The struggle for meaning and the utility of knowledge

Excerpt from Why Won't You Just Tell Us the Answer, by Bruce Lesh (p. 14)

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.