Canonical standards or orientational frames of reference? The cultural and the educational approach to the debate about standards in history

teaching

Arie Wilschut

Netherlands Institute of Teaching and Learning History

Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences

Published in: L. Symcox & A. Wilschut (eds.), National History Standards: The Problem of

the Canon and the Future of Teaching History. Charlotte NC: Information Age Publishers

2009 (ISBN 978 1 59311 669 9), pp. 113-135.

'In matters of selection of subject matter, what proportions should there be between: cultural

history, political and economic history? Which position should be given to the national, and

which position to the international element? Should most attention be paid to great

personalities, to the broad masses of the people, or to material developments? And most of

all, in what way should all of this be treated, not only from the point of view of the adult, but

also considering the nature of the demands of the developing child's mind?' 1

This quote from an invitation to a conference for Dutch history teachers in 1925 shows

that some of the aspects of the debate on teaching history have been present for a long time.

As long as history has been taught (in most western countries it started to be a mandatory

subject in school curricula in the second half of the nineteenth century) some of the

supposedly self evident characteristics of the trade have been topics of a lively debate: issues

like teaching national or 'general' history, political elitist history or social and cultural history

of 'the common people', stories about personalities or explanations about structures and

developments - to mention only a few of the dilemma's. Another type of question seems to

have been present also right from the start: If we are to teach anything about the past at all,

1 Invitation to a conference of history teachers presided by Ph. Kohnstamm in Amsterdam, 1925. Paedagogische Studiën (1925), p. 249. Quoted by J.G. Toebes in: 'Van leervak naar denk- en doevak' [From a learning subject towards a thinking and doing subject: A contribution to the history of Dutch history education.], Kleio 1976, 202-248, quote at p 222. ['In welke verhouding dienen bij de keuze van stof te staan: kultuurgeschiedenis, politieke en ekonomische geschiedenis? Welke plaats behoort aan het nationale, welke aan het internationale element te worden gegeven? Dient de meeste aandacht te worden gewijd aan grote persoonlijkheden, aan de massa van het volk of aan zakelijke ontwikkelingen? En vooral, hoe zal dat alles moeten worden behandeld, niet alleen vanuit het standpunt van den volwassene, maar wanneer rekening gehouden wordt met den aard van den eischen van den zich ontwikkelenden kinderlijken geest?']

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how should we do this with children in primary schools, students in junior high schools or

students in senior high schools? Especially for the younger ones, there have always been

serious doubts and a lot of scepticism. When history was introduced as a mandatory subject in

Dutch primary schools, some of the authors of textbooks for would-be primary teachers

thought this was quite futile.2 History was a far too complicated entity of facts, names,

developments, events and structures to be really comprehended by primary school children.

So the pedagogues came up with the advice to tell them a number of beautiful exciting stories

and leave it at that.

This pessimistic view has been persistent, though not so much among educators, who

as a matter of course prefer to concentrate on the question: if they want us to teach anything at

all, how should we do it? This position seems to force people to be more optimistic. So for

instance the British educator Watts, who wrote at the beginning of the nineteen-seventies: ‘If

we taught history only to people with a refined understanding of adult behaviour and the

passage of time, we should probably only teach it as preparation-for-retirement courses.

Arguments like these beg the question whether, if children are ignorant of something, it is not

our business to help them to learn it. And if we say that we do not know how to teach such

very difficult concepts, we should not suppose that it is impossible.'3 This position comes

close to the famous maxim by Jerome Bruner that 'any subject can be taught effectively in

some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development'.4

The issues of what to teach and how to do it are two of the basic problems that history

educators have to face. At first sight the relation between these two seems to be self evident.

The content of a curriculum is determined by decisions from outside, i.e. politics and society,

which prescribe the knowledge and skills that every citizen of a country should have. The

educators then put themselves to the task of developing the appropriate teaching methods. The

methods seem to be only subservient to the decisions society has made about contents. But in

teaching history, things cannot be separated so easily. For example: the nineteenth century

recommendation to just tell the children some beautiful exciting stories to satisfy the

politicians' demand for 'fatherland history' in the schools undoubtedly influenced the kind of

image of the past that children would develop. Or, to quote some more recent example: In the

Dutch history teacher's monthly journal Kleio, April 2005, an article appeared entitled 'Why 2 Piet de Rooij, 'De canon als bindmiddel' [The Canon as Cement], in: De Volkskrant, 1 september 2006, p. 21. 3 D.G. Watts, The Learning of History, London/Boston: Routlegde & Kegan Paul 1972, p. 14. 4 J.S. Bruner, The Process of Education. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press 1960, p. 33.

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Napoleon attacked Russia during the First World War, or: How one educational innovation

ruins the other.'5 The author of this article worries about educational problems. She notices

that her students do not have the slightest idea of chronology. She thinks that educational

reforms are the cause of her problem. She observes that it is nearly impossible for her to teach

history in a proper way - teach how to think historically, teach how to think in dimensions of

time. These are issues which have to do with methods. But at the end of the day, they also

have to do with content.

This comes down to the conclusion that we cannot treat the standards debate about

contents without referring to educational-methodological aspects. A lot of the confusion about

the standards debate is caused by the fact that arguments from either perspective are

confronted with each other in an unclear and intellectually dissatisfying way. It is probably

not a coincidence that educational specialists in teaching history tend to take positions in the

standards debate different from those taken by philosophers of history or history theorists, not

to mention politicians and opinion leaders. Teaching history is a complicated matter with

many sides. To begin with, I should like to make a clear distinction in the standards debate

between the cultural approach - about the question which educational contents and aims

would be desirable for citizens in society - and the educational approach - which takes its

point of departure in the way people learn to think in dimensions of historical time. After that

I want to try to discover where and how the two lines of argument could meet.

