V
CODA

20
The History Teacher as Mediator

The American Historical Association has made efforts over the years to contribute to the improvement of history teaching and in particular to take an interest in the problems facing history teachers in secondary schools and community colleges. One way of doing this has been the participation of its elected presidents in regional conferences on the teaching of history. It was in this capacity that I attended such a conference at North Texas State University in Denton, Texas, in the fall of 1978. The general theme of the conference was posed as a question: "Is the art of history safe in the hands of the profession?" In spite of my lack of acquaintance with the problems of teaching history at the grass roots, so to speak, or of any other special qualifications, I was expected to give an address appropriate to this theme. My response to the challenge, which appears here, has not been published before.

It is a curious reflection on the historical profession that I have only once been invited to express my views about the teaching of history. There is something distinctly odd about this. Our society, after all, supports us not simply because we are historians, but primarily because we are teachers of history. It does so on the assumption that we are the guardians, not simply of a professional discipline, but of something that, in a deep sense, belongs to society itself, something precious and even essential to its life, with which we have been entrusted not only to preserve and cultivate it for ourselves, but above all so that we may transmit it from generation to generation. And yet—I keep returning to the point as to a wonderful paradox—this is the only piece I have written during a career of nearly forty years in which I have tried to say something about the teaching of history.

There are other paradoxes about the present occasion. One is that our conferences about the teaching of history, rare as they may be, tend to be held only at certain kinds of institutions, as though only these are seriously concerned with teaching history; and I find this troubling. Another paradox—particularly poignant for me—is the strategic location, within the program of this conference, of my own presentation. Although I have never before been known to express myself on the subject of teaching, I am here, by virtue of my office of President of the American Historical Association, giving your keynote address. This is a considerable, and hardly justifiable, mark of trust on the part of those who planned this conference. I feel a strong need to assure you at the outset, therefore, that I actually am a teacher, that I conceive of everything I have written as somehow pedagogical, and that my primary satisfactions as a historian are associated with the classroom.

Some of these paradoxes are, I suppose, not so difficult to resolve. Historians have recently begun to worry about teaching because of widespread reports about a decline of enrollment in history courses. I am in no position to evaluate these reports, which I am inclined to regard a bit skeptically. They are rather impressionistic, they are not based on much hard data, and in the end—when we have such data—it will be very important to look carefully not only at aggregate figures but at what kinds of courses are suffering, and where. I think it will be important to recognize also that, if enrollments in history are declining, so are enrollments in other subjects, and not only in the humanities; in physics, for example, and in most areas not perceived as directly vocational. So if historians are in trouble, our problems probably reflect rather general changes in higher education. Nor can they be altogether solved by any adjustments we may make by ourselves, even by better teaching. And these larger changes seem to reflect, in turn, both that demographic shift we have heard so much about and a change in the economic climate. Students are worried about what will become of them after graduation, and this worry affects what they choose to study. There is no point to our reproaching them; we ought to sympathize with them as they confront, after all, a genuine problem. All these matters, nevertheless, suggest that we may have sound reasons for concern about the teaching of history, and I do not mean to minimize them.

I should like to direct these remarks, however, to what seems to me an even deeper reason for concern: to a dimension of our situation that, at the same time, I think we can do something about, provided that we recognize and attend to it. For I have been brooding about the central theme of our conference: Is the art of history safe in the hands of the

profession? I have chosen not to regard this as strictly a rhetorical question, to be answered with: Of course it is . I suppose my own answer will turn out to be, Not altogether, but it might be —again provided that we admit to some real problems. And I want also to focus a little attention on two other terms in the question: to the notion of history as an art , and finally to our understanding of what it means to do history itself.

Let me approach these matters by noticing the role of the history teacher as a mediator between two communities, on both of which he depends and both of which he must serve. On the one hand, he is a member of the more particular professional or disciplinary community of historians. But he is also a member of a more general community, or perhaps more precisely of a series of more general communities that might be conceived as a set of concentric circles: local, regional, national, and finally international. In some way history belongs simultaneously both to the professional community and to all these larger communities. This seems to me a truth that we, as professional historians, sometimes tend to forget: that history is not our exclusive property. And I want to propose that it is the particular responsibility of the teacher of history to bear it constantly in mind and to mediate between the two sorts of community in the interest of both. For if we are anxious about the future of history as a body of discourse, the deepest reason for it may be a vague suspicion that this work of mediation has somehow broken down. And I think that this suspicion is well founded.

