History as She is Taught

The provenance of the correspondence below is somewhat disputed. While purporting to be a letter of advice to a struggling high school teacher, a certain “Yvette”,  from “Sebastian Blandstone, professor of history” at one of Australia’s fine institutions of higher learning, it bears an uncanny resemblance to a parodic address by Quadrant Associate Editor Simon Kennedy to a recent history conference at Campion College in Sydney.

Whatever its origin, fact or fancy, as an overview of how the past is showcased (or not) in Australia’s schools, it rings remarkably true. — rf

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From: Professor Sebastian Blandthorne, PhD
Chair of History, University of Western Queensland

To: Yvette
Head of Humanities, John Storey School

Dear Yvette,
Thank you for your kind note. I’m sorry it has taken me so long to reply. My lecturing responsibilities have taken over all of my time these past few weeks. However, I have just employed a couple of tutors who will grade the papers for my unit and I am now able to focus on other things. This means I can turn my mind to your intriguing note about the challenges you face as a history teacher in a secondary school.

I was heartened by your passion to pass on “the truth” about history to your students at John Storey State School. You and I both know, of course, that this phrase, “the truth,” is nonsense when it comes to something like history. Every document from the past is laden with such deplorable prejudice, idiocy, and backwardness that knowing “the truth” about what really happened is impossible.

As historians and educators, we teach our students to understand truth-seeking as an exercise in identifying where they (those in the past) were wrong, and we (enlightened historians of today) are right about their manifold errors. We need to expend as much energy as possible seeking this “truth,” and impart it to our students as their highest goal.

Doing this has several benefits. For one, it bolsters the student’s sense of superiority, allowing them to see the present as more advanced than all others prior. It also instills a healthy prejudice towards all those who came before. If there is any truth to be known about history, it is that we know better than those who actually lived it.

But I am digressing from the particular challenges you raise regarding teaching history in schools. Your main concern was to achieve a very important goal: to help your students to hate the study of the past. It is your main role as an educator to guide your students to this point! We want our students to regret ever taking history, to leave class depressed from the moral nihilism that has been imparted to them, and most of all we want their legal guardians to understand that history, and the humanities in general, are a complete waste of time and money. So where to begin?

There are three primary dangers to avoid and I will expand upon some simple ways to do this presently. But I will outline the dangers themselves before revealing how we avoid them.

First, we must never let students think that the past contains anything admirable. Second, students should never, under any circumstances, be allowed to develop any affection or sympathy for those in the past. Third, we must avoid at all costs the possibility of students seeing the value of letting those in the past speak for themselves and on their own terms. These dangers are so acute that if you were to slip up even for a class or two, everything you are working towards could be undone.

One thing that history teachers have in their favour is the sprightly head-start the various curriculum authorities have given them. I know that in Queensland, where I currently reside, the state curriculum authority mandates that schools overwhelmingly reward “skills” rather than knowledge. In other words, competency in understanding the content of history is not rewarded.

This is a wonderful foundation from which to begin because you have already disincentivised students knowing anything about the past. And if we reduce the desire to gain knowledge of history, then the dangers mentioned above recede significantly.

This disinterest in knowledge from the Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority (QCAA) has been driven to such an extent that Year 12 history exams assume almost no prior knowledge. For example, a student studying the Vietnam War is not expected to know what the Viet Cong was. Instead, they are gifted the information in the form of a footnote on the 2021 exam paper, which explains that the Viet Cong was “a political organisation in South Vietnam with its own army that fought against” the US-led forces “during the Vietnam War.”

A further example illustrates this innovation well. The 2022 “Question and response book,” which is coupled with primary source documents, only requires students to read the primary sources and then exercise judgment about whether they are reliable and useful, whether different sources corroborate, and how sources are different from one another. Students could complete these tasks without any prior historical knowledge.

Quite extraordinary, is it not? There is no expectation that students will recall historical knowledge accurately during the examination process. This is quite different to the experience of previous generations of students. Back then we needed to come armed to the teeth with knowledge of the topics and periods that we were being examined, and penalties for slips and gaps were applied.

Not so anymore, and thank goodness!

In the place of actual knowledge of the past, the QCAA requires students to demonstrate competency about “concepts,” such as imperialism, democracy and liberalism. But these concepts need only be “comprehended,” and not prudentially applied to any existing historical knowledge.

