The Arrow of Time

In their February/March 1987 issue the learned editors of AMERICAN HERITAGE magazine headlined an article on the (apparently) sad state of history education in America. "History In Trouble: Why Is It Taught So Badly?" is the way they put the proposition on the cover, with a 72 pt. headline inside proclaiming: "American History Is Falling Down." The accompanying graphic showed an artist's rendition of the Jefferson Memorial, with its pillars cracked and falling down, just to make sure we got the point.

The author, an eminent scholar, offered his learned thoughts on the "trouble" in history. He blamed over-specialization, fractious separations among "popular" and academic historians, too much fiddling with the curriculum to produce trendy "social relevance," and a whole host of similar ills.

A couple of months later the magazine's equally learned readers joined their voices to the chorus. One thought accuracy was being sacrificed to make the castor oil go down easier, and this was surely the problem. Another was certain lack of discipline and an unprincipled spirit of laissez faire was to blame. Still another complained of a prejudice against those not affiliated with a university. They all agreed it was an organizational, structural, institutional fix of some sort which was needed.

I thought to myself, "These guys are members of some hoary fraternal club, blowing hot air into each others fezzes and thinking this must be the breeze of insight sweeping through their hallowed halls." The difficulty in teaching history has nothing to do with the organization of the curriculum or the structure of the teaching bureaucracy. The problem is a metaphysical one: teachers of history have gotten the arrow of time wrong.

The reason you will never figure this out, dear editors, is that you asked the wrong guys. If you want to know why America's students don't cotton to history education you need to talk to my buddies and me, who were more likely to be found smoking cigarettes in the alley during history class than to be writing letters to the editor of AMERICAN HERITAGE.

But of course you don't just need any stray juvenile delinquent--you need a reformed one, like myself. Hey, as Richard Reeves says in his commercial, I read AMERICAN HERITAGE, I subscribe to AMERICAN HERITAGE . . .

So I understand, I really do. I love and appreciate history, so I understand the consternation. But I used to be one of them, one of the great horde of unwashed, unteachable American youths who just didn't give a fig about history no matter what you said or did. So listen up, while I let you in on the secret of our little heathen club.

During my elementary and secondary education I couldn't imagine a more dull and useless subject than history--unless of course it was geography. I remember once asking my 7th grade geography teacher, with plaintive sincerity: "But why learn all this junk? Who cares about where Malawi is? I will never use this stuff in real life." My geography teacher was momentarily nonplused, but eventually he kept right on about Malawi and places like that, and I just kept right on thinking adults sure were dumb.

With my history teachers I didn't ever bother. I mean they were way too far gone. Instead I just day-dreamed, or cut-up, or ditched class to suck on a cadged Marlboro with my buddies.

The only time I remember history being interesting was in high school American History class. For one glorious week we discussed Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis about the settling of the American frontier. To our surprised ears it sounded like Turner was saying that our hallowed ancestors were a bunch of bums, criminals and malcontents. Now this was something interesting! It seemed vaguely disrespectful of authority somehow, and there was nothing closer to our hearts than disrespect for authority. But beyond this one brief shining moment, history was a wasteland.

So, dear editors, permit a reformed juvenile delinquent, with currently impeccable history-lover's credentials, to tell you just what is really wrong with history education in America:

The problem with the teaching of history is that historians have gotten the arrow of time wrong. They use the right and proper arrow of course--the physicist's arrow--which sails its certain arc from the past through the present into the future. But the interest curve of callow students does not follow the track of the physicists. Our sense of time begins with ourselves, egocentric time is the only time we understand.

For the young, the future is the stuff of fantasy and expectation and impatient longing, and the past is that dusty stuff that history teachers are always going on about. Only the hot moment is real--now alone really matters. All of time, all the universe of our concerns, collapses into the here and now.

For a youth, time stretches and shrinks depending on the concern of the moment. For who else can the presence of a pimple seem like an affliction which has lasted an eternity? For who else can the day they are old enough for a driver's license seem like a moment somewhere on the other side of the galaxy? Copernicus may have proven that the earth is not the center of the universe, but no one will ever convince a teenager that their present moment is not the very one around which cosmic time revolves. In a word, the young are self-centered. We ought to have the sense to use this pervasive fact to our advantage.

For my buddies and me, our complaint about history was always that it wasn't relevant. By which we meant: what does this have to do with me?

The usual way of teaching history is to break it into logical chunks, based on various category schemes like: American History, The High Middle Ages, The Renaissance, The Age of Discovery, and stuff like that. Just the thing to thrill the hearts of America's teenagers. And then, having carved out the appropriate groups from the granite of time, we naturally enough begin at the beginning of the chunk and work towards the back end.

So when it comes time to teach American History, for example, we invariably begin with Life in the Colonies, go on to the Revolutionary War, the Founding Fathers, zip through the middle undistinguished presidents, pick up with the Civil War, then to the other "great wars" and finally, if the students are not yet suitably exhausted, we might get within a decade or two of the present time. Anything too contemporary of course is not history but civics or social studies.

Is it any wonder my buddies and me had our curiosity put to sleep by this procedure? To put it in our terms: "What do all these colonial-type guys have to do with me?" "I mean, who cares, you know."

Dare I suggest an alternative?

Why not begin teaching history by looking at yesterday's papers. Try to show the lads and lasses how what is happening in the world today affects them and their prospects for the future. If the Germans decided last week to unify, explain to them how that decision, that little moment in history, means they will have a tougher time competing with a unified Europe in the years ahead and thus, means their job prospects are bleaker and their future prosperity less than assured. Then reach back to the last decade or so and examine the legacy of the Reagan Administration. Show them how the decisions made during those moments of history mean that they will be saddled with a national debt which will be a weight around their necks for as long as they live. Having gotten their attention, then work backward in time toward ever more distant moments, connecting the decisions made during those periods to the quality of and the features of the life they know today.

Believe or not, even American teenagers are not immune from wonder. If you can show the connections between the march of history and their present circumstances, they will respond with interest and curiosity. The fact that they have a car to ride around in is due to the moments in history when Henry Ford and his contemporaries figured out how to produce automobiles for the masses. Their ability to send and receive mail exists because of events surrounding the moments in time when Benjamin Franklin served as the nation's first Postmaster. There are thousands of ways the millions of things that constitute the past are linked with the concerns and interests of the present.

As they mature, the students will naturally develop an increased capacity for abstraction. It will therefore be a natural progression to work further and further back into history as the students advance through the years. We should begin by teaching yesterday's history to the youngest students, then work further back each year until we can teach them anything, yes, even the High Middle Ages.

So to teach history to unwilling students is really rather easy if we just reverse the arrow of time and work backwards in the causal chain, not forwards from some arbitrary chunk. The student's arrow of time emerges from the present moment and is flung backwards toward distant events they can scarcely imagine. We need only to seize this backward arrow, attach a few threads of teaching to make some connections, and let it fly, in its natural arc, back into the past. If we do this skillfully enough, we may even find my heathen brethren and I are captivated. We might even put down our cigarettes, come out of the alley and listen, as you teach us some history.