The cultural approach

A major issue in the cultural approach of the standards debate has been the loss of the

context of the nation state, the first and decisive motive to start teaching history at all.6 John

Torpey has argued that the nation state perspective has been essentially future oriented, and

adds to the nationalist perspective the position taken by the socialist project of the twentieth

century, which like the nation state, maintained a fixed view of a clear line connecting past,

present and future.7 It is our loss of a sense of destiny which has caused the crisis in our

5 G. de Vries, 'Waarom Napoleon tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog Rusland binnenviel. Hoe de ene onderwijsvernieuwing de andere om zeep dreigt te helpen' [Why Napoleon invaded Russia during the First World War: How one educational innovation threatens to kill another] in Kleio 46 (2005) nr. 3, p. 30-32. 6 See e.g. R. Phillips, History Teaching, Nationhood and the State. A Study in Educational Politics. London: Cassell 1998. 7 J. Torpey, 'The Pursuit of the Past: A Polemical Perspective', in: P. Seixas (ed.), Theorizing Historical Consciousness. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2004, p. 240-255.

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relationship to the past. The loss of the safe perspective on things to come makes people feel

insecure, and however paradoxical this may seem, they turn to the past anew to find

certainties. Apparently, human beings somehow need to feel secure about their position in

time. The stories imposed from above about the fate of the nation or the proletariat have

ceased to sound credible or satisfactory. In stead, we are trying to define new identities in

multiple ways: as members of certain social groups, local cultures, adherents of religions or

representatives of ethnic minorities. All of these positions seem to be equally justified to

today's academic historians, aware of the fact that all histories are constructions, resulting

from position taking and different perspectives on the past

The answer of history educators to the crisis has been to try to develop a more up to

date, 'better' curriculum: completed, supplemented, corrected, balanced. This meant women's

history as well as men's, history of the common people as well as history of great men, history

of coloured people as well as white history, history of non-western areas as well as western,

etc. The United States culture war seems to present a good example. Searching for a 'new

balance' in the content of the history curriculum is not easy for two reasons. First there is the

matter of quantity: the amount of history to be dealt with to satisfy all needs increases

enormously. This may result in either a superficial treatment of many topics - making history

unattractive and abstract to students because of the lack of stories on a human scale - or in a

somewhat haphazard choice of 'themes' more or less representative of the multiple aspects one

wants to deal with, often leading to a lack of structure and coherence. The second reason

making the search for a new balance in the curriculum difficult is the political and ideological

nature of discussions involved. Of course the improvers and innovators will claim that the

'old' curriculum implies a conservative political view, and that theirs is 'more objective', 'more

balanced' and therefore more justified. But the defenders of the old patrimony will contend

that the innovators represent a left wing attack on valuable traditions, and that they try to

indoctrinate students with liberal views. Indoctrination should be far from any history

teaching anyhow.

In the case of the Netherlands the trend of striving for an improved and more balanced

curriculum has also been recognizable, mainly in the discussions about the final exams at the

end of high schools. A new program was laid down in 1995 (still in use today, to be replaced

in 2007) in which eleven 'domains' were specified, out of which themes were to be chosen:

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'Livelihood and social relations, Families and education, Political system and political culture

in the Netherlands, Totalitarian systems and states, State and nation building, International

relations and war, 'Non-western' societies, Contacts between western and 'non-western'

societies, Ancient cultures and western society, Popular culture: the shaping of daily life,

Religion and philosophies of life.' In their introduction to the new program, the compilers

wrote: 'Recent understandings and results of research carried out by various historical

disciplines have been positioned in the description of the domains in a balanced way, either

as perspectives or as elements of content. In addition to the old and well known political

history, economic and social history have become increasingly important. In the last few

decades, history of mentalities and women's history have gained a stable position. Recently, a

lot of attention is also being paid to the histories of migrants and ethnic groups.'8

In the practice of history teaching in the final years of Dutch high schools, this

program has resulted into the choice of a wide variety of themes which could in some way be

connected to one of the eleven domains. For the final written exam, two of these themes are

prescribed nationally every year. Some of the themes chosen clearly represent a 'politically

correct' view, meant to 'correct' or 'supplement' some supposedly existing interpretation of

history or traditional image of the past, for instance: themes on women's history, on the

relation between the Netherlands and its colonies, or on the history of the education of

children. Recently, the Ministry of Education has subsidized the publication of a small book

on Dutch slavery history, intended to enable curriculum developers to supplement this

supposedly 'forgotten black page' in our history.9 This tendency to adjust and supplement is

based somehow on the assumption that a 'complete' and 'whole' history exists somewhere, and

that a the best curriculum is the one which best reflects the whole of the human past.

In German discussions about 'standards' (Lernstandards) resulting from the PISA-

enquiry10, the perspective of a comprehensive world history (Weltgeschichte) is proposed as a

solution for the history curriculum. An example of the German approach is the one presented

8 Stuurgroep Profiel Tweede Fase, Advies examenprogramma's havo en vwo, geschiedenis en staatsinrichting, aardrijkskunde, maatschappijleer [Advice on exam programs havo and vwo, history, civics, geography and social studies] .The Hague 1995. p. 71. 9 J. Greven, Leren en herinneren. Het Nederlandse slavernijverleden, kernleerplan 10-15 jarigen [Learning and remembering. The Dutch slavery past, nucleus of a curriculum for 10-15 yr olds]. Enschede: SLO 2005. See also the review of this book in: Arie Wilschut, 'Het Nederlands slavernijverleden en het canonieke denken over geschiedenisonderwijs' [The Dutch slavery past and canonical thinking about teaching history], in: Kleio 46 (2005), nr. 8. 10 PISA: Program for International Students' Assessment. Pisa-Konsortium Deutschland (eds.), Der Bildungsstand der Jugendlichen in Deutschland. Ergebnisse des zweiten internationalen Vergleichs [The State of Education of German Youth. Results of the second international Benchmark], Münster (etc.) 2004.