Instead of gaining knowledge about the past, history students in Queensland schools are encouraged to identify origin, motive, perspective, and context. These have always been basic to the task of the historian, and do not seem especially useful to our goal of helping students towards a hatred of the past. But consider this – giving students a purely critical lens through which they view past occurrences without encouraging any deep knowledge or familiarity with people and events of the past is an excellent way to make them deeply suspicious of historical figures and sources.

History can easily be ruined by simply applying a critical spirit to each act of investigation and interpretation. Previously, scholars, especially those of the Marxist school, found economics and class a most useful paradigm by which to judge and interpret texts and events. Rather than an obsession with economic and class factors, we now apply the narrow and idiosyncratic political and ideological concerns of our own day. Reading everything through these frameworks of criticism is a surefire way to make any history student cynical and bored. What a wonderful result!

I should say that the QCAA does not mandate that we apply laser-like focus to the idiosyncratic obsessions of our own society in our history classrooms. If they did that, their political agenda would be too overt and would attract criticism very easily. But there is no doubt that their assessment framework is set up to lend itself to this. It is quite easy to make everyone in the past seem quite beneath the students if we teach them to assume that all past people were racist, sexist, misogynistic, and ecologically irresponsible.

This critical approach, combined with an inordinate focus on today’s narrow political and ideological concerns, is an excellent foundation to work from for several reasons. One is that it dehumanises the past. If we place students in the judgment seat and only ask them to judge the reliability of a document, question the motives behind it, and find evidence of ideological impurity, they will not have any investment in the past at all. The past only serves to allow them to practice their self-conceitedness on those who cannot defend themselves. It is, I’m sure you will agree, a perfect scenario.

This approach also makes it near impossible to find any real human interest, any connection, any kindred spirit, or any romance, in history. The past becomes a place where nothing good is found; there is almost nothing of value there. Any good that is identified must be immediately relativised such that it is good only because it happens to agree with what we progressive people believe is good today. Present concerns must dominate in our student’s minds, particularly present political agendas.

Students who are taught that their own opinions and critiques are more powerful and important than any person, idea, human desire, or human “triumph” of the past; these students will despise the study of history. Why study history when there is nothing there to respect? Why take an interest in the past when there is nothing there to identify yourself with? What value does history hold if everything in the past is alien and inferior? The answer is obvious. The past will become despicable to students quicker than you can say “Herodotus.”

Speaking of Herodotus, be very careful with him. His Histories is so jolly interesting and enjoyable that you really ought to keep it as far away from students as possible. The same goes for Thucydides, the Venerable Bede, Tacitus, and any other historian of old who wrote tales of their own people and the lives of others. These writers not only captured the drama of the past with verve and spontaneity; they also made their subjects human. This is dangerous. We do not want history to be one of the so-called “humanities.” Rather, we want history to be de-humanising. We want it to be a dehumanity. A young person should never read of the remarkable achievements of leadership in the accounts of people like Pericles of Athens or Julius Caesar. Tales of King Alfred and Joan of Arc are perilous, too, because these figures are virtuous, courageous, and, worst of all, pious.

Can you imagine what exposing students to these accounts might do? It could awaken in students that dread word: admiration. This would greatly alarm you, I’m sure. But it gets worse. They might even realise that these people are interesting and worthy of study because they are both different and similar to them. And if they realise this, you have lost them. These students are treating history as one of the humanities, where the people of the past are understood as having the same desires, longings, failings, weaknesses, strengths, and dreams that we might have. In other words, these students now realise that the past is human.

But we need to dehumanise the past and make it a barren and repulsive wasteland of moral turpitude. Remember that critical spirit that the QCAA is trying to encourage in our students? That can be leveraged to this end. The people in the past are idiots. They are Philistines. They treated minorities the wrong way. They thought the wrong way. They said the wrong things. They need us to judge them. We are morally and technologically superior to them. The standard of our day must be the standard by which we judge all past events. 

This is straightforward if we take the political tropes of our own day and impose them onto the now helpless morons that populate the darkness of long ago. If possible, look for ways to discuss climate change, even back to ancient times. And it is not hard to find evidence of the patriarchy, which is regrettably still with us. Before long, the past will become one long litany of moral and political errors, and students will begin to hate thinking about it. Any common ground we might find with those historical figures we are studying is obliterated by the moral gulf now opened between the past and your students. Your students will feel like gods compared to the morons who populated the cesspit of years gone by.