I am not much concerned about the possibility that the larger community might somehow—without assistance from us—simply lose interest in history. We ought, I should think, to find it reassuring, at least in the long run, that some kind of interest in the past, however it may vary from culture to culture, seems almost universal; the only exceptions seem to be the primitive groups studied by anthropologists in which all experience is interpreted within the context of a timeless present. But it is my impression that every historical society, as it reflects about itself, takes time and change into account and raises historical questions, questions about its origins, questions about the way in which its identity has taken shape over time. An interest in history seems to be almost as natural as the child's question, "Where did I come from?" and indeed to flow out of it, biology passing into history, with its social analogue, "Where did we come from?" At any rate I know of no chapter in the Western past, beginning with the Jews and the Greeks, without a lively interest in history; an interest, furthermore, sometimes greater among groups lower on the social scale than among elites, whose dominance may be threatened by the sense of contingency implicit in a historical perspective.

Nor does our own time seem exceptional in this respect; whatever the problems of history teachers may be, I do not think they arise out of any indifference to the past that is peculiar to our own time. I share the ambiguous reaction of many historians to some recent expressions of popular interest in history; but the existence of this interest seems too difficult to deny when Roots becomes a best-seller, when the television networks consider it reasonable to invest great sums in historical dramatizations watched by millions on prime time, or when large crowds stand in line for hours to see Egyptian or early Irish artifacts. Or when, to come closer to ourselves, there have never been, per capita, more teachers of history at, however inadequate they may be, better salaries. Or—and this may be more surprising—more financial support, sometimes including federal money, both for novel ways of teaching history and for even the most esoteric kinds of historical research. I do not mean to suggest that this support is enough; I am only trying to put our situation into some social and historical perspective. There has always been, and I see no reason to doubt that there always will be, a great reservoir of public interest in history, on which we can depend.

It is important to notice, however, the kinds of historical questions that appear to interest the public, since these are by no means necessarily those that interest professional historians. They are sometimes relatively practical questions, questions about the direct relevance of the past to the present, in a collective sense self-centered questions, directed to self-understanding. On the other hand, even such questions seem to be consistent with an interest in many kinds of history, including the study of the remote past and of quite alien situations. The reason for this is, I suspect, that human beings learn about themselves not only by retracing those processes by which they have been directly shaped but also by contrasting their own familiar world with what may be utterly remote from it. It can be at once a source of instruction in the possibilities of human existence, and a liberation, to enter vicariously and imaginatively, through history, into situations quite different from our own.

All of this may suggest something of what the general community seeks from historians, who from this standpoint may be seen as the providers of a social utility. The interest of the general community in history is a product neither of idle curiosity nor of scientific detachment but goes to the heart of its own existence; in this sense it is, in a collective as well as an individual sense, an existential interest. Furthermore, it wants this interest to be satisfied in language it can understand and to which it can respond not only intellectually but imaginatively, for its concern with the past requires attention not only to narrow matters of

fact but to the wholeness of past life, to its felt quality. This means that the history teacher—and I think this is as true of what he conveys in the classroom as it is of his books—cannot, to communicate effectively, simply be well-informed. He must cultivate his own powers of imagination and expression in order to convey, attractively and with contagious excitement, the full quality of the past. I need hardly remind historians that history itself originated as a rhetorical art, and that effective historical communication was traditionally thought to depend on the inseparability of utility and delight. We all know that those great historians who continue to be read—Herodotus, Gibbon, the Huizinga of The Waning of the Middle Ages (to cite some of my own favorites)—have remained alive because they met this standard. And it seems to me quite wrong to argue that we read them still only as "literature"; we cherish them because, through their style, they are able to convey a vision of the past that still nourishes us.

On the other hand, I am of course not arguing that it is the duty of the history teacher simply to give the public—our students in both the narrower and the larger sense—uncritically what it wants. And this brings me to that other community with which the history teacher is involved, the disciplinary community of historians. Historians exist, to be sure, because there is a social need for knowledge of the. past. But they also exist, as a distinct group, because of their special competence in obtaining and mobilizing this knowledge. The participation of the history teacher, as a historian, in a professional community with its own autonomous standards of judgment protects and sharpens this competence. This is the justification of the professional community: that professionalism is itself socially useful. It assists the historian to resist the all-too-human demand for simple answers to difficult questions, to resist the tendency of mankind to prefer confirmation in its collective self-esteem to the unflattering truth, to resist the pitiful yearning to forget what is unlovely in the past even when this is essential to self-understanding, to resist the pressure to exploit the past selectively and even cynically. The existence of the professional community gives to the history teacher a space of relative freedom in which it is possible to distinguish between what the general community might like to believe and what it can responsibly be taught.

