Statement of Teaching Philosophy
The reports are confounding:

“This historic sense thus seems akin to what the newspaper man has in
mind when he talks about ‘a nose for a story.’ . . . But what determines
this profile pattern into which the historic thought landscape falls?
Practice, training are undoubtedly of the highest importance, but native
mental organization also plays a considerable part.”

A small-scale investigation of college seniors’ knowledge of American
history reveals mass ignorance of basic concepts, trends, and events.

“Nevertheless, in every age history is taken to be a story of actual
events from which a significant meaning may be derived; and in every
age the illusion is that the present version is valid because the related
facts are true, whereas former versions are invalid because [they are]
based upon inaccurate or inadequate facts. . . . To establish the facts is
always in order, and is indeed the first duty of the historian; but to
suppose that the facts, once established in all their fullness, will ‘speak
for themselves’ is an illusion. . . . The scientific historian, it seems, was
one who set forth the facts without injecting any extraneous meaning
into them.”

The American Historical Association established a commission “to
reshape history and social science education in the schools.”

“We look to these institutions [American high schools and colleges]
which train them [the country’s students] to convert them into firstclass doctors, lawyers, teachers, attorneys, writers, and engineers. We
expect these institutions also to make them thoroughly good American
citizens. . . . Yet it is distressingly true that our young people are all too
ignorant of American history when they leave high school or even
college. . . . The fact is that our educational requirements in American
history and government have been and are deplorably haphazard,
chaotic and ineffective.”

