On teaching history

Much of today's paper concerns education. I've been engaged in the process my entire life, from first grade at the Yeshiva of Flatbush (I was expelled) to the present as a college professor. I'm vain enough to think that some might like to know what professors (or at least one history professor) thinks of the process. I do not pretend that what I think of education is universally held, but I hope it is.

Let me begin with a negative. I don’t teach to the student present; I teach to his future self. I don’t only teach what happened, I teach methods of determining what happened; it’s not the same thing. Some students take one course with me and love it, while others hate it, some take multiple courses with me either out of love for the way I present or as evidence of masochism. In all cases the goal is the same—to make of them thinking human beings.

I assign grades, but I know that their grade can only be determined in a dozen years. Do they remember the facts beyond the course? If “yes,” fine; if not, it may not be important. Do they remember that they are part of history, not the end of it; that they are products of a chain of human endeavor inheriting from the past, contributing to the development, and then leaving the world to the next and the next and the next generations for as far as can be imagined? If so I have succeeded. If after a dozen years they are still asking of something they read or hear, “is this true?” then I have succeeded. If they become teachers and pass along the knowledge and the perspective I’ve taught, then I’ve succeeded. But whatever profession they enter, if when they hear a politician speak they can also hear Pericles, and Cicero and Caesar saying the same things, even if they don’t remember exactly where they heard all that first, I’ve succeeded. If when entering a polling booth they take their obligations seriously, I’ve succeeded.

It is to them I teach, the students who are not yet there but the people they will be in a dozen years, hearing the echoes of the lessons; they are the ones to whom my class is aimed. How successful I am can only be judged by them. This past Fourth of July I met a middle-aged man who asked if I remembered him. I said his face and voice were familiar but that I couldn't place them. He had been a student of mine in the early 1970s and he said that what he had learned from me was vital in his career. I asked what that career had been, expecting that his reply would be “teacher” but, no, he said he had been employed in the defense intelligence establishment. What was useful to him was not the facts I taught, but the questions I'd taught him to ask of documents, the process of discovering truth. He remembered. I had succeeded.

Teaching, to me, is the transmission of the accumulated wisdom (and failed attempts at wisdom) of mankind from antiquity to yesterday. It is the role of the teacher in society, especially the historian, to distill this accumulated knowledge and present it in readily digested portions. I do not know everything that happened in Europe; I do not teach everything I know; I hope to stimulate my students to want to know more than I have taught them, more than I currently know, to understand their role in history, to understand what and how the present receives from the past and contributes to the future.

I encourage my students to challenge me when they disagree and to prompt me when they want more than I have given them. In the process I hope that they learn that authority may be challenged, should be challenged, and how best to challenge it. This process intimidates some students. They don’t like their core ideas threatened and some don’t like my making them think about things they have always taken for granted. Some realize that raising uncomfortable issues is to their benefit, allowing them the opportunity to confirm with knowledge that which they had previously held only as an opinion. Some appreciate new perspectives (new to them) and change their minds about the issue at hand. I always require them to think about what they believe.

So, when I'm not typing columns on this old Olivetti, that's what I do.