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by a number of educators from Hesse, a German state which has a reputation in creating

comprehensive frameworks.11 They indicate a series of eras which could play a decisive role

in the historical understanding of the present, because they represent crucial complexes of

problems of humankind. Such complexes, according to this framework, could be found in:

- Pre- and proto history of mankind

- The Greek polis and the Roman Empire

- Lordship, society and the church in the Middle Ages

- Cultural centres outside Europe

- The origins of early modern Europe

- Processes of industrialisation and revolution

- Colonialism and imperialism

- The era of world wars

- The new world order after 1945 and 1989

Somehow, the list looks familiar. The selection is said to be based on crucial problems of

mankind, but isn't there also some element of tradition in this selection of a more or less

chronologically ordered range? The selection of topics is completed by introducing a range of

leading questions which should be asked in the case of each of these epochs, thus creating a

matrix:

- How did people secure their livelihood, how did they improve this, how did they work and

organize their economy, and how did they handle their environment?

- How did they organize the control of means of production and power, and how did they

organize and legitimize their way of living together?

- Which kind of social changes occurred and how were conflicts inside societies and conflicts

outside societies dealt with?

- Which conceptions of meaning existed in societies and how were adolescents socialized?

This too reminds us of a familiar approach: the economic, political, social and cultural

dimensions of human societies. However, I do not intend to criticize the scheme because of its

familiarity. Maybe some traditional approaches of history are quite useful after all. We should

remember that any program represents a point of view, which is not necessarily better than

some other.

11 G. Henke-Bockschatz, U. Mayer, V. Oswalt, 'Historische Bildung als Dimension eines Kerncurriculums moderner Allgemeinbildung' [History Education as a Dimension of a Core Curriculum in Modern General Knowledge], in: Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 56 (2005) nr 12, p. 703-710. The fame for frameworks indicated for the State of Hesse alludes to the renowned 'Hessische Rahmenrichtlinien' dating back to 1972.

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This could also be said about a somewhat different idea presented recently by a Dutch

scholar taking part in the Rotterdam project 'Paradoxes of De-Canonization'.12 He states that

students in the Netherlands are in fact members of three communities: the Dutch national

community, the European one and the world community. Among these three, the world

community seems to gain importance because of the rapidly increasing globalizing tendencies

in our world today. In stead of trying to cover 'the history of the whole world' - which would

be impossible anyway - he thinks we should concentrate on topics which clarify the process of

globalization.13 Three examples are: the history of technology, which made global contacts

technically possible, the history of European expansion, which brought inhabitants of

different continents into contact with each other, and the history of democratization. The last

theme should be studied comparatively: after the French and American Revolutions, attention

could be paid to events at Haïti, in Meiji Japan and in China around 1900 to show that

developments towards democracy are not an exclusive western phenomenon.

World history or global history has some important drawbacks, which may however

be temporary. It is very difficult to present the subject matter in some comprehensible form:

'Yet the reader is struck by a large measure of elusiveness which seems to be inherent to the

genre.'14 It might be this elusiveness which explains the considerable problems of students in

my College who have to study the McNeills's The Human Web: a bird's eye view of world

history as an addition to their all too Euro-centric curriculum. The book presents problems of

comprehension, even if students have a Dutch translation at their disposal. This is of course a

issue of methodology, not an argument against a world history approach as such. So should

we give the world or global historians more time to deal with the matter and think about

workable forms of presentation, after which we could introduce this concept into our

curricula?15 To what degree are we dealing with 'just a matter of presentation', or with a

problem characteristic to the genre?

However useful propositions about a comprehensive world or global history may be,

they can never be what they pretend to be, i.e. the 'better' and 'preferable' solution to the

problem of selecting content. Stating that students in the Netherlands belong to three

12 Siep Stuurman, 'De canon. Een wereldhistorisch perspectief' [The canon. A world history perspective], in: Kleio 46 (2005) nr. 4, p. 36-40. 13 Stuurman here refers to an article by Bruce Mazlish about the history of globalization 14 Piet de Rooij, 'De canon als bindmiddel', in De Volkskrant, 1 september 2006, p. 21. ['Tegelijkertijd wordt de lezer toch getroffen door een grote mate van ongrijpbaarheid die aan dit genre lijkt vast te zitten.'] 15 Suggested by Piet de Rooij in the quoted article.

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communities among which the global one is the more important is taking a position just as

much as any other, and like any other, it may be disputed. After all, these students are also

members of a number of other communities, such as their families, their ethnic or religious

groups, their local community, their generation, etcetera. The tendency to orient on world

history or global history might be the final stage in all of the attempts to formulate the final

best answer to the curriculum problem, assuming that such a final best answer exists. But it

remains questionable whether the problem of composing a 'complete' and 'balanced' view of

history could be solved in any satisfactory way at all. Christine Counsell thinks it could not.

She writes: '.. to try to solve this by opting for a criterion-based history curriculum seeking

the ultimate balance in all cultural, ethnic, gender and social aspects is not to protect the

pupil from indoctrination. It is just creating another kind of story reflecting an assumed

consensus in contemporary concerns. It is arguably just as dangerous for any teacher to seek

the holy grail of an ethnically, culturally, socially neutral history curriculum, however

redemptive of past imbalances.'16 She thinks that the only option is to confront students with

different 'narratives' next to each other. Only in that case it will become clear what history

does to people and only on this condition students will begin to understand the ways in which

history is presented.

