Is Historical Thinking Unnatural?

Sort-of a Historiography post

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts

Sam Wineburg, 2012

The subtitle of this award-winning volume of essays promised to chart the future of teaching the past. Sam Wineburg’s main point was that the “historical thinking” and close, critical reading practiced by professional historians are very different from the ways students in other fields (and high school students, even in history classes) were taught to read and think. This is a valuable insight which historians (and grad students) would benefit from pondering. Wineburg’s essays, gathered from a decade of articles, conference papers and informal presentations, asked a number of questions that he and others have begun trying to answer.

Wineburg began by observing that standardized testing did not provide an accurate picture of students’ historical knowledge, partly because of the testers’ focus on data and facts. He suggested that a wider exploration might explore the “cultural pores” through which students (and the general public) absorb historical understanding, “make meaning…[and] situate their own personal histories in the context of national and world history.” This reminded me a bit of Carl Becker’s thoughts in “Every Man His Own Historian”. Wineburg situated the debate over history at the center of the American culture wars, complete with Lynne Cheney at the head of the National Endowment of the Humanities, and candidate Bob Dole calling his opponents in the national standards debate “worse than external enemies” of America. Given the nastiness of the debate over what should and shouldn’t be taught, “some might wonder why history was ever considered part of the humanities…that are supposed to teach us to spurn sloganeering, tolerate complexity, and cherish nuance.” Wineburg’s claim was that history is mind-expanding and humanizing, but only if we learn to think like historians.

Historical thinking, Wineburg said, “goes against the grain of how we ordinarily think.” Wineburg observed high school students and found that even those with well-developed reading skills “shaped the information [they] encountered so that the new conformed to the shape of the already known.” He compared the naïve high-schooler’s approach to R.G. Collingwood’s belief “that we can somehow ‘know Caesar’ because human ways of thought, in some deep and essential way, transcend time and space.”

Against this “classic historicist stance,” Wineburg argued along with Carlo Ginzburg that the historian’s task is to “destroy our false sense of proximity to people of the past. The more we discover about these people’s mental universes, the more we should be shocked by the cultural distance that separates us from them.” The Egyptians, Wineburg concluded, “drew differently because they saw differently.”

This is fairly familiar material to academic historians, who typically delight in the tension between the two extremes of “classical” objectivity and “post-modern” subjectivity – and generally live somewhere in between. Wineburg’s articles were originally written primarily for social studies teachers and educational administrators. The part that may be new and shocking to professional historians is understanding how their nuanced, qualified descriptions of the past change as they enter the high school classroom. Textbooks, Wineburg said, “pivot on what Roland Barthes called the ‘referential illusion,’ the notion that the way things are told is simply the way things were.” Textbooks eliminate “metadiscourse…places in the text where the author intrudes to indicate positionality and stance.” They generally speak in the omniscient third person, suggesting that they’re presenting “just the facts, ma’am,” and that there’s one correct interpretation and it’s the one they’ve presented. Metadiscourse, Wineburg said, indicates an author’s “judgment, emphasis, and uncertainty.” Historians “rely heavily on ‘hedges’ to indicate indeterminacy, using such devices to convey the uncertainty of historical knowledge.” Textbooks don’t.

This approach to teaching the past, Wineburg suggested, leaves students unaware that for actual historians, the past is substantially more mysterious and our understanding of it more tentative and contingent. The students are left with a “presentist” point of view, and come to see concepts like prejudice, tolerance, racism, fairness, and equity “as transcendent truths soaring above time and place,” rather than as “patterns of thought that take root in particular historical moments.” As a result of current methods, Wineburg said, students (and student-teachers) don’t know what to make of figures like Abraham Lincoln, whose attitudes toward black people don’t fit those of the twenty-first century.

The two main elements of “historical thinking” for Wineburg seem to be subtext and context. General readers often mine texts for data points, he said, while historians are aware of the text as both “a rhetorical artifact and…as a human artifact.” To the historian, “texts emerge as speech acts,” subject to “the same set of concepts we use to decipher human action.” Furthermore, historians were rarely the intended audience of the documents they study, so “as eavesdroppers on conversations between others, [they] must try to understand both the authors’ intentions and the audiences’ reactions” to the texts. In contrast, students and their teachers too often looked for “straight information,” and “failed to see the text as a social instrument skillfully crafted to achieve a social end.”

Having laid out this argument, Wineburg presented the results of a series of studies he had performed over the years. He showed bright, articulate high school students failing to understand the contexts of primary documents, while historians examined the sources of statements as closely as the statements themselves. In one ironic passage, a student-teacher who majored in history as an undergraduate was less able to pull back from the text than a former physics major (suggesting perhaps a difference in the way these people learned about paradigms and the contingency of knowledge?). Finally, in a concluding essay, Wineburg made some interesting points about lived and learned memory, and observed wryly that “family” experience of history has largely devolved into jumping on the couch together and popping in a Spielberg video.