
exists and is quite pernicious. I don’t believe that Lesh’s work gives
sufficient weight to this concern.
