Wineburg,S. Why Learn History (When it’s Already on Your Phone)

The work of an educationist, and of a teacher in particular, is never easy. She is expected to prepare grounds, where achievements meet aspirations, where aims meet values, and where social decisions meet personal developmental pathways. Children are to learn, and the teacher is to teach, but between them are the worlds of historians, scientists, musicians, economists, lawyers, social reformers, spiritual leaders, mathematicians, technocrats, politicians and many more. Sam Wineburg’s Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) tells us stories of the meetings of these worlds. Stories of the efforts of various authorities in education—including the author, his colleagues, students and the teachers—to make sense of, to change, to reform the aims and practices of education. These stories have a specific context: the rise of Internet, easy availability of information of all sorts, some closer to truth, some farther and some without a trace of commitment to anything of value. Can we teach what is educationally valuable, with technology in our hands and head? In this book, Wienburg has interwoven his reflections on re-presentations of historical facts and explanations across textbooks, popular press and the sea of digital ‘information’, with his interventions to improve the teaching of history. He writes about how we fail to think historically while evaluating divergent claims about the past, and what educationists can do to set the state of the education right—on the path of evidence and truth; particularly, in a world where students are habituated to ‘commune with screens’ connected with a huge web of mostly unvetted content (p. 139). Why students, even historians in Wineburg and Sarah McGrew’s studies, could not ascertain the veracity of claims presented on an apparently credible webpage (pp. 145–149). To judge the veracity of e-information, historians in the study often looked at the ‘looks’ of a webpage—‘classic fonts … the black and white seal’, for example—forgetting that citations on a webpage may not hold the same authority as those in established academic journals of repute do (p. 148). This behaviour of ‘getting lost in the digital weed’ (p. 147) was not unlike that of the students in another of the Wineburg’s study, when students ‘equated the placement of a website on Google’s list of results with trustworthiness: the higher the placement, the more reliable the information’ (p. 140). Only seasoned fact-checkers could quickly decipher and separate authentic and trustworthy webpages from similar sounding flawed ones. They could hop the Internet laterally—not just vertically—from one page to another to find the credentials of who is putting out the content, and with what possible intent. But the majority of Internet users are not seasoned fact checkers and still rely on free-flowing web content ‘to lean what’s going on in the world’. Can the labelling schemes by social media establishments such as Facebook save us from appeals of propaganda? Particularly, when even well-respected print media ends up blurring the boundary between a sponsored content and a news story, with an eye on boosting their dwindling revenue? Is policing the Internet a solution? Or are we to create quick-fix courses in ‘media literacy’? Wineburg argues that such ‘media literacy’ courses are ‘dislodged as soon as there’s a budget crunch or a new crisis appears’. These add-ons are ‘like slapping a new coat of paint on a house that’s teetering on its foundation: it lends the house better street appeal but does little to address the underlying problem’. In a world where ‘proofs’ are just a click away, deeply drenched in the ‘digital swamp’ of ‘concocted evidence, photoshopped images, and pseudo-scholarly accounts studded with footnotes that lead to non-existent archives’, Wineburg worries about teaching historical thinking. Teachers have to learn to educate children to commit to value accuracy and honesty when ‘alternative facts’ are mushrooming exponentially (pp. 158, 175).

In collaboration with his colleagues and students, Wineburg worked on an in-depth educational interventions in curriculum and teaching of history in schools, with projects titled: ‘Promoting Argumentation Through History and Science’ (PATHS), ‘Historical Thinking Matters’, ‘Reading Like a Historian’ (led by Abby Reisman), employing approaches like ‘Opening Up the Textbook (or OUT)’, ‘Historical Assessment of Thinking, or HATs’, ‘Document Based Questions (DBQs)’, and methodologies such as ‘thinking aloud’. He noted that he and his colleagues could do this, partly because the ‘Internet has lowered opportunity costs such that professors can create and distribute quality materials’. But he adds that, ‘ultimately, it is a teacher’s knowledge, capability, finesse, understanding and sensitivity that constitute the most important qualities in a pedagogic repertoire’ (p. 138). These interventions were aimed at developing historical thinking among students: ‘What good was turning kids into engaged citizens if they struggled to make their way through basic newspaper article’ (p. 123). By working their ways through the ‘documents of varying trustworthiness and authority’, some very old and some contemporary, students came to see that the textbook is not the final or sole ‘arbiter of historical truth’ (p. 108). In Wineburg and his colleagues’ interventional studies, students could learn to develop explanatory hypothesis, discuss historical causality, and talk about the role of human motivations in explaining events of historical significance. They were taught to learn from each other’s work and become ‘intellectual partners’ of peer students.

