9 posts tagged “history”

Ken Bain, author of What the Best College Teachers Do, came and spoke to our faculty today.

 "We don’t learn from experience but from reflecting on experience" John Dewey once said and so I thought I would take a moment to reflect on what he had to say. "When we learn, we construct our sense of reality" Ken pointed out, "and then we begin to "use our models of reality to understand new sensory inputs."

We construct mental models or maps that enable us to know what to do in life. This practice serves us well but can be a problem if they are not accurate models or maps. As teachers, we want students to build new models of reality that we believe are more accurate than the ones they carry with them to the first class ... or to at least question existing constructs of reality. When we ask them to disbelieve their own maps and models, we are asking students to engage in an "unnatural act".

Ken mentioned the book: Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts" 

 

"Whether he is comparing how students and historians interpret documentary evidence or analyzing children's drawings, Wineburg's essays offer "rough maps of how ordinary people think about the past and use it to understand the present." Arguing that we all absorb lessons about history in many settings—in kitchen table conversations, at the movies, or on the world-wide web, for instance—these essays acknowledge the role of collective memory in filtering what we learn in school and shaping our historical thinking.

 

Pasted from <http://www.amazon.com/Historical-Thinking-Pb-Critical-Perspectives/dp/1566398568>

 

Two physicists asked "Do my Physics classes change the way my students conceive of motion?" (Does your course change the way your students think about History?) They devised a "force concept inventory" and gave it to 600 students. Virtually none changed their minds between the test they took before the class and the test they took a few months after. Neither was the degree of change predictable by grade. "A" students were better at looking like they had changed their minds. That was all. The human tendency is to wrap new learning around old learning, Ken noted.

So, how do you create an environment where people will change their thinking? Bains asked, The Answer: A Natural Critical Learning Environment. Bain says, that you have to put the learner in a situation where their existing mental model does not work. There has to be an “expectation failure.” Students have to expect one thing and not get it. Secondly, the learner has to CARE that their mental model does not work anymore.
  

Question for Comment: So, “What is a learning experience that you could design to provide almost guaranteed "expectation failure"? What are the fundamental paradigms that you believe that your students come with? Which ones do you want your class to challenge?

Bains also suggests that good teachers appealed not to grades but to outcomes they could promise when motivating students. "You take my class and here is what you will be able to do." Not, "Here's what grade you will get."

"This course will help you to learn to use your head. If you don't want to learn to use your head , go enroll  in a Barber College."

Tonight, the boys and I watched some episodes from E2, a series of documentary videos about architects and how they makes use of environmental studies to create sustainable building designs.

It is an important reminder of how knowledge can so often be, but shouldn't be, disconnected from problems solving, and even more, service to a community. knowledge was never intended to be known to pass a test. it is there to be used as a tool of service and it was refreshing to see creative, intelligent, well-educated people using their assets for the good of communities, some, as in the first episode are some of the world's wealthiest. Some, as in the second episode are among the world's poorest.

That word, SUSTAINABILITY is gaining traction everywhere. It implies that a paradigm shift is occurring whose principle feature is a change from thinking twelve months out to twelve decades out.

Sustainability may be understood by referring to a set of five core principles:

Respecting life and natural processes. Sustainability commits us to explicit considerationof the effects of our decisions and actions on the health and wellbeing of the entire community of life.

Living within limits. Sustainabilityinvolves an awareness that natural resourcesare finite endowmentsto be used with care and prudence at a rate consonant with their capacity for regeneration.

Valuing the local. Sustainabilitycommitsus to show respect for the natural components of our neighborhoods and bioregions;to preservation, restoration,and use of local knowledge; and to creation of strong, selfreliant
local economies.

Accounting for full costs. Sustainabilityrequires that we become aware of the costs generated by our products from "source to sink-to the environment and society. Product prices must reflect this awareness.

Sharing power. Sustainability demands we recognize that we are all interconnected-people, biota, and physical elements. Problems are solved by each individual assuming a share of the responsibility.

Green Destiny: Universities Leading the Way to a Sustainable Future
Christopher Uhl; Amy Anderson
BioScience, Vol. 51, No. 1. (Jan., 2001), pp. 36-42.

It makes me sit back and ask, "How will the teaching of history contribute to or inhibit the speed with which we convert to this new way of thinking? How have historians contributed to the lack of sustainability in the way we have been living? is there a historiography of sustainability yet?

The most interesting of the episodes in the series to me was about sustainable archetecture in China right now. See the trailer at: CHINA: FROM RED TO GREEN at PBS.

Question for Comment: How sustainable is your life at the moment? Is it a life that your children and grandchildren could continue living? Why or why not?

