Introduction
by Ross Dunn
Introduction
by Ross Dunn
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The American public in general probably has a fairly hazy perception of world history in the schools, regarding it as social education about places on the globe that are not the United States. However, people who decide what the intellectual scope, sequencing, and content of world history should be bringing to their work more detailed ideas and assumptions about subject matter. Most states have written new competency standards for history and social studies, many are developing assessments for U.S. and world history, and new global history textbooks continue to appear. What intellectual assumptions and precommitments underlie the shaping and molding of world history standards, assessments, curriculum guides, syllabi, and textbooks? It is clear first of all that no single version of world history prevails across the United States. Indeed, one of the characteristics of a healthy democracy is lively public debate about the shape of the past, not dogmatic conformity to official narratives. Classroom teachers know well that educators (and politicians) have over the decades repeatedly rewritten the definition of world history as a school subject and that several conflicting definitions are likely to be on the conference room table at any given time. In today’s continuing debate over world history in schools, four broad models, it seems to me, compete for the attention of educators and the public. The first I call the Western Heritage Model. Its advocates declare that the central mission of history education is to transmit to the rising generation a shared heritage of values, institutions, and great ideas derived mainly from peoples of Europe and the ancient Mediterranean. World history as the story of “our civilization” and its presumed ancient antecedents is the framework young Americans need, so that they will commit themselves to national unity and our distinctive way of life. The Western Heritage Model particularly honors the traditional “Western Civ” course, which spread across the nation after World War I and which aimed in part to teach newly arriving immigrants that Europeans and native-born Americans shared a proud, unitary cultural heritage. The Western Heritage Model’s dedication to democracy, freedom, and a shared system of cultural communication remains valid and commendable. This model, however, also assumes an essentialist point of view, contending that Western civilization generated out of its own cultural ingredients exceptional traits and that it continues to possess innate attributes, which may from time to time be obscured, though temporarily. According to Samuel Huntington, for example, “the essential continuing core of Western civilization” notably includes “its Christianity, pluralism, individualism, and rule of law, which made it possible for the West to invent modernity, expand throughout the world, and become the envy of other societies.... The principal responsibility of Western leaders, consequently, is... to preserve, protect, and renew the unique qualities of Western civilization.”1 Following this view, world history in schools should aim to identify the inborn characteristics of the West, contrast them with the qualities of other civilizations, and demonstrate through lessons and narratives the importance of nourishing our culture’s “essential continuing core." I name the second framework for defining world history the Different Cultures Model. Emerging from the domestic social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s and from the extraordinary expansion of the historical discipline after World War II, this model offered a much-needed critique of Eurocentrism. For the most part, however, it did not challenge the Western Heritage Model’s fundamental assumptions. Rather than disputing the idea that civilizations possess inherent attributes, many multiculturalists insisted that world history courses amply represent other civilizations and cultural categories besides the West and largely for essentialist reasons. The Different Cultures Model mirrored on a world scale the emerging (though contested) definition of American history as the stories of diverse ethno-racial groups, each possessing its own internal coherence, rationality, and integrity. World history education, therefore, should largely be study of the ancestral narratives and cultural qualities of all groups in America’s “ethno-racial pentagon”–the presumed forefathers of African-Asian-, Hispano-, Native-, and European-Americans.2 The third pattern is the Contemporary Studies. Its advocates are concentrated in professional social studies circles and among advocates of international education. Contemporary Studies is kindred to the Different Cultures Model in its general commitments to internationalism. But it puts more stress on young Americans understanding up-to-the-minute world developments that cut across cultural and political boundaries: economic globalization, international migrations, global culture, national or ethnic conflict, warfare, peace studies, environmental change, and world-scale institutions such as Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the United Nations. This model posits a curriculum centered on the study of contemporary processes and crises. History becomes a well on which to draw as needed to explain the “background” of recent transformations. Indeed some Contemporary Studies advocates reject substantive investigation of remote periods of history on the assumption that such study is inevitably fact-oriented, Eurocentric, and too detached from the “real” problems of our own time. Gilbert Allardyce has characterized such internationalists as arguing that “the global village is no place to dig up the past.”3 I call the fourth approach the Patterns of Change Model. Like the Different Cultures and Contemporary Studies Models, it champions a socially and