Having made this point, we could opt for any point of view we may think fit for

teaching for any honourable reason. If we are beyond the search for a final answer, there

seems to be nothing wrong, for instance, with the choice made by Barton and Levstik in their

recent Teaching History for the Common Good, stating that preparing students for their role as

citizens in a democratic society is one of the most important goals of teaching history. To be

able to live in a society and participate in it, they argue, one has to have the feeling of

belonging to it. Only on that condition citizens are prepared to recognize the authority of its

laws and pay the taxes which are agreed on by its authorities.17 Even if national history is

largely a myth, it can still serve the purpose of making students feel part of a nation, which is

a prerequisite for a functioning democracy. In fact, this point made by Barton and Levstik is

the same good old point of preparing for citizenship which was made by the nineteenth

century politicians - though they probably did not think that national history is largely

mythical. But can we still maintain to be teaching history and historical ways of thinking if we

present a national myth to our students, even if we accompany such a narrative with different 16 C. Counsell, 'Historical knowledge and historical skills: a distracting dichotomy' in: J. Arthur, R. Phillips (eds.), Issues in History Teaching. London / New York: RoutledgeFalmer 2000, p. 54-71, quote p. 61. 17 Keith Barton & Linda Levstik, Teaching History for the Common Good. Mahwah/London: Lawrence Erlbaum 2004, p. 59.

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alternative ones and with critical thinking methods which will enable students to distinguish

between facts and fiction? Would not historical critical thinking soon deprive the national

story of its credibility? Can history really be taught for the common democratic good, or does

historical thinking by its nature imply distanced and reserved judging without committing

oneself to a cause too soon? Maybe authentic historical thinking cannot do such a thing as

forging national unity.

Summing up, the cultural approach to the standards debate leaves us with a series of

problems for which I cannot think of any feasible solution by continuing the debate in this

perspective. The post-modernist awareness of the fact that the only thing we have at our

disposal is a number of different narratives about the past, all of which have their due right to

exist, makes it virtually impossible to cut the Gordian knot. Many educators know this and

therefore just avoid the problem of formulating a curriculum based on descriptions of content.

They concentrate on historical thinking, methods of enquiry and problem solving. If only

students are made familiar with these, and with a few different perspectives on the past, they

will have learned something worthwhile, whatever the content op the topics they have studied

may have been. This approach, however, appears to be problematic as well. As I have stated

before, content and method in history are closely interconnected. The content chosen

influences a student's images of time, and consequently also his way of historical thinking. To

be able to say more about this, we had better turn to the educational approach of the standards

debate.

The educational approach

The educational approach takes its point of departure in methods: how do we teach

history? For a long time, this has been regarded as a fairly simple and straightforward matter.

History is about memorizing facts, which doesn't seem to be a very complicated thing to do.

Many outside the trade of teaching history think in this manner, and even quite a few teachers

devote a lot of their time getting the facts right and testing their students' ability to memorize

them. The cultural approach of the standards debate at first sight also shows the same

tendency: it concentrates on the selection of the right facts to be remembered without

spending too much time on the issue of how to teach them, or how to teach thinking about

them. Since the nineteen-sixties, however, we have learned to concentrate on levels of

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thinking in education. The taxonomy of educational objectives formulated by Benjamin S.

Bloom for instance distinguished six levels: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis,

synthesis, and evaluation18. In a system like that it is clear that memorizing facts only belongs

to the very lowest stage: knowledge (if memorizing produces such a thing as 'knowledge' at

all - because most memorized things are soon forgotten). Besides: memorizing facts seems to

be not at all specific to history, but something common to many school subjects. So the

question is raised what is characteristic for doing history, and how typical ways of historical

thinking can be organized into a system of attainment levels.

Not entirely surprisingly, history educators have started by looking at the way history

is practised by academic historians. They have derived basic concepts and principles like

evidence, historical fact, objectivity, causation, change and continuity, values and

interpretations from the way academics research the past and shape their interpretations.

Using these concepts not only enables students to 'discover' their own version of history by

investigating and evaluating historical sources, but also opens up possibilities of raising the

level of history teaching above the basic knowledge category.

This concentration on the way in which history is being researched and described has

reduced the amount of attention paid to coherent content. In fact, it has ended up in

considering selection of content an irrelevant matter. It was no longer important which facts

were dealt with, as long as the way in which they were dealt with was correct. An example of

this trend is the British Schools Council History Project 12-16 and the 1985 GCSE-attainment

targets derived from this.19 The SCHP recommended an exam consisting of 'a study in

development' (the example chosen was a diachronic theme 'history of medicine'), 'a study in

depth', 'a modern world study', and 'history around us'. The GCSE criteria concentrated

exclusively on historical research skills: using facts to create a structured image, using the

concepts of cause and consequence, continuity and change, similarity and difference, showing

empathy and skills in using evidence.

Ironically, much of this 'new history teaching' came up with content from the

traditional curriculum. If one doesn't worry about matters of selection, the likely result is that

the obvious is chosen. Many examples of 'new' British history teaching show students 18 B.S. Bloom c.s., Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, New York: McKay 1956. 19 For a description see e.g. R. Phillips, History Teaching, Nationhood and the State, p. 17-19. R. Phillips, Reflective Teaching of History 11-18, p. 15-23.

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studying contrasting evidence on topics like William the Conqueror, or applying the concepts

of cause and consequence on topics like Henry VIII's wives and the English Reformation. A

similar development has been noticeable in the Netherlands. In the 1970's a Leyden

University educational historian introduced the 'method of inquiry' into history teaching,

concentrating on similar skills and concepts as the British SCHP.20 He developed a series of

textbooks in which applying concepts and skills were a central element.21 The books

contained units on questions like 'Was Leonidas a hero?', 'How did Gregory of Tours evaluate

the acts of king Clovis?', 'What can we conclude from Dutch seventeenth century painting

about the layers in society?' These units were inserted into a general description of factual

survey knowledge which was meant to tie things together. The survey consisted of traditional

(and very thorough) factual content. The textbooks are still being used today, mainly by

teachers who value sound traditional historical survey knowledge. The modern source units

are taken into the bargain.

