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About history (from an essay just published in FictionAlley)
A child is a human being in the making. Certain features of the adult are absent or developing; and one of them is the ability to take and keep an autonomous position merely because you think it is right. Children want to please, and will do what it seems to please adults; that is the secret behind the hideous process called “grooming”. And even without sinking that low: anyone with experience of divorce proceedings will know that the same child will say completely opposite things, and even feel completely opposite feelings, according to which parent they are spending time with. Teen-agers are, if anything, even less capable of individuality; eminently group-conscious and fashion-minded, they will say and do anything that pleases the group. There is a reason why sane nations (Lula’s Brazil does not count) have restricted the vote to eighteen or twenty-one.
Now, a skill is neutral. If you teach a child a language, music, drawing (in the sense of drawing skills – anatomy, perspective, lighting, etc.), mathematics, or sports, you have no control over what they will do with it in the short or the long term. A child who can read and play music can indifferently play jazz or baroque, Mahler or the Beatles, Latin or twelve-tone – or the two genres which alone Rossini claimed to recognize, “good” or “bad”. A child who can read French or Latin has a wholly open field as to what they read or write in those languages. A child who has learned mathematics can do anything that can be done with mathematics, from investigating the mechanics of star systems to cooking the books of an employer. Give the broadest amount of skills possible to a young person, and you will be giving them the broadest possible freedom of thought, purpose and action for life.
(I will add that I myself have a slightly higher amount of such skills than the average person – no thanks to school. And it makes me really angry when people, upon finding that I can draw or read Latin, look at me as though I were some sort of miracle, when they could easily do the same themselves with a little work. The emphasis on self-expression in modern schooling robs supposedly educated persons of skills that ought to be their birthright, for every hour spent writing essays agreeing with the teacher’s viewpoints is an hour that could have been employed learning science, anatomy, or ancient Greek.)
History is not a skill; it is a viewpoint. It is the ability to follow and understand facts, to investigate and explain them, to connect them with each other. Some subordinate disciplines, such as papirology and other text and writing studies, do involve skills that can be learned; but such disciplines are not necessarily part of history itself – their main purpose is to deliver into the hands of the historian an understandable and easily accessible set of sources. (Here and now, I have no space for a more nuanced discussion.) History itself is entirely based on understanding; and it follows that it cannot be taught. No teacher can teach a student to understand; and there is a terrible danger that the student will only learn to replicate mechanically the teacher’s own thought processes. It is true that a teacher of keen mind can often get a student to do their own thinking, by the example of a sparkling and vigorous process of thought; but that is only the beginning of the process of maturation that can make a historian. Indeed, a good teacher is like Jacob’s angel; he will not bless you until you wrestle with him. It is not until you notice the flaws and the errors with your beloved version of Albus Dumbledore that you can say you have developed a mind of your own. And even this process cannot be induced, hurried, or planned. Even if Albus actually asks you to criticize his views (which “he” may well do), you will not be able to produce anything really valuable until your own maturation has begun.
There are no prodigies in history. Music, mathematics, the arts, sports, are all full of people who performed with immortal genius before they were old enough to vote; history is not. To the contrary, if there is one thing that can be generalized about historians, is that the best will get better as they get older, and will generally die in harness. Gibbon in Lausanne, tired, sick with a hundred ailments, revolted by contemporary politics, and still scribbling away, is the model; dozens of others, from Thucydides to Cesare Baronio to Mommsen to Dumezil and beyond, have died with their pens in their hand. We still have titans of history among us, here, now, and I do not doubt that (for instance) a giant like Ann Douglas will go on writing as long as she physically can. Certainly if there is one body of work that shows that history depends upon mature judgment, it is hers.
Which is why I dread teaching history to teen-agers and children. You cannot teach maturity; but you can teach children to ape maturity, to reproduce the views and the processes of thought of the teacher or the teacher’s textbook. You can shape them in your own image before they are old enough to understand. [I]And that is what I have seen textbooks of all kinds, conservative and progressive, socialist and fascist, Catholic and atheist, doing.[/I] They cannot teach to think, but they can, and do, teach attitudes. I would infinitely rather give a child something they can make use of; and leave history for the time when they have the ability to challenge me rather than imitate me.
The very issue of “being afraid of reason” or whatever is not only a red herring, it is the reverse of reality. Let us take a group which we both regard as dangerous and misguided, namely, creationists. Look at their rhetoric, look at their arguments. They are all about “giving children the right to choose between Darwinism and creationism”. And why is that? They certainly are not interested in freedom of thought or argument per se; to the contrary. It is exactly the opposite that they want: they want to expose children to their arguments in the classroom, before they have acquired enough knowledge and maturity to realize that they are simple nonsense. They do not want to offer arguments – although argument is the shape their activity takes – but attitudes; once they have imprinted upon the teen-age mind that creationism is the challenging, oppositional, independent-minded way to think, that, to a teen-ager, will be more important than whether it is right or wrong.