culturally inclusive curriculum. Unlike those two frameworks, it is firmly based in the discipline of history, though drawing extensively on the social sciences for analytical constructs and vocabulary. In contrast to the Western Heritage Model, it shuns the search for cultural “origins” or the hypothesis that an actual chain of causation directly links paleolithic East Africa to Mesopotamia, Mesopotamia to Greece, and Greece to modern Europe. Like Contemporary Studies, this model is a response to our expanding awareness of globalization and the complex relationship between Homo sapiens sapiens and the biosphere. In the past few years the Patterns of Change Model has also drawn on some post-modernist currents, particularly studies concerned with cultural borderlands, deterritorialization, and how human groups have represented and made sense of one another. These concepts invite us to rethink the assumption that the groups we “see” around us–or that are presented in our history books–are “natural” groups, in other words, that cultures or civilizations are “solid, commonsensical, and agreed-upon” rather than “contested, uncertain, and in flux.”4 The Patterns of Change Model advances the idea that social and spatial fields of historical inquiry should be open and fluid, not predetermined by fixed cultural or geographical categories. Structuring world history curriculum, then, is not so much a matter of deciding how to line up study of various autonomously-conceived cultures but of framing substantive, engaging historical questions that students might be invited to ask unconstrained by predetermined border lines of civilizations, nations, or continents. Drawing on this model, students range across the whole wide world. But they are always on the lookout for explanations of change, not to describe “how things were” in Culture A, “what they had” in Culture B, or the “interesting things they achieved” in Culture C. That is, the Patterns of Change Model requires that the organizing of textbooks and curriculum guides start not with selection of places to study but with problems to investigate in both the remote and recent past. Readers will note my enthusiasm for the Patterns of Change Model. It is the one most closely associated with the intellectual and pedagogical aims of the World History Association and, in my view, the one that is most likely to guide young Americans to a greater understanding of how this complicated world got to be the way it is. Which of the four models I have outlined commands the most influence in American schools? The answer is tangled, partly because social studies curriculum is in such flux and partly because the models are not themselves pure conceptual constructs but edge into one another in various ways. In terms of the general precepts that inform world history education across the nation, the Different Cultures Model has led the pack for the past two decades or more. Its success is a facet of what David Hollinger calls “the triumph of basic multiculturalism.” That is, the multicultural tenets that world history education should be culturally inclusive, attentive to diversity, moderately relativist, internationally-minded, and hostile to the idea that any single culture is inherently better or worse than any other have won acceptance, at least resigned acceptance, in virtually all state and large-city education agencies. However, a careful look at state standards documents, professional journals, and textbooks reveals the multiculturalist victory to be less than complete. In educational practice, rather, one finds a somewhat awkward, unstable blending of Different Cultures and Western Heritage history. This inconsistent mix is partly a reflection of politics: boards of education, publishers, and curriculum officers constantly grope for a safe road through mine fields laid on one side by multicultural or ethno-racial interest groups and on the other by organizations dedicated to advancing “Western values.” The result is a general pattern of curriculum that reflects a fairly murky ideological position combining cultural inclusivism with a rather absent-minded acceptance of the notion that after 1500 and up to 1945 Europe and the world were the same. This amalgamation of Western Heritage and Different Cultures history is evident in almost all the leading world history textbooks and in the more content-rich state standards documents. The usual pattern is this: The first half of the text or standards guide presents major civilizations ad seriatim, each covered in a discrete unit encompassing several hundred to several thousand years. Diversity and internationalism thus honored, the scene shifts to Europe, whose internal history, together with the activities of Europeans abroad, dominates the second half of the document. The idea of the West as a cultural entity, whose “rise” may be ascribed almost entirely to internal mechanisms and foundational traits, remains largely unchallenged. For periods after 1945, but only then, textbooks and standards pay significant attention to globalization. Although this treatment accords with the Contemporary Studies Model, it is generally brief and appears jarringly inconsistent with what has preceded it–representation of world history as the unconnected stories of distinct civilizations and, from 1500 to 1945, as the story of a single civilization in possession of almost all historical agency. Among recent documents that specify content for world history, the Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Framework, the Virginia History and Social Science Standards of Learning, the California History/Social Science Content Standards, the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, and the National Council for History Education pamphlet titled Building a World History Curriculum all follow a generally similar mix of multiculturalism and Western Civ.5 More troubling, none of these documents displays much awareness of the