The view that history is a basic and straightforward subject only dealing with facts,

easy to learn for anyone, is the extreme opposite of the view quoted before that history is a far

too complicated entity of facts, names, developments, events and structures to be easily

comprehended. Educators know that the last position may be closer to the truth than the first

one. But does this mean that history is difficult because of the methods of historical enquiry

which are involved in the academic discipline? A lot of the methods of enquiry are not

specific to history anyway. Evaluating sources critically to establish facts is a skill used by

any academic in social and cultural sciences. And so is theorizing about causes and effects,

and discussing different interpretations. We can teach history without any of these, and yet

discover that it is still difficult. It is not the methods of historical enquiry that make history

difficult, but it is historical thinking itself.

Some of the more recent research, especially the work done in the British CHATA

project22 and research carried out by Barton and Levstik23 indicates the kind of difficulty that

20 L.G. Dalhuisen & C.W. Korevaar, De methode van onderzoek in het geschiedenisonderwijs [The method of inquiry in teaching history], The Hague 1971. 21 L.G. Dalhuisen e.a., Sprekend Verleden [The Past Speaking], 1972-present. 22 CHATA = Concepts of History and Teaching Approaches. This is a long term research project on historical thinking by students of different age groups which has taken place in Britain in the 1990's. See for instance: P. Lee & R. Ashby, 'Empathy, Perspective Taking and Rational Understanding' in: O.L. Davis e.a. (eds.), Historical Empathy and Perspective Taking in the Social Studies. Lanham etc.: Rowman and Littlefield 2001, p. 21-50. P. Lee, 'Understanding History', in: P. Seixas (ed.), Theorizing Historical Consciousness. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2004, p. 129-164.

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students of different ages may have in thinking historically, i.e. thinking in terms of different

times and situations than our own and taking them seriously. A constant factor in student

thinking seems to be the inclination to measure acts, opinions and beliefs from the past using

present day standards. The situations and behaviours students meet in descriptions of the past

are experienced as 'weird' or 'primitive' and a lot of actions by people in the past are explained

because they 'knew no better in those days'. The element of thinking in terms of progress is

especially strong in Barton's research results: anything 'better' has to be more recent, and

'better' always means: more similar to what we know today. The most striking examples of

this kind of reasoning are those which regard the absence of present day appliances and

conditions as the cause of certain strange behaviour: 'They had to do the washing by hand

because there were no washing machines'.

Historical thinking implies an intellectual attitude which doesn't develop easily as a

natural phenomenon. Peter Lee talks about 'counter-intuitive ideas' which are central to

history as a discipline.24 He illustrates this with the example of a child breaking a window and

facing mother with the dilemma of either having to tell the truth or to tell a lie. The distinction

between truth and lie about the past in this case is clear and simple. Someone 'having been

there' can tell the truth. The results of CHATA show that young children show a tendency to

apply the same principle when confronted with two different stories about a distant past: one

of them has to be a lie, but we can no longer know which one, because no one is alive that has

been there. The counter-intuitive thinking required here is that the rules for establishing truths

about a historical past are different from the rules for establishing truths about the past in

daily life. Sam Wineburg has a similar thing in mind when he talks about historical thinking

as an 'unnatural act'. In his example about judging some seemingly 'racist' statements by

Abraham Lincoln, the question is to what degree students are prepared to and capable of

investigating the historical context in which these statements were made before expressing

their verdict on Lincoln (was he really a racist?).25

In both cases, it's the distance in time that requires counter-intuitive or unnatural

thinking. Thinking about time historically may be something very unnatural indeed. Wineburg

says that presentism (viewing things from the past using present day lenses) 'is not some bad 23 K. Barton, 'Narrative Simplifications in Elementary Students' Historical Thinking', in: J. Brophy (ed.), Advances in Research on Teaching Vol. 6: Teaching and Learning History. Greenwich: JAI Press 1996. p. 56-62. And Levstik and Barton's research quoted throughout Teaching History for the Common Good. 24 Peter Lee, 'Understanding History', p. 134. 25 Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts. Philadelphia: Temple University Press 2001. p. 17-22.

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habit we've fallen into. It is, instead, our psychological condition at rest, a way of thinking

that requires little effort and comes quite naturally.'26 There are reasons to believe that this is

a true statement. The awareness of time among Inuit peoples for instance, is described in

terms of 'ecological time', 'social / structural time' and 'mythical time'.27 The first type of time

awareness refers to the relationship between man and nature: the change of seasons, the

migration of animals, etc. This time awareness has a cyclic pattern. The second time

awareness refers to man and his fellow men, describing important events in human life, like

births, marriages and deaths. This time awareness has a linear pattern, but it usually comprises

no longer period than four or five generations. The last time awareness is actually not a

temporal one at all. It refers to a mythical dark stadium of chaos, in which everything was

insecure and undefined. This mythical past does not have structure and dimension in the way

we are used to talk about historical time. Historical time is lacking in the Inuit system.

It would be an interesting field of research to find out which kind of similarities exist

between thinking about time by (historically) unschooled people in western societies and

thinking about time in societies like the Inuit in northern Canada. For the time being, we

accept the hypothesis that historical thinking is a peculiar product of western cultural

thinking, which has to be acquired because it doesn't come naturally. This peculiar way of

thinking has to do with imagining time as a very long development, the dimensions of which

are beyond the natural environment of human beings. Strangely enough, learning to think

historically in time has not been a major topic for history educators up to recently. For a long

time, educators have concentrated on historical skills as if they were skills of enquiry: using

sources critically, distinguish between fact and fiction, discussing causes and effects and

debating interpretations. All of these are general skills of social and cultural sciences. Reading

a source is not an historical skill, but interpreting contents of a source from some other time.

Establishing facts about the truth is not an historical skill, but finding facts and truths about

some other time. This also applies to the example given by Peter Lee about breaking the

window (truth or lie) and two narratives about the end of Roman rule in Britain (which is

true?). The difficulty is the distance in time, which makes it a problem to talk about truth

concerning the Romans, but not so much a problem to talk about truth concerning breaking

the window.

26 Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, p. 19. 27 Johan Macdonald, The Arctic Sky: Inuit Astronomy, Star Lore, and Legend. Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1998.