“After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education
on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a
conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the
superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’
commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican
political philosophies in a more positive light. . . . The conservative
members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a
liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. . . .
Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict
constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs,
managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures [in the world
history curriculum] whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th
century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas,
John Calvin and William Blackstone. . . . ‘The Enlightenment was not
the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based,’ Ms.
Dunbar said.”
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While characteristic of current debates, these excerpts delineate a shifting and century-old line of
battle over the relevance of history in American society and the content and methods most
appropriate for American classrooms.1
Spanning a period from the United States’ entry into the First World War to the
contemplation of its withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, these snapshots draw the observer’s
attention to three dilemmas regarding the nature and function of historical studies and the proper
role of professional historians, high-school instructors, and the general public in resolving them.
The most frequently recognized of these dilemmas, historical ignorance, tends to elicit editorials
and commentaries filled with laments about American students’ inability to identify the decade
in which the American Civil War was fought or the characteristics of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
New Deal programs. Critics wring their hands over an apathetic generation unable or
uninterested in engraving a single historical datum on its collective tabula rasa.
Hiding in the shadows of historical ignorance is a less easily detected dilemma, a debate
over the “stuff” that is appropriate and essential for students to know. This grappling over
historical relevance regularly pits shifting confederations of school boards, faculties, parents,
politicians, and editorialists against each other in rhetorical clashes the intensity of which
approaches that of European trench warfare in the years immediately preceding J. Carleton Bell’s
1917 penning of “The Historic Sense.” The verbal volleys fired by these belligerents regularly
resound with calls for the preservation or revision of one or another definition of an American
identity.
While the adversaries in these pitched battles may occasionally glance down to glimpse
the values on which they stand, a third, more elusive, yet fundamental, question remains
unasked. How do we know what happened in the past? This epistemological query lies at the
very heart of the historical profession, yet remains unasked in most high-school, undergraduate,
and graduate history classes. Leaving this question unaddressed not only limits students’
exposure to the past to the flotsam and jetsam that regularly pass for competency on standardized
state exams, but also denigrates the study of history, allowing fields, such as mathematics and the
sciences, to be deemed more academically rigorous and, therefore, more worthy of the time of
teachers and the treasure of tax revenue and tuition.
With such labyrinthine considerations before them, how does one begin to redress these
shortcomings in the teaching of history and in the training of history instructors? Paraphrasing
David Lowenthal, how do historians and teachers of history guide students in fathoming and
domesticating the strangeness of that foreign country known as the past? How does one
recognize the competing currents of criticism of the study of history without being pulled under
by them? How do instructors cultivate J. Carleton Bell’s “historic sense” in their students? A
worthy start would be made with a reexamination of the assumptions, attitudes, and aptitudes
that anchor historical studies.2
J. Carleton Bell, “The Historic Sense,” Journal of Educational Psychology, 8 (1917), p. 317; D. H. Eikenberry, “Permanence of
High School Learning,” Journal of Educational Psychology 14 (1923), pp. 463-481 cited in Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking
and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), p. 32; Carl
Becker, Everyman His Own Historian, annual address of the president of the American Historical Association, delivered at
Minneapolis, December 29, 1931. From the American Historical Review, 37 (1932), pp. 221–36; Gary Nash, “Creating History
Standards in United States and World History,” OAH Magazine of History, spring 1995, p. 3; Allan Nevin, “American History
for Americans,” The New York Times Magazine (May 3, 1942), p. 6; James C. McKinley Jr., “Texas Conservatives Win
Curriculum Change,” The New York Times (March 12, 2010).
2 David Lowenthal, The Past as a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) p. xvii.
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Assumptions: In Carl Becker’s criticism of the shortsightedness of the “scientific
historian” and James C. McKinley Jr.’s description of the revisionism of the Texas Board of
Education, cited above, two errors of assumptions are evident. Becker takes to task individuals
who argue that historical meaning automatically emerges from the who, what, where, and when
that too often serve as the raison d’etre of standardized tests. McKinley, concentrates his
attention on the debate over which facts should be included in high-school curricula and
attributes the Texas Board of Education’s overthrowing of classroom teachers’ decisions to their
erroneous assumptions regarding what the state’s students should know. In considering these
two positions, one finds oneself on the horns of a dilemma: historical data must be given
meaning—must be interpreted—but, in selecting particular data, the instructor may convey the
sense that these points encompass the totality or the “correct” version of past events.
Drawing on an approach to research and reporting that characterizes many works of
feminist history, high-school teachers and college professors would do their students and the
field a great service by forthrightly recognizing historical biases. Countering their authoritative
tone, instructors should make their students aware of the built-in topic-selection bias evident in
committee-written textbooks. With a small group of textbooks, such as Eric Foner’s Give Me
Liberty! and the American Social History Project’s Who Built America?, serving as exceptions,
the anonymity of textbook authorship often lends an “official” or “sanctioned” aura to the
material covered in them. Although this situation is most often found in high-school settings, it
also frequently emerges in college-level survey courses. By selecting textbooks written by an
individual author or by a small group of historians who share a particular area of interest, and
explicitly recognizing this fact early in the course, instructors will provide their students with a
more comprehendible history and introduce them to the centrality of interpretation in the field of
history.
Other equally relevant biases that need recognition are the one brought into the classroom
by the instructor. More evident in college rather than high-school courses, the political leanings
of the instructor is one form of this bias. Other factors, such as an instructor’s research interests
and period of specialization, are also worthy of acknowledgement. The need for such
transparency on these latter points is frequently evident in survey-level courses, in which
students become confused when discussions of the American Civil War or the Second World
War concentrate on sectional economic differences between the North and the South and the
temporary expansion of employment opportunities for African Americans and women instead of
the battles of Vicksburg and Gettysburg and the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Normandy
Invasion.
Attitudes: In the first two chapters of his book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural
Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, Sam Wineburg identifies two important qualities
of the historian’s craft whose absence exacerbates the above biases and students’ misperception