literature in comparative, cross-cultural, and transnational history that has been pouring forth during the past quarter century and which offers so many new, fascinating, species-oriented questions about humanity’s development. The National Standards for World History, published in revised edition in 1996, have influenced the subsequent state standards projects in varying degrees. They clearly embody a much greater commitment to the Patterns of Change Model than do the content-rich standards of Virginia, Texas, Massachusetts, or California. The stamp of current world-historical thinking is clearly on the national standards, and their writing involved an unusual number of teachers and scholars dedicated to history as both a discipline and a globe-encircling project. To be sure, the national standards represent numerous compromises, the project involving as it did a huge cast of academics and teachers with divergent views on world history definitions. In other words, the standards do not represent a Patterns of Change manifesto. In my mind, however, they are a big step in the right direction, encouraging students not only to learn about major civilizations and key movements associated with the West but also “to draw comparisons across eras and regions in order to define enduring issues as well as large-scale or long-term developments that transcend regional and temporal boundaries.”6 Owing to the political Right’s media campaign against the first edition of the national standards, state and city education agencies have been slower, at least slower than I would have preferred, to draw on them as a model or resource for curricular and standards reform. As the public controversy of 1994-96 recedes into the past, however, something of a rediscovery of the national standards has been taking place. Witness for example the decision in New York State to adopt the general periodization scheme of the national standards in reshaping the world history curriculum for public schools. On the other hand, it seems likely that state-wide assessments in non-American history and social studies will, at least over the short run, reflect a rather confused combination of Western Heritage and Different Cultures assumptions. For example, the new content-specific state standards documents from California, Massachusetts, Texas, and Virginia include no clear declarations of the intellectual or pedagogical grounds on which particular topics for study were chosen, no rationales for why students should know what they were being asked to know, and no discussion of why they should study designated topics in a particular order and at a particular grade level. None of the guidelines I have seen make clear how the people who drafted them defined world history or conceived the world history teaching project as a whole. It seems to me that curriculum could be constructed more logically and coherently and be more in tune with the way children think about the past in relation to daily experience if history educators debated more self-consciously what we think we mean when we talk about world history. What assumptions and precommitments inform our structuring of the subject matter as a whole, and what do we expect our students to gain from a world history education beyond learning this and that about places in the world that are not the United States? All the social studies face tough competition with other subjects to get space in the school day. Even so, we must regard world history teaching as a particularly critical business, not as a low-priority subject governed by fuzzy, contradictory ideas about inclusiveness, diversity, and the native qualities of the West versus the Rest. Educators need to continue to ask big, highly reflective questions about the meaning of world history education: How can we make explicit the ideological and cultural premises that inform the differing ways we define world history and justify its inclusion in the curriculum? Why do textbooks and standards directives show such obliviousness to the exciting world history scholarship of the past quarter century? In what ways do we think students are capable of constructing meaning from the past, especially when that past is far away and long ago? At what developmental levels should we start teaching world history and why (In Virginia and South Carolina it’s third grade.)? If so many teachers teach world history these days, why don’t more public universities offer courses that connect directly to the K-12 curriculum or that ask students to ponder world history as a new and challenging approach to the past? Why do teachers have many avenues—workshops, institutes, conferences, published materials—for building their knowledge of various parts of the world but so few opportunities for grade-specific “communities of inquiry” to develop coherent conceptions of world history that can underlie an entire year’s work? How can prospective teachers be more effectively trained in college to consider world history, not as a series of units on “other cultures,” but as a distinctive, coherent mode of investigation. Perhaps the main epistemological problem in history education is to figure out how students use their minds to connect their own experience to that of human beings who are dead and gone. Where do students put themselves, if anywhere, in the stream of global time? These are big issues for international educators. In my view we should see what answers we get when we free the curriculum from identity politics, hunts for “our origins,” and the telling of cultural success stories. Some years ago the late scholar Marilyn Waldman voiced her dream of a “new” world history: “What I want is a movement toward a set of questions that all human data are theoretically needed to answer. I think we need to stop arguing over which books to read or which cultures to study and start talking about which questions to ask.”7
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