I have outlined to you two of the three things to avoid: we should avoid at all costs our students developing any admiration for things that happened in the past, and we need to ensure that they do not become sympathetic through any human connection. The common weapon against these is to make history about suspicion and criticism, and to put the possibility of historical knowledge beyond the reach and desires of the students.

The third and final thing to avoid at all costs is letting the past speak. This should be straightforward, given the groundwork laid by bodies like the QCAA through devaluing real knowledge of the past. But the danger still lurks, despite this. If we allow people from the past to speak on their terms, rather than our terms, we risk undoing everything.

Students must feel they are in control of the materials: they are judging, they are casting the shadow of their moral superiority back over the barbarians of the past. Therefore, we must avoid reading diaries, letters, and firsthand accounts, if at all possible. Reading these could open the student’s eyes to the moral complexity and humanity of those in the past. If they do have to read these primary documents, we must prepare them thoroughly with that sense of superiority I discussed earlier.

But most crucial of all is the political and ideological preparation. If students read Marcus Aurelius’s diaries, Augustine’s Confessions, Pope Gelasius’s correspondence, Thomas Hobbes’ account of the English Civil War, the letters of soldiers fighting for the Confederacy, and similar documents, they must come armed with issues like patriarchy and racism to prejudice their reading. The point is not knowledge, nor the human connection that we all share. The point is politics. Everything must be about politics.

If we make Aurelius and Augustine seem like misogynists, Gelasius like a religious bigot, and paint the Confederate soldiers purely as racists, this will mean our days’ concerns and ideas will dominate the discussion. The possibility that these people could have had good motives, genuine human concerns, and even a kind of nobility, will recede into the background. The past does not speak to us – we speak to it. We speak down to it.

One final way to ruin the study of history involves basing historical investigation on a single issue. This is adjacent to each of the issues above. I only raise this towards the end of my letter because, as a practicing history teacher, you are already well aware of it. It is a commonplace teaching method, these days. But note that it is effective to achieve your goals of getting students to despise history as a discipline. I know people say it helps students connect with the content of your unit. But that is, as they say in the industry, complete bollocks.

Common options for single-issue historical study, all of which prove very effective, include gender, climate, sustainability, sexuality, and race. This kind of approach gives an appearance of relevance to the students. They will think, at least for a time, that history might have something to say to them. But before long, they will realise that such a method also leads to boredom. For any student who doesn’t share the narrow, single-issue obsession that the teacher has, they will rapidly grow weary.

This is perfect, of course, because history will become a sordid tale of repetitive struggles to achieve (or undermine) this narrow ideal of social justice or climate justice, which leads to cynicism and drudgery. As the teacher, you can have the moral satisfaction of pushing your agenda of interest, as well as an agenda that suits your side of politics, whilst at the same time indoctrinating your students and pacifying them through boredom and nihilism.

Yvette, this letter has wandered across several different aspects of teaching history to school students. I hope it has been useful to you. Remember, we aim to develop in our students a hatred of historical studies. We want them to find nothing meaningful, interesting, or human in the past.

If we can achieve this, we will have gone a long way towards our ultimate goal of reducing the human experience to the present and the pleasurable, and instilling in our students a sense of moral hopelessness simultaneous with senses of moral outrage and superiority. People who know little, and care nothing, about the past are welded to present political concerns and are like putty in the hands of people who control public discourse.

We are preparing lemmings, my dear Yvette, political lemmings. You and I are not lemmings, though, because we know. We are not stupid or ignorant because we know that studying the past well (in the sense that those nasty traditionalists mean) risks everything. People who know and love the past will realise that there is more to life than power, pleasure, and prejudice. It is our job to ensure that they never get a glimpse of this.

Do keep in touch if I can be of assistance going forward. You should consider studying our Postgraduate Diploma in Historical Pedagogy. Next semester’s seminars are entitled “Witches, Demons, Patriarchy and Feminism in the Witch Trials of Cheshire, 1632–1637,” and “Land Rights and Climate Change in First Nations Discourse, from Canaan to Arnhem Land.” I’m sure you’re already signed up, though.

Best,
Sebastian

Simon Kennedy is Associate Editor at Quadrant. He is also a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Danube Institute. The article is a revised version of an address given at a seminar on classical education held at Campion College in July 2023.