Since it is the night before Easter I figured I would give Frederich Nietzsche a chance to tell me what he thinks about life and death tonight. The movie of the night was When Nietzsche Wept. I can't say that it will come to you highly recommended but there was at least one interesting scene where Nietzsche convinces his Dr. that one should never live a life that they would not live over and over forever - That no one should live their lives from a sense of duty if to do so would mean condemning themselves to a life they would not chose to live. Its an excellent philosophy for abandoning someone and I am sure I probably have been the victim of it more than once. Maybe we all have.

Rather than talk about the movie though, I thought perhaps I would offer some short reflections on some favorite Nietzsche quotes:

“For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.” Frederich Nietszche

Is this misogyny or observation? Do all men sense this is the truth? In the movie, the Dr. I believe is convinced of it. He longs to be told that he will be the only man in a woman's life (his obsession says it to more than one man in the movie). But his own wife resents him for not spending more time with the children and later loves him only after he does. I do think this "spousification" of the child is something women should think about even as men should worry about  the "spousification of their work" perhaps.

 “Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.” Frederich Nietszche

I wonder if this is the result of his attitude towards women ... or if his attitude towards women was the result of experiences like the ones that led to this observation?

“Whoever has provoked men to rage against him has always gained a party in his favor, too.” Frederich Nietszche

I need to remember this one this week. Because it is true. Be a speaker of truth for people. Someone in that crowd will appreciate it. Emerson understood this. Pretend that if you don;t speak the truth to power no one will because it is probably the case.

 “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” Frederich Nietszche

Is insanity a matter of not knowing something one should know or a matter of knowing something before others do? This quote reminds me of that song about Vincent Van Gogh ... even though I can never figure out what the lyrics mean. It also connects nicely to W.H. Auden's poem, The Unknown Citizen.

“He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon.” Frederich Nietszche

This is a problem for thinking people for usually they can't survive without others in a system who deal with the more mundane but necessary aspects of existence. A smart person without connection to a community is likely to be, well, like Nietzsche, a brilliant conductor on a deserted Island. Of what use are his skills?

 “I did that," says my memory. "I could not have done that," says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually — the memory yields.” Frederich Nietszche

I like this one. I see it in other people all the time. Grin. 

“All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.” Frederich Nietzsche

 "History teachers rule and dictator's drool" I always say. I hope, in the way that I teach history, this is not the case. I hope that students leave my history classes with their opinions about history based on their exposure to sources and not based on my favorite way of seeing things. I am not to be thought of as the teacher but as a fellow student who often happens to be right. grin.

“Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt.” Frederich Nietszche

In short, in a world where "God is dead" because we killed him (as Nietzsche would argue), nothing we do is wrong - Nothing worthy of guilt? Try to tell a conscience that. I read Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and  Punishment a few weeks ago and his whole point is that this escape from moral accountability is a novel concept and liberating perhaps - but delusional. If we think we will not care what we do to people, we deceive ourselves.

“Every church is a stone on the grave of a god-man: it does not want him to rise up again under any circumstances.” Frederich Nietzsche

Ahhh ... the ubermensch. This is not a man like other men but better. It is a man unlike other men. He is better because he declares what bad, good, and better is. A man who declares a new doctrine ... a new set of rules. a man not limited by the ideas of men who came before. It is a modern way of saying to a man "And you shall be as gods" - you shall declare your own set of rules and rule men because the rules of the game you play with them are your rules. I don't know ... the set of rules the original ubermensche set out seem like they don't need a whole lot of revision. I am not sure I could do better. 

“A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.” Frederich Nietzsche

Is in-loveness a disease worth curing? It seems only to make us sick when we are cured of it?

Question for Comment: If you had to live your life the way you have over and over forever, would you be cool with that? does the thought frighten you?

Tonight's movie, Elizabeth, the Golden Age. Something for everyone. Lots of romance for the romantic and a burning Armada for those with a need for devastation. I particularly loved the part where the Spanish ambassadors get all bent out of shape and self-righteous about the English privateers stealing the gold they steal from the Aztecs and Inca. Imagine the chutzpah of it!

"Elizabeth is darkness. I am light." says the Catholic king of Spain. I mean, those sorts of self-righteous categorizations would make any god in heaven want to pee on you and blow your ships into the cliffs. ESPECIALLY, when you are in the very process of decimating a continent, enslaving its people, stealing its gold, and killing left-over heretics on Sunday.

Queen Elizabeth I: Go back to your rathole! Tell Philip I fear neither him, nor his priests, nor his armies. Tell him if he wants to shake his little fist at us, we're ready to give him such a bite he'll wish he'd kept his hands in his pockets!

Spanish Minister: You see a leaf fall, and you think you know which way the wind blows. Well, there is a wind coming, Madame, that will sweep away your pride.
[turns to leave with his ministers]

Queen Elizabeth I: I, too, can command the wind, sir! I have a hurricane in me that will strip Spain bare when you dare to try me!