of the past and historical research. In recognizing, in the words of Primo Levi, the “inability to
perceive the experiences of others” and the limitations of actually knowing the past, Wineburg
calls for an attitudinal adjustment, one which acknowledges the incomplete nature of the
historical record and the distortions that result from an emphasis on a particular part of this
incomplete chronicle. Without such “intellectual charity,” not only does one run the risk of
allowing history to become the servant of one particular political opinion or another, but one also
distorts the historical record, turning it into a one-dimensional parody of the past. While some
critics may claim that such misplaced charity would debase the metal of historical inquiry, in
actuality, such actions would draw students’ attention to the complexity of the field and, as a
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result, elevate it above the misperception it being merely a disjointed collection of names, places,
and dates.3
This enhanced sense of intellectual humility needs to be accompanied by an adjustment
in the tone of both textbooks and teachers. Countering students’ misperception of history as
merely “knowing the facts,”—a condition that emerges from a lack of “metadiscourse,” the
“indications of judgment, emphasis and uncertainty” indicated in academic journal articles and
monographs by “hedges” such as “may,” “might” “suggest,” “appear,” “seem,” “possibly,” and
“perhaps”—history instructors must recognize the structural limitations of historical inquiry in
their classes. By returning these qualifiers to their curricula, instructors provide students with the
opportunity to grapple with the limits of the historical record. This reorientation would go a long
way in revitalizing and reinvigorating student interaction with the material. Such a renewed
attention to “metadiscourse” would expose students to a way of thinking as sophisticated and
complex as those found in the fields of mathematics and the sciences. Along with improving
students’ comprehension, this modification would assist in rescuing the study of history from its
“stepchild” status in the debates on educational funding and graduation requirements.4
Aptitudes: This new way of thinking—this “thinking in time”—requires a certain
aptitude in both abstract thinking as well as meaningful storytelling. The ability to conceptualize
the past as an ordered sequence of events is at the very heart of the historian’s craft. This
chronological thought requires the student to sift through clusters of concurrent happenings and
develop a network of causal connections that exhibit both the context of a particular event as
well as its significance. A second thought process essential to “thinking in time” is
interpretation. Reliant on, but separate from chronological thought, interpretive thought elevates
students’ exposure to the past. In engaging in such activity, students move beyond being passive
recipients of data to becoming meaningful storytellers. The act of creating meaning from past
events is an exercise in agency. The final thought process, comparison, requires students to
place two or more meaningful stories side-by-side in judgment. Frequently distorted into a
“history-repeats-itself” encapsulation of the past, comparative thought, when carefully applied,
allows the student to appreciate more fully the broad chronological and cross-cultural scope of
the study of the past. While engaging in these processes requires great care, such a reasoned
comparison of events allows students to cross tentatively over the border between the “foreign”
past and the present.
The culmination of this “thinking in time,” requires students to capture both the details of
events as well as their significance and to convey their findings to others in written form. This
meaningful storytelling is a daunting task for both high-school and college students. Beyond the
pitfalls of grammar, punctuation, and citation, student expository writing often suffers from
rudderless prose that offers data and description without argument. To aid in the remedying of
these ills, history instructors need to step away from the interpreting of the past to serve as
masters to their journeyman student historians. With their exposure to expository writing
frequently limited to a high-school or survey-level college English class, many history students
have never had the opportunity to rally specific historical evidence to support an argumentative
thesis statement. Lacking the opportunity to enroll in programs like the British School Council’s
“What is History?” course, which “introduced students to the nature of historical evidence, the
nature of reasoning from evidence, and problems of reconstruction from partial and mixed
3
Wineburg, Historical Thinking, p. 24.
Avon Crismore, “Rhetoric of Textbooks: Metadiscourse,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 16 (1984), pp. 279-296 cited in
Wineburg Historical Thinking, pp. 47-48.
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evidence,” a majority of American high-school and college history students have not had the
opportunity to hone fully the research and writing skills specific to the field. To demand the
most from their students, history instructors must provide them with more precise analytical and
rhetorical tools. By initiating them into this “thinking-in-time” process, instructors usher their
students passed mere disconnected data to a deeper understanding of history.5
In espousing such a philosophy of teaching history, its adherents should be cautiously
aware of questions that may emerge with its implementation. By reorienting the teaching of
history from a data-driven discipline to one that emphasizes “thinking in time,” the instructor
confronts a dilemma of breadth versus depth. How, with the never-ceasing march of time, does
one cover a period spanning the Pre-Columbian period to the present in a one-year high-school
United States history class or the century-and-a-half between the end of the American Civil War
and American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan in a one-semester survey? If this is not
daunting enough, the quandary intensifies when contemplating a global history or western
civilization course. Holders of newly minted teaching certifications or doctoral diplomas may
waiver in their zeal at this thought and scurry back to the safety of data-driven, multiple-choice
familiarity.
This tendency toward desperation, however, may be dissipated and the quality of history
education enhanced if one reorients one’s thinking and considers a few viable structural
adjustments. On the high-school level, the time necessary to develop such a “thinking-in-time”
curriculum could become available by, as some schools already do, developing a two-year
program for both United States and global history. This objective could be reached on the
college level by the substituting of a three-semester structure for the usual two-class survey of
United States and global history. These changes would also go a long way toward addressing a
complaint of many history instructors on both the high-school and college level. By this
restructuring, students would be given the time necessary to develop the requisite analytical
skills and knowledge base to explore more recent history more deeply and to give it fuller
meaning.
In the September 12, 2011 edition of The New Yorker, Jonathan Safran Foer, in
contributing his thoughts on the tenth anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center and
Pentagon, recalls his son’s difficulty in describing a nightmare he had one night. “But I’ve come
to wonder,” Safran Foer writes, “if he simply didn’t possess the vocabulary. And if that failure
of language was at least part of the problem. Words are capable of making experience more
vivid, and also of organizing it.” In contemplating how he will explain the terrorist attacks of
9/11, Safran Foer ponders: “How could this [post-9/11] world be so unlike the world that I
believed I was living in? I can’t describe it. Do I not want to describe it, or do I simply not
possess the vocabulary?” The job of both college historians and high-school history teachers is
to aid their students in developing not only the historical vocabulary, but also the syntax and
grammar necessary to offer such an exlanation.6
Charles R. Kaczyński
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6
Wineburg, Historical Thinking, p. 41.
Jonathan Safran Foer, “Speechless,” The New Yorker (September 21, 2011), pp. 28 & 30.
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