Coping with Mr. Gradgrind: History vs. “The Epistemology of the Self” | Ray W. Karras

As many assessments and studies have shown, historical facts are hard to teach and hard for students to learn. Too many high school and college students know too little about when the Civil War happened, for example, or even how many World Wars the United States has fought in the twentieth century. Various remedies have been tried with limited success. Some teachers decide that factual historical knowledge is overrated; students can always look up the facts somehow, someday. Others may become “Mr. Gradgrinds” with a vengeance and demand rote memorization from their students, following in the footsteps of Dickens’s character in Hard Times who wanted “only the facts.” And all of us have, at least once, preached to students on the dire fate of those who forget the past. None of these approaches do much good. There must be a better way to help students learn factual knowledge.

At least part of our problem may be that we assume what we should not assume: that both we and our students have the same understanding of the nature of historical facts themselves. Yet, exactly what do we mean when we ask students to know historical facts? The historian knows that to say that “the slavery conflict was the main cause of the Civil War” is to state an historical claim, not a true or false fact. However, to many students reading a textbook, the statement may appear as pure true fact. Why shouldn’t it? It’s in the book, isn’t it? And on test day students will be held responsible for everything in the chapter assigned, won’t they? Faced with masses of facts, claims, concepts and other historical data, students may feel that their best strategy is to memorize as much as they can, hope that it sticks until the test, and then forget it. What we have here, I suggest, is a gross misunderstanding between history teachers and history students about the epistemology of historical knowledge.

Before we can teach our way out of this misunderstanding, we need to recognize what we are up against. Our students&emdash;indeed all of us&emdash;live in an epistemological climate that is often profoundly hostile to the belief that objective factual knowledge is possible or desirable; this belief takes both naive and sublime forms. In his book, Illiberal Education, Dinesh D’Souza reports his discussion with a student who desired a more multicultural education from Stanford University. D’Souza suggested that if multicultural perspectives were truly his aim, the student might study the rise of capitalism in Japan or perhaps Islamic fundamentalism. “Who gives a damn about those things?” the student said; “I want to study myself” (1). Such solipsism may seem naive, but it coexists with very sophisticated scientific thinking. In physics courses, students may hear Niels Bohr’s advice to his colleagues: “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature” (2). This is surely sound advice for physicists, but it is less helpful for historians. And in some English courses, students learn from deconstruc-tionists that the texts they read have no fixed, objective meaning; it is all in the political eye of the beholder. On the evening television news, distinctions among factual events, opinions, and ideas are muted; in rapid succession, we see street riots in Algiers, surfers drinking Pepsi, Boris Yeltsin and George Bush shaking hands, Ford cars whirling over mountain roads, and an anchorperson who seems to know and control it all. It is difficult to discern reality from illusion. Thus, many students come into history classrooms believing that, whatever happens, it is all only in each person’s own mind and feelings.

With this “epistemology of the self” having gained such prominence, how can we teach students to distinguish facts in today’s world and in history from ideas and feelings inside their own heads? I suggest that history teachers will have to give as much explicit attention to the epistemological demands of history&emdash;to the origins, methods, nature, and limits of factual historical knowledge&emdash;as they give to the teaching of history itself. Doing so will directly challenge the epistemology of self. We will have to teach a positivist epistemology, one rejected by some other disciplines but necessary to the discipline of history. We will have to teach that historical facts are statements describing events that really, physically happened, that were observed by people seeing, hearing, touching, and smelling them. Furthermore, we will have to impress upon students that all of this occurred outside of ourselves and independent of our modern culture. We will have to ask our students to put themselves aside when they read historical facts.

A useful exercise is to ask students to list all the physical facts they can find in almost any textbook paragraph. Consider the factual statements that appear in this paragraph from a widely used textbook:

The debate over the causes of the Civil War began even before the war itself. In 1858, Senator William H. Seward of New York took note of the two competing explanations of the sectional tensions that were then inflaming the nation. On the one side, he claimed, stood those who believed the sectional hostility to be “accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators.” Opposing them stood those who believed there to be “an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces.” Although he did not realize it at the time, Seward was drawing the outlines of a debate that would survive among historians for more than a century to come (3).

Strictly obeying our positivist criteria for historical factual statements, we find only these facts in this paragraph:
• In 1858 Senator William H. Seward claimed that there were two views about the causes of sectional hostility.
• Seward said some believe this hostility to be “accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators.”
• Seward said others believed there to be “an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces.”

These, to repeat, are the only facts in this paragraph. Otherwise, the paragraph tells much that only seems to be factual. Take the words “Civil War.” No one ever saw the “Civil War;” instead, for four years, people observed men firing guns and troops marching, heard or read statements by Northern and Southern leaders, mourned the dead and praised the victors&emdash;and then called all this “the Civil War.” “The Civil War” is actually an idea, a concept that classifies myriads of events that occurred between April 1861 and April 1865. And if “the Civil War” is not objectively factual, then neither are the “debates,” the “causes,” the “competing explanations,” the “sectional contentions,” or the “sectional hostility;” all of these are concepts in the minds of primary or secondary spokespersons. And when the textbook authors say that Seward “did not realize it at the time,” and that there is “a debate that would survive among historians for more than a century to come,” they state historical claims, and historical claims are not facts.