14

What has caused the absence of thinking about historical time in educational

developments in history teaching can only be guessed. An explanation could be that the

academic discipline of research in history has been the first and primary inspiration for

educators. Building up arguments in the manner of historians not only provided possibilities

to raise history above the basic level of memorizing facts, it also seemed to be highly relevant

to students living in an information society. Thinking in terms of historical time is rarely

problematic for academic historians. So this was not too readily put on the agenda. Besides,

thinking chronologically reminded too much of dates, facts and timelines, the symbols of

traditional and outdated history teaching. These are just some tentative explanations about a

problem which would deserve more careful study.

If historical thinking about time doesn't come naturally, if it is something that has to be

learned by careful study, is there a good reason why students should take the effort? In other

words, is it useful to learn to think in terms of historical time? If so, we could have a solid

base for a history curriculum. If not, we could dismiss history from the curriculum without

feeling too sorry about it. In our textbook Geschiedenisdidactiek published in 2004, I have

attempted to argue why historical thinking about time is not only crucial for the study of the

past, but also significant for the contribution history can make to the education of citizens of

modern democratic societies.28 I have developed these views reflecting about works by

German scholars licke Jürgen Kocka and Hans-Jürgen Pandel, combined with David

Lowenthal's distinction between 'history' and 'heritage' and Sam Wineburg's views about the

unnatural act of historical thinking.29 Because the text of Geschiedenisdidactiek is not

available in English, I will sum up briefly a few of the points made:

- Thinking in time not only shows that things could be different, but also that developments

might have taken a different course. Both of these insights enable us to take a more distanced

position towards things as they are. They might have been different and they may change. In

this way, historical thinking opens up options for critical thinking about present conditions

and thinking about alternatives. Important for an open democracy.

- Thinking in time shows that the things people believe in (ideologies, religious convictions,

etc.) and their values, are changeable and relative. People may change their minds, people 28 Arie Wilschut e.a., Geschiedenisdidactiek [Teaching History], Bussum: Coutinho 2004, p. 20-23 and 28-29. 29 Jürgen Kocka, 'Gesellschaftliche Funktionen der Geschichtswissenschaft', in: W. Oelmüller (hrsg), Wozu noch Geschichte? München: Wilhelm Fink 1977. p. 11-33. H.-J. Pandel, 'Geschichtlichkeit und Gesellschaftlichkeit im Geschichtsbewusstsein', in: B. von Borries e.a. (hrsg), Geschichtsbewusstsein empirisch. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus 1991, p. 1-23. C. Köbl & j. Straub, 'Geschichtsbewusstsein im Jugendalter. Theoretische und exemplarische Analysen, in Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung 2 (2001), nr. 3. David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Cambridge University Press 1998, p. 105-126. Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts.

15

have thought about things in very different ways and will continue to do so. This means that

someone's present views should also be considered as less absolute than is sometimes done

without historical thinking. This attitude is also very important for an open debate in a

democratic society.

If we agree that historical thinking about time can be an important contribution to the

orientation in reality that is desirable in the type of society we live in, we have to concentrate

on the question what is necessary to develop such awareness of time. Here I refer once more

tot the Inuit time awareness. The natural way of thinking seems to extend in time no longer

than four of five generations, people we could imagine to have met ourselves, or people we

could imagine to have been talked about by people we have met ourselves - because they

knew them from their own experience. (This assumption about why the natural time

dimension is no longer than four or five generations is a hypothesis I have made up myself;

more research is needed to be able to know whether this hypothesis could hold). Before, or

rather 'beyond' this natural time awareness, there is just a chaotic and shapeless darkness of

'past times'. Historical thinking implies giving shape and dimensions to these past times, by

imagining their duration, by distinguishing different periods and putting them in order. This

type of chronological thinking might be crucial to historical thinking, if only an instrument.

To begin to be able to respect past times as specific entities different from each other, we have

to know something about dimensions and order of time. The alternative would be just to talk

about a fairly shapeless 'back then' - a way of reasoning which is quite frequent in the results

of Barton's research. How far away is 'back then'? How many 'back thens' can we distinguish?

In an article entitled 'The Caliph's Coin'30 Dennis Shemilt (one of the driving forces in

the British SCHP) indicates a strange unintentional consequence of not explicitly teaching

chronology: 'Over the past twenty-five years, British teachers have sought, with some success,

to teach pupils that statements of historical facts must be justified against evidence; that such

statements are at best "more likely than not" and at worst "more likely than the alternative

statements on offer"; and that evidence derived from relics and records may be challenged

and variously interpreted. What has not been attempted in Britain is to teach pupils how to

handle the past as whole. In consequence, few fifteen-year-olds are able to map the past; even

fewer can offer a coherent narrative; and virtually none can conceive of anything more subtle

30 Dennis Shemilt, 'The Caliph's Coin. The Currency of Narrative Frameworks in History Teaching', in: P. Stearns, P.N. Seixas, S. Wineburg (eds), Knowing, Teaching and Learning History, New York U.P. 2000, p. 83-101.

16

than a single "best" narrative.'31 Representing the past as a closed events space without

alternatives (one of the attitudes which was intended to change by confronting students with

evidence and different interpretations) ironically seems to have been reinforced by paying

little or no attention to a coherent narrative of 'the whole of history'. If someone doesn't have a

comprehensive image at all, it is difficult to think about alternatives.

Shemilt states that learning one comprehensive framework is only an initial level. He

suggests three higher levels of frameworks which should follow. His four levels are: 1 a

chronologically ordered past, 2 coherent historical narratives, 3 multidimensional narratives

and 4 polythetic narrative frameworks. Starting from the second level, we are dealing with

alternatives next to the initial framework. Without level 1, however, reaching the others is

obviously impossible. To be able to reach other levels after learning the first framework, this

should not be a closed 'cage' out of which it is impossible to escape, says Shemilt. It should be

a 'scaffold' which makes it possible to construct multiple different edifices.32 It is an important

and challenging educational question whether Shemilt's four suggested levels are within reach

of students of various ability levels. Levels 3 and 4 will definitely be very demanding. But the

initial framework of level 1 is the one that needs our attention in the first place. Without it,

students can do hardly anything at all. The first level is not as easily reached as one would be

inclined to think. It is not a self evident result of history teaching today.