Yet, as historians well know, particular professional communities, although they come into existence to meet social needs, exhibit a remarkable tendency, as they develop, toward autonomy and isolation. They tend to behave as though they exist chiefly to promote the interests of their own members, even when these interests conflict with those of

the larger society. Professionals are thus inclined to present themselves— and even to regard themselves—less as the servants of the public than, in their own sphere, its masters, as the priestly guardians of a body of knowledge and activity beyond the capacity of the laity to evaluate, as authorities with an exclusive competence to determine what is best for others, sometimes even as a privileged caste relieved of the need to concern itself with the public interest. This is why "professionalism," once an unambiguously honorable term, is now viewed with growing distrust by the lay public: that is to say by those who contemplate the professions from the outside. Historians have been among the first to observe how other professions with major social impact, law and medicine in particular, have been increasingly estranged from the public by their own internal development. It is time, I would suggest, to scrutinize ourselves with the same cold eye, if only because it may help to explain some of our present difficulties.

Since history belongs, in a deep sense, to everybody, the consequences of an overweening professionalism for historical study seem both particularly inappropriate and particularly unfortunate. The central difficulty arises, I would suggest, from the fact that, when he sees himself only as a professional, the historian addresses himself chiefly to his fellow professionals, the group to which he chiefly owes his prestige and advancement. The first result is that he loses his ability to communicate effectively with a larger audience; and while the utility of his work can be recognized only by a smaller and smaller public, it is less and less likely to evoke delight. I dare say that historians are not altogether immune to delight. but there is a kind of austerity about our professionalism that assigns to delight only marginal value, and we protest only mildly if at all when we encounter an awkward, lifeless, or unnecessarily difficult style of discourse. In this connection our increasing reliance on quantitative method may be symptomatic. Quantification is obviously a valuable new resource for historiography, but it is a measure of the inroads of our professionalism that we have been so little troubled by the problems of communication it creates. Except in pure mathematics, numbers function linguistically, I should think, as adjectives; they modify nouns, and it is these nouns that give them life. Thus numbers do not constitute after all, as their enthusiasts sometimes claim, a separate language. They must somehow be assimilated, as elegantly and imaginatively as possible, into the traditional task of the historian, which is the creation and communication of the past through a common language. This is our special art.

But a further consequence of the tendency of professionals to direct their discourse primarily to each other is the fragmentation of the historical discipline into an indefinite series of increasingly remote and tiny specialties. There are good reasons for specialization; historical knowledge is difficult, and specialization may be the price of competence. Yet this seems to me only the respectable tip of the iceberg; specialization also serves less presentable motives. Psychologically, it is a source of personal security in a harshly competitive world, for the atmosphere within professional groups is not exactly gentler and more friendly than that within the larger society of which they are a part. This is why (if I may speak for myself) publication is so fraught with fear and trembling. In this situation specialization functions somewhat like territoriality among animals. We stake out our turf by leaving little tokens of our presence about; so we mark out a familiar place that looks and smells like home, within which we know our way and feel reasonably safe, where the perennial risks of professional existence are at least kept to a minimum, and which we are prepared to defend against venturesome intruders—though it must be admitted that specialization as a defensive strategy sometimes fails, since the most deadly struggles for dominance may be waged over the smallest territories. But meanwhile we become like those physicians who seem, to an increasingly suspicious laity, indifferent to the general health of the patient, though they may know everything about a particular set of endocrine glands. But we, perhaps, have less excuse; the specialties in medicine exist because patients have specific as well as general needs. Our specialties are too often generated only to serve ourselves.

But the major problem here is that our specialization tends to estrange us from that larger community to which history "belongs" in a livelier sense, perhaps, than to us. Instead of recognizing and building on the fact that history is public property, we have often seemed to want to take it away from the public, among other devices by claiming that history is a science and therefore the preserve of scientists. This claim may, in some respects, be justified, as similar claims may be justified in the case of physicians or librarians; and of course much depends on what one means by "science," a word whose significance seems to be determined somewhat by the kind of language game one chooses to play. Here I want only to call attention to its social function. It converts history from a common heritage that, by our teaching, we invite the public to appropriate and cherish, into a thing, our thing, which we as teachers are seeking to impose on students, an operation that under-

standably invites resistance. The claim to be scientists also justifies us in pursuing our own questions, not those of the public, to follow our own rather than its interest in the past.