Feisty! Course it helps to have a Rotweiler like Walsingham torturing your enemy's spies for you. I mean, the guy was brutal in ways you don't even want to know brutality existed but he had no problems justifying it later.

"I call God to witness that as a private person I have done nothing unbeseeming an honest man, nor, as I bear the place of a public man, have I done anything unworthy of my place."

I suspect that when he compared himself and his tactics with the Spanish inquisition, he came out smelling like roses.

"To sacrifice the national prosperity, political, financial or economic on the altar of ecclesiastical polity and dogma (as had been frankly done in the preceding reign), was the furthest possible thing from the minds of Queen Elizabeth and her Council; the measures which they took against the English Romanists were all primarily intended to promote the safety and strength of the realm or to enrich the crown. The contrast with the policy of contemporary Spain or of France under Louis XII', is striking and significant: while these nations lacerated and impoverished themselves in the excess of their religious zeal, the peace and material comfort of England were preserved in a manner which makes her history in the sixteenth century unique in the annals of the Reformation. . .

Torture by the rack was employed with a frequency which is in striking contrast to the rest of the reign."' Mr. Norton the Rackmaster ", was accused in a seditious book of having vaunted that he had pulled the Jesuit Alexander Briant "one good foot longer than ever God made him."

Some Notes on the Treatment of the English Catholics in the Reign of Elizabeth
Roger Bigelow Merriman
The American Historical Review, Vol. 13, No. 3. (Apr., 1908), pp. 480-500.

425 some odd years later, we are still debating the subject. The Supreme Court "The Vaders" were hearing a case about Guantanamo Bay prisoner rights just a few months ago.

Question for Comment: do all great rulers have someone doing their Machiavellian work for them in this world? I was listening today to a college course on the Middle East and the lecture of the day was focusing on Jimmy Carter, the "human rights president" and it has made me wonder if his administration "suffered from undiluted goodness?"   

Tonight's movie documentary was The War that Made America: The Story of the French Indian War. Nothing really exciting to report. Just something to fill in the details of a period of History for me. The one thing that I would mention is this: At the siege of Fort William Henry on the Southern tip of Lake George, General Moncalm offered the British terms of surrender that violated the unspoken agreements with Montcalm's native American allies. After allowing the native Americans to accept a lot of the front line risks of the siege, Montcalm sat down to dinner with Colonel Monroe and the British officers and basically told them that they could leave unmolested.

Now, I am by no means suggesting here that the British SHOULD have been handed over to an Indian War party but quite clearly, the natives had good reason to feel used by the French. After all, Montcalm had made use of threats of Indian savagery in a letter to Monroe earlier to get him to surrender the fort. For all intents and purposes, he was talking out of both sides of his mouth. he reminds me a bit of Henry V at the gates of Harfleur.  He gets his soldiers all in a lather with a "Go kill'em" speech ... and then he tells the defenders of Hafleur that his men cannot be controlled much longer and the city better surrender ... and then when they do surrender, Henry basically offers them amnesty.

Here is what he says to get his army all rabid:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!

... And after he has them all goaded into a frenzy, he speaks to the men of the beseiged city and warns them of the dangers of his half crazed soldiers yanking the locks of their "shrill shrieking daughters" and dashing their fathers' brains against the walls and "spitting their infants on pikes". Two minutes later they have surrendered and Henry tells his men to "use mercy to them all". . . . like he is playing with puppets.

Where this all connects for me is how similar it is to what goes on with the use of adjuncts. Montcalm will put you on the front lines, dangle a reward in front of you and then when he has what he wants, forget the whole previous unspoken arrangement. You are ONE thing when you are needed and ANOTHER thing when you are paid. The question is how long can the French, who are statistically outnumbered, keep the natives from figuring out the way the game will be played. I will have to get the next DVD in the documentary but as I recall THE FRENCH LOST.

Question for Comment: When an employer admits to being morally in the wrong while asserting that they are legally in the right, what is the appropriate response?    

Just finished reading Daniel Quinn's book My Ishmael. I confess, it would be particularly interesting book to use in a class on the Agricultural Revolution. In the past, I have not been terribly interested in covering the period before Egypt and Mesopotamia in significant detail, as I prefer to focus on periods in which there was a good deal of debate about ideas - ideas that make a big difference. Quinn does a creative job arguing that no idea is more fundamental to our culture than ideas about food production and distribution. His argument is that we jettisoned the possibility of a sustainable culture when we began "locking up the food" as he puts it.

