It's Critical in the Classroom - February 2023

Image: LOC

The human experience is infinitely vast. We all intuitively know this, sure. But when it comes to teaching I have been thinking more and more these days about focusing on salient aspects of historical actors at the expense of all the other stuff they did. Is this a fair read of the historical record? I think when we do this we tend to miss the mark - and generate skewed conclusions. One of my favorite characters to dissect historically is (of course) Abraham Lincoln. The great emancipator? The savior of Union? The American exceptionalist? Yes he is all of these things, and he’s other stuff too. He endorsed black colonization, he made assumptions about black people that we would consider racist, he signed off on a mass execution of Indians. Do we focus on the “good” stuff? Do we counter with the “bad” at the expense of everything else? How might doing either paint a not-so-accurate Lincoln portrait?

In short, he was a complex person - just like any other historical actor, from Robert E. Lee to Martin Luther King to George Washington to Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Frederick Douglass to Phyllis Schafly to Barry Goldwater to…well, you get the point. People are more than one thing. And if you think you can define them by underscoring that one thing, you are going to fall very very short.

Here’s something I always ask of my students: for what are these individuals most known in the historical narrative? Okay…then, what else can we say about their worldviews? Their biases? The contexts in which they live? Their backgrounds? Now…how might all of these things have helped inform their decisions?

I try to dissuade my students from taking the words of social media sock puppets (from the left and right) who try to distill historical actors down to a singular aspect of their humanity and use it to support their modern agenda. To me, this seems the exact opposite of critical thinking. In fact, in my estimation it’s both essentializing and ahistorical.

As tempting as it might be to put people in nice neat little boxes, doing so won’t get you very far. So students, if you are reading this I encourage you to dig a little deeper and try to figure out why people did what they did…perhaps see how their worlds colored their actions. Muddy the waters, as it were. Now you’re getting closer to figuring this stuff out in a comprehensive way that reflects the history.

Teachers - if you are encouraging this sort of activity then HUZZAH!! Sure, the work is more challenging than simply saying “historical actor X was a fill in the blank.” But I think you will find that facilitating a nuanced discussion about the human experience…in all its complexity, is far more rewarding. And I promise, your students will agree.

With compliments,

Keith