Then and now 8/14

Thursday, August 14, 2003

Praise of my historical writings often leaves me feeling humble, or at least uneasy. Looking at them myself I can see only the faults, how they could've been done better. An instance of praise not so long ago, however, had more positive and thought-provoking effects. A home-schooling mother and her children cornered me with compliments. I was somewhat rescued from my usual embarrassment by the mother's qualification: "When they were in public school, they hated history. Your books showed them it didn't have to be dull. What a difference! Now they love history." How account for it? Me, I liked history even in school; but most kids don't. "For all too many Americans, history classes are an unpleasant memory." Of course, public schools are massive bureaucracies; and the nature of bureaucracies is to reduce everything to tidy routine, to "system." The smooth running of the system itself, not, say, the mere imparting of knowledge, tends to become its overriding purpose. Moreover, many in the field (the "educational-industrial complex" Richard Mitchell calls it) now believe educational content doesn't matter anyway; the whole purpose of school is to turn ignorant young folks not into informed young folks but into "well-adjusted" citizens. So all teaching may be in a bad way, on the wrong track; but I'll confine the discussion to the teaching of history. Why do most kids leave school actually hating it? The trouble began more than a century ago. The prestige of the physical sciences had grown so great, so fast, every discipline (art, literature, even religion) imagined it too had to be a "science," and hurried to turn itself into one. Alongside the physical sciences grew up the "social sciences": the "soft" sciences (e.g. psychology, sociology), really not sciences at all, since the factuality and stern exactitude of the true, "hard" sciences (chemistry, physics) were beyond them. But no matter. History found itself taken over, demoted to merely one of the "social sciences." The "science" of psychology was shotgun-wed to the "science" of education, giving birth to the bastard beast that still dominates American schooling, "educational psychology." Its basic effect, says Mitchell, was to foster "an atmosphere in which silliness could thrive." (A pioneering example was the "look-say" reading method, which resulted; in Mitchell's words, in "the destruction of a whole nation's ability to read.") History's particular travails in this same period are told in a prophetic little essay entitled "Clio: A Muse," by celebrated British historian George M. Trevelyan, first published as long ago as 1904. Clio, of course, is the Muse of History, one of the nine demigoddesses who oversee the various arts and sciences, under the eye of Apollo, god of Light. Clio' s name is derived from the Greek word for glory or renown, "because she celebrates the glorious actions of the good and brave." Trevelyan's point, of course, is that history is an art, not a science. As such, novelist Sir Walter Scott wrote truer history than any academic historian. And the poem "John Brown's Body" has been called our best Civil War history. But what would poor Clio think, I wonder, of the newest horror perpetrated in her name? "Cliometrics: the use of quantitative data and statistical methods to analyze historical problems." M'mm, not much room there for "the glorious actions of the good and brave." If "history" were the likes of "statistical history," of "cliometrics," I'd hate it too! Once, says Trevelyan, history was part of literature, the work of "men of letters," read by all the reading public. Then, "history was, by her own friends, proclaimed a 'science' for specialists, not 'literature' for the common reader; and the common reader has accepted his discharge," that is, stopped reading history, the historians' kind. "Popular histories" still make the bestseller lists, but the historians sneer at them, even if they stoop to write and profit from them. Worse, they began serving history up in the schools embodied not in the timeless classics of the field but in "textbooks." "Unbooks," Mitchell terms them, in a class with Reader's Digest Condensed Books or showy "coffeetable" tomes. A book you see, is the work of a mind the coherent thought of a single human being, the only thing on earth able to think at all. A textbook, by contrast, is the work of a committee, each member not so much thinking his own thought as obeying his own master, looking out for a constituency and taking care to offend no other. The result is predictable: the lifeless blandness that puts even grownups to sleep and leaves students loathing the subject. It's obvious to many that something is wrong. Recent books bear such revealing titles as "The Killing of History" and "The Degradation of American History." But they shortsightedly fancy the "going wrong" began only in the 1960s. True, the '60s saw the confusion worse confounded. The "silliness" throve as never before. The would-be storytelling historian began to find the road blocked by myriad fashionable "schools," each armored in its own impenetrable jargon: "cultural studies," "historicism," "social theory," "structuralism," "poststructuralism," "semiotics," "postmodernism," "anti-humanism," "neo-Marxism," "feminism," "heterology." And on and on. All this garbage, which Clio's diffident devotee must have the guts to sweep aside, only obscures the fact that the root problem is really still as Trevelyan stated it back in 1904. Some '60s rebels even affected to be flying Trevelyan' s flag anew, celebrating history-as-literature after all. Unfortunately they had in mind the "deconstructed" literature of Derrida, Foucault, and Co. Their history-as-literature turned out to be history-as-fiction. Science, as Trevelyan notes, seeks to deduce "cause and effect." And there's just no way history can do this. Cause and effect in human affairs are matters of mind. And we'd have to go down to hell and up to heaven to read the minds of people of the past. "Even if cause and effect could be discovered," he continues, "they still would not be the most interesting part of human affairs. Not man's evolution but his attainment is the great lesson of the past. The deeds themselves are more interesting than their causes and effects. The historian may generalize, and guess as to cause and effect, but he should do it modestly and not call it 'science.' And he should not regard it as his first duty, which is to tell the story." To tell the story (Latin, historia) Here's where historians have been "misled right away from the truth about their profession." In their "scientific" obsession with "cliometrics" they've lost all sight of Clio, of the art of narrative, of simply "telling the story." Let them learn it anew, and they'll have readers again; for people will always love a good story.

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