What is it that marks the success of Wineburg et al.’s interventions? It is the knowledge of disciplinary ideas and learning to value disciplinary practices. Students as well teachers must acquire ‘ways of thinking [what is] at the heart of the discipline’ (p. 122). Wineburg raises important questions on the relationship between the teacher’s content knowledge and students’ learning achievements, and to what extent large-scale, abundantly funded, projects to develop teacher knowledge translate into evident improvements in student achievements in learning historical knowledge and understanding historical thinking or the grounds of historical inferences. What strikes me, qua a responsive reader, is: development of teacher knowledge is a slow affair that demands closer, deeper and longstanding engagement; while teacher knowledge is an indispensable contributor to student learning achievements, the latter cannot be a linear, direct and instant consequence of the former. Moreover, the assessment of the student learning achievements on the one hand, and assessment of the relation between teacher knowledge, everyday teaching–learning practice, and student performance on standardised itemised large-scale testing statistics on the other, remains an area where an anarchy of interpretations flourishes. Wineburg discusses some of these in the opening of chapter of the book.

What is the reason for fragmented student learning? Wineburg’s reflections and research—discussed in Parts 2 and 3 of the book—warn us against the separation of content from pedagogy in teaching and teacher preparation. It suggests the familiar question: do teachers learn to teach independently of learning the subject matter? The mastery of the disciplinary content in itself is not sufficient to turn the master into a good teacher, but neither does the mastery of pedagogic practices (cf. pp. 43–46). The larger question is: In what ways should teacher professional development be linked to student achievement surveys on one hand, and to the disciplinary knowledge of teachers on the other (pp. 31–49)? Even the spending of a billion dollars—as was the case of ‘Teaching American History’ programme by the United States government discussed in Chapter 2 of the book—could not forge these links with the surety of success. According to Wineburg, ‘Teaching American History’ is guilty of gluttony and pride (p. 47), for the assessments of the program’s achievements remain feeble. Wineburg’s analysis of what it takes to improve history education may not be without merit. But it reminds us that measuring the student learning achievement as a function of teacher inputs and efforts is a messy affair. Indeed, the million-dollar question, in Wineburg’s own words, is: ‘If educational change comes slowly, what shall we do while waiting for the revolution?’ (p. 27). While waiting for the revolution, I doubt whether Wineburg will allow educators to confuse the assessment of ideas and issues in teacher knowledge qua teaching with the assessment of student knowledge qua learning.

Knowledge in History—and in other disciplines including Science—must rely on inferences or interpretations. Various activist movements in the late twentieth century almost exploited this dimension, arguing that ‘positionalities’ matter in how one interprets historical events. Writings that foreground ‘squishiness of interpretations’ (p. 74) do become popular. Do such writings help students learn historical thinking? Winburg’s analysis of immensely popular American history book

A People’s History of the United States highlights how the popularity of a work is not a guarantee of its educational value. Education teaches students to seek truth, not indoctrinate them with blind faith in a particular view of history.

[W]hile A People’s history draws liberally from… working class history, feminist history, black history, and various ethnic histories… the book resolutely strikes a traditional pose toward historical knowledge. It substitutes one monolithic reading of the past for another, albeit one that claims to be morally superior and promises to better position students to take action in the present. (p. 74)

Wineburg has no doubt that the author of this widely applauded work, Howard Zinn, lived ‘a life of commitment and unstinting devotion to the things he believed in’ (p. 75). But when we think of his book in terms of a history curriculum, our concern is education of the young and

here Zinn’s undeniable charisma turns dangerous, especially when we become attached to his passionate concern for the underdog … [The young readers] do not yet get the interpretive game … [They] are just learning that claims must be judged not for their alignment with current issues of social justice, but for the data they present and their ability to account for the unruly fibres of evidence that jut out from any interpretive frame. It is here that Zinn’s power of persuasion extinguishes students’ ability to think and speaks directly to their hearts. (p. 76)

