Perspective Equals Power
I remember hearing, when I was young, a grumbly objection to the growing prevalence of “world history” in higher secondary and undergraduate education curricula that went something like this: “They don’t even know their own history; we should teach them that before we teach them ‘world history’.” Now that I’m a pro historian with a pile of work under my belt, as opposed to a grad student/teaching assistant for a freshman-level World Civ class, I can answer that objection with some confidence.
There’s no doubt that students would, and do, benefit from quality instruction in local, regional, and national history. It’s that last bit, though, that’s problematic; traditionally, at least since the latter half of the nineteenth century, most history taught to students, anywhere that wasn’t under colonial domination, was highly nationalistic. Public schools were set up primarily to indoctrinate, not educate, pupils. Their primary purpose was to create a national culture that transcended whatever local and regional cultures the pupils might have imbibed, in order to foster a sense of nationalist patriotism, loyalty to a nation-state, and thus a willingness to follow the orders of that state—especially orders to go to war for the interests of the dominant elite. That is why it is so traditional in the U.S. to have public-school students recite the Pledge of Allegiance in unison. This sort of underlying agenda is not by any means unique to the U.S. though. In fact, it’s older in Germany, which did not become a nation-state until 1871, and then an exceptionally-militaristic one. Now, though, German students are taught a critical national history, while here in the U.S., commendable attempts to do that are being hampered by loud, ignorant people who hold the asinine point of view that one cannot be both a critical and a committed citizen at the same time.
OK, but let’s assume that we offer a balanced, thoughtful, critical history curriculum in the public schools and lower-level undergrad. That’s great. I’m all for it. I don’t accept, though, any argument that such a curriculum is some sort of pre-requisite for world history. It isn’t. The two are complementary. Here’s why.
Kids assume that whatever they experience is normal until they experience an alternative. The extreme example I always use is K.L. Randis, the author of Spilled Milk, who only learned that it isn’t normal for a father to violently abuse his children when she spent time around her boyfriend’s family as a high-schooler. We continue to assume universal normality for whatever our own normal is until we are presented with an alternative. Lacking such an alternative, we will carry our assumptions to the end of our lives.
Kids, then, imbibe important aspects of their own society’s culture simply by being raised in it. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a lot to learn about the society they live in. That even includes being inculcated with the core values necessary to maintain a functioning civil society. Those include respect for others, empathy, participation in the democratic process, a sense of belonging to a society, and the history of that society, presented at a level appropriate to their cognitive ability. They do not include theism or the notion that their society is better than, in some absolute sense, everyone else’s.
At the same time, though, they are capable of learning from alternatives presented to them in an educational setting—and that is what global history offers. Things that we take for granted as normal are not normal for other people—or were not normal for people in the past. As soon as the student acknowledges that, and asks “why?,” real education begins.
And there are two primary purposes there. The first is obvious: to learn about other peoples and their ways, in order to foster both awareness of the world we live in, and empathy for other people. The second is just as important: it’s when we study alternatives to our own assumptions and ways of doing things that we clearly see our own. If we don’t place something in the context of comparison and contrast, we don’t understand it. We may not even be aware that “it” is an “it” until we realize that there are other “its.” Once we do, we can evaluate our own norms for what they are—choices made from a set of possibilities. From there, we’re equipped to think critically about how we do things. If we don’t do that, we can’t adapt intelligently, and we can’t change those norms to improve our own well-being. If she hadn’t been invited to family dinners at her boyfriend’s house, K.L. Randis might not have decided to bring charges against her father before she even finished high school, and, ultimately, served as the key witness who sent him to prison.
We can study alternatives to our own specific realities by shifting our focus geographically, temporally, or both. Either way, we familiarize ourselves, to some extent, with the Other. We can take what we apprehend from even a survey of global history and set it next to aspects of local, regional, or national history. We will realize important things-such as the fact that the “nation” is a modern construct and there are plenty of other ways of organizing a society—or a group of societies. We can realize how a map conveys a certain group’s sense of who they are and who the Other is, and another map, of the same area, can convey an alternative. We learn to evaluate our world rather than just accept it, not just as the way it is, but perhaps even as the way it always has been and always must be. Knowledge really is power, because it gives us our agency—or, rather, it makes us aware that we had that agency all along.