I dread children being indoctrinated. That is the beginning and the end of it. And I dread it because I know it happens, and have experienced it personally.
Now, a skill is neutral. If you teach a child a language, music, drawing (in the sense of drawing skills – anatomy, perspective, lighting, etc.), mathematics, or sports, you have no control over what they will do with it in the short or the long term. A child who can read and play music can indifferently play jazz or baroque, Mahler or the Beatles, Latin or twelve-tone – or the two genres which alone Rossini claimed to recognize, “good” or “bad”. A child who can read French or Latin has a wholly open field as to what they read or write in those languages. A child who has learned mathematics can do anything that can be done with mathematics, from investigating the mechanics of star systems to cooking the books of an employer. Give the broadest amount of skills possible to a young person, and you will be giving them the broadest possible freedom of thought, purpose and action for life.
(I will add that I myself have a slightly higher amount of such skills than the average person – no thanks to school. And it makes me really angry when people, upon finding that I can draw or read Latin, look at me as though I were some sort of miracle, when they could easily do the same themselves with a little work. The emphasis on self-expression in modern schooling robs supposedly educated persons of skills that ought to be their birthright, for every hour spent writing essays agreeing with the teacher’s viewpoints is an hour that could have been employed learning science, anatomy, or ancient Greek.)
History is not a skill; it is a viewpoint. It is the ability to follow and understand facts, to investigate and explain them, to connect them with each other. Some subordinate disciplines, such as papirology and other text and writing studies, do involve skills that can be learned; but such disciplines are not necessarily part of history itself – their main purpose is to deliver into the hands of the historian an understandable and easily accessible set of sources. (Here and now, I have no space for a more nuanced discussion.) History itself is entirely based on understanding; and it follows that it cannot be taught. No teacher can teach a student to understand; and there is a terrible danger that the student will only learn to replicate mechanically the teacher’s own thought processes. It is true that a teacher of keen mind can often get a student to do their own thinking, by the example of a sparkling and vigorous process of thought; but that is only the beginning of the process of maturation that can make a historian. Indeed, a good teacher is like Jacob’s angel; he will not bless you until you wrestle with him. It is not until you notice the flaws and the errors with your beloved version of Albus Dumbledore that you can say you have developed a mind of your own. And even this process cannot be induced, hurried, or planned. Even if Albus actually asks you to criticize his views (which “he” may well do), you will not be able to produce anything really valuable until your own maturation has begun.
There are no prodigies in history. Music, mathematics, the arts, sports, are all full of people who performed with immortal genius before they were old enough to vote; history is not. To the contrary, if there is one thing that can be generalized about historians, is that the best will get better as they get older, and will generally die in harness. Gibbon in Lausanne, tired, sick with a hundred ailments, revolted by contemporary politics, and still scribbling away, is the model; dozens of others, from Thucydides to Cesare Baronio to Mommsen to Dumezil and beyond, have died with their pens in their hand. We still have titans of history among us, here, now, and I do not doubt that (for instance) a giant like Ann Douglas will go on writing as long as she physically can. Certainly if there is one body of work that shows that history depends upon mature judgment, it is hers.
Which is why I dread teaching history to teen-agers and children. You cannot teach maturity; but you can teach children to ape maturity, to reproduce the views and the processes of thought of the teacher or the teacher’s textbook. You can shape them in your own image before they are old enough to understand. [I]And that is what I have seen textbooks of all kinds, conservative and progressive, socialist and fascist, Catholic and atheist, doing.[/I] They cannot teach to think, but they can, and do, teach attitudes. I would infinitely rather give a child something they can make use of; and leave history for the time when they have the ability to challenge me rather than imitate me.
The very issue of “being afraid of reason” or whatever is not only a red herring, it is the reverse of reality. Let us take a group which we both regard as dangerous and misguided, namely, creationists. Look at their rhetoric, look at their arguments. They are all about “giving children the right to choose between Darwinism and creationism”. And why is that? They certainly are not interested in freedom of thought or argument per se; to the contrary. It is exactly the opposite that they want: they want to expose children to their arguments in the classroom, before they have acquired enough knowledge and maturity to realize that they are simple nonsense. They do not want to offer arguments – although argument is the shape their activity takes – but attitudes; once they have imprinted upon the teen-age mind that creationism is the challenging, oppositional, independent-minded way to think, that, to a teen-ager, will be more important than whether it is right or wrong.
I dread children being indoctrinated. That is the beginning and the end of it. And I dread it because I know it happens, and have experienced it personally.