Historical facts cannot be made contingent on our present political liking or disliking, we cannot expect history to ‘do its duty’, when we ‘sap it of autonomy and drain it of vitality’. Education should teach us to have ‘the moral courage we need to revise our beliefs in the face of new evidence’, and not put us in the habit of ‘imputing the basest motives to those who view the world from a different perch … In a world devoid of doubt, the truth has no hands’ (p. 78). Wineburg sounds a great caution when in history one plays ‘a game that historians call the counterfactual—a thought experiment about how the past might have turned out differently had things not turned out the way they did’ (p. 64). In such arguments, history should not broadcast certainty: ‘had this [not] been the case, things would have been so and so’; but things might have or could have. We could only be ‘certain about the history that’s happened … [not] about the history that didn’t’. As in other disciplines so in history: certainty is always open to ‘new scholarship … new evidence … the discovery of previously unknown documents ...’ (p. 63).

Textbooks and teachers are expected to teach thinking. In history, it is thinking about the historical claims we make to describe and explain the past. In science, we think to describe and explain the natural world. The nature of thinking differs with the object of thought. But this thinking must include thinking about the grounds that support our claims—thinking if these grounds are sound or good enough such that the claims could be counted as historical claims not populist illusions. But do textbooks do this? Or they are no different from popular narratives in ignoring thinking? Do textbooks ‘bind evidence to conclusion, to convince readers that [their] interpretations are right’ (p. 53). Textbooks are valuable; in heterogeneous classrooms ‘a textbook narrative establishes a shared framework’. And still, students must learn to probe the ‘factual basis’ of interpretation given in their textbooks, as also in the documents made available to them (p. 125). ‘Fed the gruel of documentation-less textbooks, students come to see history as a story without evidence. Don’t like this particular story? Doesn’t sit well with your politics? Don’t worry. Custom order one online more to your own liking’ (p. 175).

Teachers and students have to think with the textbooks. But can one think of thinking in itself—or one thinks historically, scientifically, poetically, etc? ‘To a historian, critical thinking isn’t just collecting facts in order to pass judgement. It’s about determining what questions to ask in order to generate new knowledge’ (p. 88). Thinking thereby requires recognising the relevance of knowledge: ‘knowledge possessed is not knowledge deployed, especially when such knowledge is deemed irrelevant’ (p. 90). What’s the point of being critical ‘with little thinking backing it up … [without] determining what … [one is] needed to know to better understand an assertion or event’ (pp. 90–91). Thinking is tied to disciple. Disciplinary thinking is thus ‘the opposite of disorderly, slovenly, whimsical, and capricious’, it resists ‘first-draft thinking and the flimsy conclusions that are its bitter fruits’ (p. 91). Knowledge is not merely necessary but central to thinking. Indeed, knowledge is the aim of education. This may sound mundane, but it is not uncommon to ignore it. For example: ‘Bloom’s pyramid … [by] placing knowledge at the bottom sends the wrong message … [It] endows knowledge with all the glamour of a dank basement: necessary for a house’s foundation but hardly the place to host honoured guests’ (p. 92). Knowledge is a base of Benjamin Bloom’s famous Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, but it advocates moving beyond teaching facts to teach to think. Can knowing—even knowing facts—be separated (in the time and space of a classroom) from thinking—analysing, synthesizing or evaluating? And that too in the era of Internet? As Wineburg argues:

We now live in an age when no one needs a licence to practice historiography. Rouges contort the past in ways that even Winston Smith couldn’t have imagined. If history is to have relevance in the digital age, it must make us allergic to the point of nausea to claims attached to spurious evidence … (p. 177). Tyranny wins when it succeeds in shaking our confidence in basic notions of truth … A society that disputes basic facts has no moral right to maintain a judicial system that locks people up. The logical extension of ‘alternative facts’ is to throw open the prison gates and let everyone out. (p. 158)

Among the disciplines in the school curriculum, History is the one where the (meta) concepts of explanation, truth and evidence are crucial and yet, these very concepts are the ones often found missing in educational discourses in general. Sam Wineburg’s book is a good guide to everyone who is serious about learning the value of explanation and truth in the history education. Not just history educators and teachers, everyone who cares about education—particularly when the enormity of virtual access to diverse ideas and practices is dazzling—will find this insightful book useful. The days when discipline is often missing in the humbug of inter-disciplinarity, when the intent and worth of an action is lost in the flurry of school activities, when determining meaning gets increasingly difficult, are the days where books like Wineburg’s have a potential to turn educators to education.