Is There a Right and Wrong in History?

This week's article summary is Shifting Out of Neutral and it focuses on the challenges middle and high school history teachers face when trying to remain objective in class. 

While I am a champion of guiding students to be open minded, reserve judgment, and think with multiple perspectives, the article’s author rightly wonders if too much teacher objectivity may lead to students not thinking there are moral and ethical rights and wrongs in life.

I liked how the author defines the purpose behind studying history: “Studying the past offers a venue for reflecting on the human condition and developing a sense of right and wrong.”

Viewing all opinions and perspectives equally may result in students looking at the world and how we treat one another through an overly relativistic lens when in fact we want our students to develop an ethical and moral compass to guide them into and throughout adulthood. 

It’s hard to teach history in these polarized and politicized times, yet, as we have emphasized this year in our all-school meetings, if we keep the words of our mission and program pillars as the basis for what and how we teach, we will be doing well for our students.

Joe

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I ask a lot of open-ended questions in my history classes, the kinds of questions to which there are no right answers, only good answers (logical, well-supported and so on). 

A few years ago I started asking myself such a question: “Am I damaging my students?”

Here’s the context. In the past I hesitated to share my own opinions about the questions we addressed in class. My hesitation came from a desire to maintain some level of objectivity and my understanding that this is what was expected of me as a teacher. 

But my attempt to strike a neutral pose began to feel like a major ethical and philosophical quandary: Is neutrality possible or even desirable.

I have come to the conclusion that objectivity is practically impossible. What’s more, it can hinder our students’ moral development. And cultivating morality is uniquely essential to the project of teaching history. Studying the past offers a venue for reflecting on the human condition and developing a sense of right and wrong. We study who we were so that we can figure out who we want to be.

Today’s students often view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture. In other words, today’s students have an overdeveloped sense of relativism. All opinions or perspectives are considered equal. My students tolerate all views while dismissing none.

A student once gave me a note on the last day of school that read, much to my alarm, “Thank you for a great course. I learned that if you look at perspectives that are different, then you will see that everyone is right for different reasons.” I was dismayed because, of course, everyone is decidedly not right for different reasons. Some people are quite wrong about a lot of things, and many of those people feature heavily in the U.S. and global history classes I teach.

Teachers often diversify and complicate their students’ thinking by talking about studying history from “multiple perspectives.” This approach can be an effective way to broaden students’ thinking and include voices from outside of the dominant narrative.

I have come to see, however, that the inclusion of “multiple perspectives” without sufficient attention to power, intent and privilege makes it challenging for history teachers to honor their moral imperative. 

Talking about perspectives without talking about power can imply an equivalency of viewpoints that brings with it a very real danger of erasing historical injustice. Do we consider the perspective of the slave owner and the enslaved person to be equally valid?

Instead of multiple perspectives, I use “narrative,” which we can define as “perspective + power.” Using a narrative means interrogating the story and the storyteller, shifting perspective but also opening us up to questions of authority, power and control. Narrative offers us a way to frame history as multiple stories while also allowing us to talk about right and wrong. Without it, we risk producing relativists who tolerate all views and critique and interrogate ---none.

I acknowledge the fact that I want students to think how I do, as an expert in historical thinking. I also want them to learn how to build reasoned and well-articulated arguments. So, I think it’s okay to recognize and teach from one’s own bias and preconceptions provided that a) there is room for dissension and debate and b) students are assessed on the clarity of their thinking, soundness of their arguments and judiciousness of their evidence—and not their parroting of my ideas.

As students improve their discussion and argumentation skills, they will inevitably challenge each other. At other times, students will introduce ideas and ways of thinking that do not mesh with our subjective interpretations of the issue. Preparing for these moments means knowing what types of comments we as teachers will let slide and what we will flag as unacceptable. This means thoroughly assessing our own “red lines,” those areas that we will not permit students to enter.

My goal is for my students to learn to think how I think but not necessarily what I think. Inevitably, they may reach conclusions similar to my own, but the process of developing historical thinking skills is more important than whether or not they agree with me.