Does this analysis draw distinctions too nice to live with? Perhaps this would have been the case in times gone by. Before the epistemology of the self became so pervasive, perhaps students could be expected to comb out objective factual information from the rest. Almost instinctively, they may have understood that “the Civil War” covered a multitude of events, and that historians do state historical claims without stopping to identify them as such. But today, concepts, claims, and facts often seem a part of the same reality. To many, claims and concepts seem even more “real” than the facts that actually happened. It may seem far more interesting to report one’s own feelings about sectional hostility, causes, or wars than to take seriously the facts underlying these generalizations. In this process, factual knowledge goes by the board.

Both the teaching and the learning of history may gain considerable advantages from making these distinctions. For example, by recognizing the conceptual nature of the words “Civil War,” students may be led to notice that Southerners sometimes classify the events of 1861-1865 as “the War Between the States,” or as “the War for Southern Independence.” Why do they do this? What facts do they note to produce this alternative conception of these four years? We certainly want to engage students in such questions. By teaching in the context of a positivist epistemology, we can stress the differences between facts and the other kinds of historical statements.

This epistemology can also help students use primary sources judiciously. Just as it is a fact that cannons fired on Fort Sumter, it is a fact that Seward said what he said. This is so even though Seward expressed his own claims when he spoke of the “irrepressible conflict.” A positivist epistemology enables students to sharply distinguish their own claims from Seward’s. Students may claim, for example, that the Civil War was or was not an irrepressible conflict and quote Seward as a document of factual evidence to help support the claim. Seward thus plays the role of a witness in a trial of historical interpretation, though, crucially, Seward himself is not on trial. Advocates of “political correctness” may overlook this important distinction when they praise or condemn historical figures, and sometimes suggest that the more objectionable figures should be removed from historical mention. But facts remain facts, and it is senseless for the history student to like or dislike them. Instead, it makes a great deal of sense for that student to use those facts to support his or her own historical claims.

We can do much in our classrooms to engage our students in factually anchored historical interpretation. Suppose that at the beginning of class we write three words across the top of the chalkboard, leaving plenty of space between them:

facts
concepts
claims

Ask students to report anything they learned from the assigned reading. Then ask them to tell the person at the chalkboard under which of the three headings to enter that information. Suppose a student says, “Seward believed the conflict was irrepressible.” Should this statement go under the fact, concept, or claim heading? According to our positivist criteria, the statement can only be listed as a claim. It cannot be a fact for no one ever directly perceived a “belief” in anyone even though historians often claim what others believed. In this case, words from Seward’s 1858 speech provide some factual evidence relating to the claim, and those words should be quoted under the fact heading. Note that to support the claim adequately, students will have to consult Seward’s entire speech. Graphically showing the epistemological distance between statements of fact and statements of claims can help drive students into further factual material; it gives them a need to know more. As for the concepts involved, they are the raw materials of claims and they classify the facts. Concepts are what the facts are all about: “Seward’s belief” and “irrepressible conflict.” Once “Seward’s belief” is written under the concept listing, it becomes natural to ask, “Who was Seward, anyway? Where did he come from? What did he do? Why did he make that speech?” Again, the need to know more facts becomes apparent. The blackboard work suggested here is but one of many classroom methods teachers can devise to take advantage of epistemological instruction.

Explicit attention to epistemology can also make us careful with our instructional language. We should consider closely whether we want to ask students to “prove” historical claims. Don’t we really mean instead that we want them to support claims with convincing reasons and evidence? Remember that most of our history students also study mathematics where proof leads to an entailed factual conclusion that is either true or false. We cannot really say that the statement “the Civil War is an irrepressible conflict” is either true or false; its authority depends wholly on the research and reasoning behind it. And truth itself? Perhaps we should reserve this word for statements of fact alone for only they can be shown to be true or false.

In conclusion, consider the very idea of a “conclusion.” In literature courses, students learn that the conclusion of Hamlet is the death of the prince; it is the end of the story. Do we want history students to believe that they can reach a conclusion, an end, to the debate about the causes of the Civil War? Probably not. Words like “proof,” “truth,” and “conclusion” are epistemologically loaded with meanings from other disciplines. Their special meanings and uses for the discipline of history should be carefully demarcated.

Of course, history is not philosophy. Nevertheless, when history teachers ask students to learn factual knowledge, they will face philosophical problems, especially those of epistemology. Currently, the epistemology suggested here, positivism, enjoys very little popularity. Some popular pedagogy suggest that if two students find that they share the same opinions about any issue, then those opinions, in their own minds, become true facts. If a teacher and a student strike an agreement of opinion, then, says the epistemology of the self, teacher and student have established a fact; they have found “the truth” and such truths and falsities may be concepts, claims, interpretations, likes and dislikes, or, almost by chance, objective facts themselves. Many history teachers agree that this epistemology of the self is inappropriate to the study of history. These teachers face the difficult but not impossible battle to establish a higher regard toward factual knowledge.

Endnotes
1. Dinesh D’Souza, Illiberal Education (New York: Free Press, 1991), 74-75.
2. Quoted by Richard Rhodes reviewing Abraham Pais’ Niels Bohr’s Times in The New York Times Book Review, 26 January 1992, 3.
3. Richard N. Current, T. Harry Williams, Frank Freidel and Alan Brinkley, American History: A Survey (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 420.