A frame of reference as a map of the past

To teach thinking in time is an educational challenge. It is not at all easy. In fact, we

do not even have adequate instruments to describe the fourth dimension, because the fourth

dimension cannot be made visible or imaginable. The fourth dimension is highly abstract. The

problem of trying to picture it isn't even comparable with trying to picture a three dimensional

object or space on a two dimensional surface, like it is done by using the renaissancist illusion

of perspective. After all, three dimensions can be observed and experienced in reality, so any

constructions on paper have their realistic counterparts. But what about time? To picture time,

we constantly use spatial metaphors. We say that the future is 'ahead of us' and that the past is

'behind us'. (Some people say that studying history is like 'walking backwards into the future',

31 Quote p. 85-86. 32 Shemilt, 'Coin', p. 93.

17

because we cannot see what is ahead of us, but only what is behind us in the past. This

maintains the metaphor of moving along the timeline as if it were a road that leads

somewhere). We use timelines to make time visible. We have an idea that 'long ago' more or

less corresponds to 'far away'; certain things happened 'way back in Antiquity' - but couldn't

they have happened right on the spot where we are now? It is strange to think things like that.

'The Past is a Foreign Country. They do things differently there.' These famous initial lines

from L.P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between (1953) were borrowed by David Lowenthal to

entitle his book published in 198533 which describes how people live with their past and their

heritage. The spatial metaphor again, suggesting that we have to travel far to go to the past.

The spatial metaphor could give reason to start thinking about something like a 'map

of the past'. A map is a two-dimensional schematic representation, on a much reduced scale,

of a spatial three dimensional reality. Reading maps is a skill of considerable difficulty. One

has to know the most important outlines to be able to recognize contexts, one has to know the

meaning of names and symbols and the rules of scale. And even after studying all of this

carefully, some people do not succeed in reading and using maps satisfactorily. Reading a

map of a completely unfamiliar area is extra difficult, because there are no 'clues' which ring a

bell there. Tourist agencies publishing maps of city centres have understood this and try to

help their clients by publishing maps which show such clues. Between the abstract grid of

streets and parks, they show landmarks of important buildings and sights with pictures

standing out from the map. They hope this will make it easier for the helpless tourists to find

their way: perhaps they will recognize the landmarks and be able to navigate through the city

orienting on these.

Orienting in time means finding ones way in a panorama of centuries, which we can

only represent as a whole using things like schemes and timelines. But remember that we are

talking about the fourth dimension. The conceptual distance between a two dimensional map

and a three dimensional reality is smaller than the conceptual gap between two dimensional

schemes and the abstract concept of time. So the map of the past must be compared with a

geographical map of the very difficult type: a completely unknown and strange city, the

comprehension of which should definitely be supported with landmarks. The landmarks

should not be abstract, like the grid of streets on a map, but concrete representations, like the

33 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge U.P. 1985.

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pictures of buildings standing out from the map. In the case of history this means: imaginative

representations of eras, which makes it easy to remember and recognize them.

Based on the hypothesis that a framework formulated in this way would help students

to orient in time, the Commission on History and Social Sciences presided by Amsterdam

University Professor De Rooij presented its proposal for a framework of ten eras, with

imaginative names (see appendix). In stead of Middle Ages, it talks about 'era of knights and

monks' and 'era of cities and states'. In stead of Early Modern Age, it talks about 'era of

discoverers and reformers', or 'era of wigs and revolutions'. It is suggested that teachers attach

concrete stories about events and persons to each of these eras, using the names as an

indication of the kind of stories they could choose. The framework should be used in all

history education, starting at primary school level until the final stage of secondary education.

Of course, at higher levels students should also learn more generally accepted concepts like

Antiquity and Middle Ages. They should even study theoretic preconceptions and flaws of the

era-system, thus reaching Shemilt's level 2, and maybe level 3. But the level 1 base has to be

there in any case.

We have conducted some research into the question whether the eras could function in

the way the Commission on History and Social Sciences expected them to do.34 The era

system has not yet been formally introduced into curricula and exam programs. The Minister

of Education plans to do so starting from 2007. The Netherlands Institute for Learning and

Teaching History (IVGD) has been given the task of conducting a pilot study with new

examinations based on the ten era system to be able to decide whether introduction of the era

system into the curricula is feasible. The pilot study started in the autumn of 2004 in eight

high schools, involving some 700 senior high school students. We have done research into

their initial situation in 2004. These fifteen year old students had completed junior high

school, including the normal history education (three years, ca 2 periods in a week). They

were not familiar with the ten era system which was - as mentioned - not yet introduced into

the curricula.

Students were given a blank form which presented to them only the names of the ten

eras and their limits in time, for instance: 'era of monks and knights, AD 500 -1000'. They 34 Dick van Straaten, 'Berenvellen en markiespakjes. Het tijdvakkenkader en beelden van tijd' [Bear skins and marquis's outfits. The ten era system and images of time], in: Kleio 2006 nr 1, p. 2-7. Van Straaten reports here about the results of the research by IVGD.

19

were asked to give names of persons, events and general words and associations which came

to their mind thinking about such an era. The results showed that few students did not have

any associations at all, when thinking about the periods. The percentages were different

however between the eras. The eras which appeared to cause the largest difficulties were

'cities and states' (late Middle Ages, 1000-1500, 22% of students did not mention any

association here) and 'regents and princes' (17th century, 37% of students did not mention

any association). The average over the ten eras was 13,8% of students without associations.