Throughout the book, he makes the argument that our culture is not based on an accurate or realistic understanding of human nature. our laws are not made for people as they are, he argues. Our economies are not designed to serve humans as they really are. Our educational systems are not designed to educate humans as they are. It is almost as if he is saying that humans as they were in 10,000 B.C are humans as they are. They lived in a system that had grown organically along with human evolution itself. The Agricultural Revolution and especially the Industrial Revolution were changes in human  social systems that were made to benefit a few people but not the species as a whole and for that reason may not be sustainable as more than just a few people now demand to be included in the once small group of elite humans that designed the system for their little clique alone.

Excerpts from the book would make good fodder for conversation in the first week of a World History class.

Question for Comment: How important is "sustainability" in your lifestyle? If everyone in the world used resources and produced resources in the same way you do, would the world survive the load?

The book of the day today was a City Upon a Hill: How Sermons Changed the Course of American History by Larry Witham. It was an interesting book about the place that public discourse of a religious persuasion has influenced American life. The author takes a chronological stroll through the various periods of national life to highlight the key oratorical events and personalities behind them.

I enjoyed a section on Billy Sunday in particular. The book notes that Sunday spawned a host of copycat evangelists with names like "Rodney "Gypsey" Smith, Dan "Cyclone" Shannon, and "Sin Killer" Griffin. These preachers would seize upon reputations as  "cowboy" evangelists, or  "the singing evangelist" or the "railroad" evangelist.

There was also a section on the preaching war underlining the Civil War and a section on the preaching support for the eugenics movement that also was well worth reading. The year after the Scopes trial, the American Eugenics Society sponsored the first of three eugenics sermon contests, "the topic being 'Religion and Eugenics: Does the Church Have a Responsibility for Improving the Human Stock?'." The prize was $500. Hundreds of sermons were submitted for evaluation? As one minister put it, "THE CHURCH CAN HELP POPULARIZE THE KNOWLEDGE NOW IN POSSESSION OF THE SCIENTISTS.'

Already, the school textbooks were serving the function well. See a page from the textbook John Scopes was using in his classes here. There is clearly a direct link between the Scopes trial, eugenics, discriminatory immigration laws, the KKK, and American isolationism in the 1920's and 1930's. and, it is no accident that America's leading opponent of Darwinism in the schools William Jennings Bryan was also America's leading voice AGAINST race based imperialism.

"History is ending, because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley. And as the inevitable chaostrophe approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble, it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa, 15,000 years ago, rocked in cradle of the great horned mushroom goddess before history. Before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism. Before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us. Because the secret faith of the 20th century is not modernism. The secret faith of the 20th century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the Paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock and roll, and Catastrophe Theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom-dotted plains of Africa, where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it chose that the way out is back, and that the future is a forward escape into the past." Terence McKenna

So ... if we go back to the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago ... we will find people who wouldn't trade their lives for ours? How long were they living? What diseases were afflicting them? What were their children dying from? What freedoms did they have that we lack? What happinesses were their women and children experiencing that ours don't? What fears of the divine, of nature, of wild animals, of their fellow man were they subject to?

Question for comment: Is it my job as a history teacher to tell my students that their lives suck when compared to savanna-dwelling hunter gatherers?

 

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Why women were not allowed to vote until the 1920's is beyond me. Seriously. If the kings of Europe had been half as capable of critical thought as the Byzantine princess, Anna Comnena, living in Constantinople during the first days of the Crusades, the western world wouldn't have gone for a thousand years without a bath.

“The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and worthy of commemoration; as the playwright [Sophocles] says, it "brings to light that which was unseen and shrouds from us that which was manifest." Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against this stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of Oblivion. . . . I, having realized the effects wrought by Time, desire now by means of my writings to give an account of my father's deeds. I wish to recall everything. . . . Whenever one assumes the role of historian, friendship and enmities have to be forgotten; often one has to bestow on adversaries the highest commendation (where their deeds merit it); often, too, one's nearest relatives, if their pursuits are in error and suggest the desirability of reproach, have to be censured. The historian, therefore, must shirk neither remonstrance with his friends, nor praise of his enemies. For my part, I hope to satisfy both parties, both those who are offended by us and those who accept us, by appealing to the evidence of the actual events and of eye-witnesses. The fathers and grandfathers of some men living today saw these things.” -Alexiad (1037)

I have a particular admiration for people who are capable of this kind of rigorous observation. I have a particular disdain for people who are too lazy to do it and exploit the laziness of others to do it.  For instance, Adolph Hitler:

"The very first condition which has to be fulfilled in every kind of propaganda; namely, a systematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with. . . .  The aim of propaganda is not to try to pass judgment on conflicting rights, giving each its due, but exclusively to emphasize the right which we are asserting. Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favorable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; yet it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favorable to its own side." - Mein Kampf

Question for Comment: Is a blog a bulwark against the stream of time? Or is it a waste of time? Why?