Now, even from the standpoint of what I take to be our proper social role, this independence is not wholly misguided. In the long run we can often contribute more to the understanding of those matters on which we are obligated to inform the public by devising our own strategies. My question is whether we are in fact motivated by this ultimately pedagogical concern, and whether we are serving it. Let me give a couple of examples to illustrate why I am doubtful.

The first, which may be less compelling, is the present vogue, among professional historians, of a kind of ahistorical structuralism. This sort of historiography describes, often in highly sophisticated ways, isolated and relatively static moments in the past in all their social and cultural complexity. It can be marvelously ingenious and persuasive, and it is also remarkably suited to a profession consisting of specialists, since it takes little responsibility for relating one such moment to another. This approach to the past can, of course, be profoundly useful even for a historiography that is concerned, as historians have traditionally been and as our public largely remains, with the processes of history. It illuminates the complexity of the relations between past and present, and it provides a kind of insurance against anachronism. But it also results in a virtual denial of the continuities of history. It reduces our knowledge of the past to a series of unrelated flashbacks, so that all that can then be said about the relation of the past to ourselves—at least all that is now being said even about so recent a time as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—is, to cite the title of a distinguished book, that the past is "a world we have lost." The past, in this construction, ceases to be our past, and some of the advocates of this kind of history have been aggressive in denying the very legitimacy of seeking self-understanding through the study of history. No position, it seems to me, could be better calculated to isolate the historical profession; and insofar as isolation signifies distinction, this may indeed be its unconscious purpose. To me it seems professionally suicidal. It is also opposed to the commonsensical view that, however obscurely, the past lives on in the present, a view for which, if we care to look, there seems to me always abundant evidence.

My second illustration is the low esteem of professional historians for textbooks. Though sometimes written by distinguished historians, textbooks—if my own observations are correct—are rarely prepared because the author believes he has something to present that will signifi-

cantly improve the teaching of his subject. What has in fact happened is that he has succumbed to the blandishments of a publisher; after all, who would write a textbook on his own initiative, as he would write something else, before signing a contract and receiving an advance? The author writes his textbook as quietly as possible, and with apologies and elaborate explanations of his financial need to any colleague who discovers what he is up to. The fact is that our textbook writers would honestly prefer, with an occasional honorable exception, to be writing something else: something "serious," with the implication that pedagogy is not, for a professional historian, altogether serious. Under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that textbooks are not reviewed in our professional journals, or that they are rarely well regarded by the teachers who must rely on them. Generally speaking one chooses a textbook faute de mieux .

I have presented here a one-sided and somewhat unflattering description of the professional community of historians. But I have done so in order to focus on what seems to me an extremely serious problem, one that concerns us all, arising out of the widening gulf between the two communities that the history teacher simultaneously inhabits. Obviously the validity and integrity of what we teach depends on the disciplines that our professional community enforces. Good history—useful history—depends on high professional standards. But these standards do not exist only to serve the internal development of an autonomous professionalism. And given our present difficulties it is a matter of some urgency to insist on the need for a historical discourse that is finally directed to the larger social community, ad urbem et orbem , and that speaks to its concerns. What is at stake, after all, is its history, which is not a commodity that it can afford to do without, and which it will not do without unless we manage to persuade the public, by our own professionalism, that history is irrelevant and dispensable.

This suggests the strategic importance of the historian as teacher, with a double role, facing both the profession and the public; and it is a singular advantage of our profession that the overwhelming majority of historians are also teachers, a fact that remains potentially significant even when our professionalism tempts us to forget it. It is as a teacher, open in both directions, that the historian can mediate between his professional community and the larger community—from which, it may be added, his professional status has not separated him: he remains a part of the world he also addresses, a part of his own audience. This probably means that he must ponder the concerns of the larger community, and his own as that member of it with whom he is best ac-

quainted, as thoughtfully as he studies the past. In short, as a condition of dealing effectively, as a teacher, with the past in the present, he must try to understand the present as well as the past. I suspect that, however essential, this may prove for most of us the more difficult assignment. In this way, as mediator, the history teacher might contribute both to keeping the historical profession alive and to keeping the life of his own time rooted in a sense of history.