This means that most eras called up some association with most students. The reason why

'cities and states' and 'regents and princes' presented a lower score might have been that these

names were least 'imaginative', compared with names like 'citizens and steam engines', 'monks

and knights', 'discoverers and reformers' or 'wigs and revolutions'.

Remembering names of persons and mentioning concrete facts appeared to be more

difficult than having associations. On average, 49% of students did not mention names for the

different periods (not counting prehistory, for which it is difficult to mention names for

obvious reasons), and 59% of students did not mention events (not counting prehistory). A

conclusion could be that remembering dates and facts is not so easy after all, at least on a long

term basis (the students were asked to fill in the form after the summer holidays, returning to

school without special study), and that persons apparently stick to mind more easily than

events. The positive and hopeful aspect here is that the great majority of students did have

associations. The mentioning of the 'wigs' in the name of era 7 reminded them of ballets and

marquis's suits, the images that belong to the eighteenth century. Greeks and Romans

reminded them of 'temples', 'gods', 'baths', 'myths and legends'. The name of era 8, mentioning

the steam engines called up pictures of cities in the time of the industrial revolution. All of

this tends to indicate that a framework of eras using imaginative names could support the

development of thinking in time, because it attributes different characters to different periods,

thus articulating the amorphous mass of 'back ten'.

The initial framework should be a scaffold, not a cage. It should not be a concrete

building which impedes our view, but it should be an open structure which can help us to

build our own edifices. It is like learning the words and grammar of a language. This doesn't

teach us the kind of things that we have to think and say, but it enables us to say what we

want and express our own thoughts. History education should also equip students with the

necessary tools to be in touch with society, to understand it and to express their own thoughts

20

about it. It should not teach them the thoughts they should have, but give them the tools to

formulate their own.

This is an important difference between a canonical framework of standards and a

framework which is being taught for educational reasons to enable students to think in time. A

canonical framework doesn't only teach what we call 'orientational' knowledge, but it also

serves the purpose of developing certain way of thinking and feeling, for instance feeling an

American citizen who is proud to be one. It doesn't teach only the words and grammar, but

also the content of the sentences.

National canonical frameworks, traditional as well as progressive ones, usually serve

the purpose of developing certain attitudes and ways of thinking: citizenship, national pride,

tolerant multiculturalism, anger about slavery, etcetera. All of these are not compatible with

modern history teaching in an open democratic society. History as such cannot be used to

shape certain thoughts and attitudes. And if it is, we have to call it abuse of history. It is the

opposite of the sense of perspectives and relativity which is the result of true historical

thinking.

How can an initial framework be open and function as a scaffold? Does it mean that it

has to be very abstract and written on the scale of world or global history? This would

probably be difficult to combine with an imaginative character. If the framework is to appeal

to imaginations students might have, it has to connect somehow with images present in our

societies. We all know that the influence of knowledge built up outside schools is very

important. The ten era system has been criticized as being too western, too European, to much

of a 'closed' narrative to be able to really function as a scaffold and not a cage. There is some

point in this, but at the same time, it seems inevitable. If we come up with something

completely strange and abstract, the associative support of learning to think in historical time

might be lost.

Is it an important drawback to start working initially with something recognizable

from our 'own' world? I have conducted an experiment with my College students to see

whether this characteristic of the framework really prevents it from being a scaffold. During

their study at the Teacher Training College in Amsterdam students are nowadays made

familiar with the ten era system. I presented to a group of these students, advanced to their

21

third year of study, a history of South Sulawesi, an Indonesian province on the island also

known as Celebes. These students of course knew nothing about this topic. I asked them how

they could use their 'European' framework to understand some developments from this

history. There appeared to be a rich harvest: the transition in the stone age from hunters and

gatherers to farming cultures, the development of the local alphabet, the La Galigo epic which

showed some similarities to the Homeric tradition of the Greeks, feudal lords and peasants,

the arrival of Islam which could be compared with the christianization in Europe, a movement

like the European renaissance at the Makassar court of prince Pattingaloang (1639-1654), and

of course the arrival of Portuguese and Dutch which fitted into the picture of European

expansion. The attitude of the Buginese prince Arung Palakka towards the Dutch and the way

the Dutch used his support to gain superiority in Makassar could be compared with similar

events in America when the conquistadores arrived there. After this the Dutch colonial

influence of course increased until the period of modern imperialism in the nineteenth

century. One of the students finally observed: 'Everything worked fine until we came there

and messed it all up'. Of course he meant to say that his framework 'worked', until colonial

developments started to - in his view - muddle the picture.

To sum up. I have given reasons why it is important to have a framework to be able to

think in historical time. The framework should not be abstract, but should be associative and

'filled' with concrete examples. These examples can best be found in our 'own' world, because

that is the position from which we start orienting ourselves in space and time. This is a reason

why we should teach an outline of western history to our students, mentioning names with

which they are familiar, names and dates from their own country's history or the region where

they happen to live. The reason to do this however has nothing to do with making them feel

proud citizens of their country, or teaching them some political correct view of past or

present. The reason is to help them thinking in historical time, which is the most crucial thing

that can be taught in history lessons.

__________________

Appendix Ten eras as proposed by the Dutch Commission on History and Social Sciences in

2001:

- era of hunters and farmers / Prehistory and Ancient Civilizations

- era of Greeks and Romans / Classical Antiquity

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- era of monks and knights (500 - 1000) / Early Middle Ages

- era of cities and states (1000 - 1500) / High and Late Middle Ages

- era of discoverers and reformers (1500 - 1600) / Renaissance / 16th century

- era of regents and princes (1600-1700) / Golden Age / 17th century

- era of wigs and revolutions (1700-1800) / Age of Enlightenment / 18th century

- era of citizens and steam engines (1800-1900) / Age of Industrialisation / 19th century

- era of world wars (1900-1950) / first half of the 20th century

- era of television and computer (after 1950) / second half of 20th century