The Importance of Questions

Today’s topic in my historiography class was supposed to be causation – why does stuff happen? But we got astray, because the chapter on causation in our textbook started off with a riff on the importance of questions, which led to a discussion of bias. Most people think of bias as someone having an axe to grind or some product to sell. We see it every day, from politicians to advertisers. We think ourselves pretty savvy, snickering at the blurbs on movie ads from reviewers no one has ever heard of, sneering at the half-truths from the politicians we love to hate. But seeing bias on that level is trivial – any five year old can spot the obvious stuff.

I routinely get book reviews from students telling me that the author was “objective and unbiased.” What they mean is that the author was measured in tone, neither praising the subject at hand to high heavens nor demanding its damnation. Most scholarly authors of course don’t do that – we got that beaten out of us in grad school. But bias very much remains. The place where bias is most influential is not in our adjectives but in our questions. It is when we decide what to write about, what to research, what questions to ask, that our presuppositions become clear. If I bother to write a book called Religion in America, I am asserting that religion in America is important and worth researching. You may say that of course it is, but note I have not written a book called Atheism in America, or Humanism in America. Indeed, Prentice Hall publishes a textbook called Religion in America – there is no corresponding title on atheism (PZ Meyers might want to look into that).

So if you really want to know where bias lies in academic or journalistic circles, don’t just look at what is written, think also about what is not written. Frank Rich’s new book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina makes exactly this point. In the run up to the Iraq war, the information was out there that the intelligence for WMDs in Iraq was weak and shoddy. Most of the media, the Knight-Ridder papers being an exception, just weren’t asking the right questions. Indeed, the White House was in the same boat. They focused on asking what evidence there was for WMDs in Iraq, and vacuumed up every scrap they could find. They didn’t ask the opposite question - what evidence is there against the existence of WMDs in Iraq? This is how the CIA got caught flatfooted by the collapse of the Soviet Union – our agents and analysts studied the ways the USSR was powerful and dangerous, not the ways in which it was a house of cards. Once again we didn’t ask the right questions. Please, before we start bombing Iran, could somebody start asking the right ones?

As Goes Billings, So Goes the Nation (I Hope)

I’m shocked, really. What is there to say? Students are apparently knocking down the door at Montana State University-Billings to become history majors. Someone find out what’s in the water in the dorms and send some of it my way – we could use it!

Graduates Who are Not Ready for College

I’m a bit late posting on this, but there was very interesting article in The New York Times yesterday concerning the number of students at junior colleges who required remedial work. This isn’t just a problem for two-year schools, as this problem also appears in four-year schools. Many students who graduate from high school are shocked to find that their skills in writing, reading, and math are not sufficient for college work. The article points out that some of the students who need remedial work are people who got good grades, even honors, in grade school. What’s going on here?

There are some obvious possible answers. Grade inflation, coupled with a lack of rigor, would be obvious suspects, and undoubtedly these play a factor. But there are some other factors I think are at work here. One is the increased emphasis in our education system on standardized testing. Teachers and school systems increasingly find that their livelihoods and their funding depend on how students perform on these tests. Let me tell you – if you told me my paycheck depended on how well students were doing on a particular test, I’m going to teach that test, probably to the exclusion of everything else. Students whose education revolves around learning these tests do not get the kind of well-rounded education required to develop the critical thinking skills that are needed for college work, which is probably one of the things that is hurting them.

The other thing I think that is happening here is that it is my experience that students do not read enough. Even good students are not reading much for pleasure now, and they read newspapers less and less. Yes, they’re on-line and are “txt msgng” each other like mad, but not enough to enable them to develop strong vocabularies, good critical thinking skills, or a broad cultural knowledge. I’m not sure what the answer is here, but in the short run at least, colleges need to put ever more emphasis on reading and writing. This may seem obvious, but I think we’re up against something critical.

If I were the curriculum god, I would put every student in a reading and writing seminar every semester, with a reading list for the whole institution that every student would be expected to finish before graduation. This is not a call to teach all the Dead White Males – I’m less concerned about the precise works that are being read, more concerned that the process of reading and analysis is taking place, and that students and professors can rely on a common set of cultural references from which to do analysis. If I were the curriculum god.

Making the Elephant Disappear

There's a new history curriculum for grade schools in China, and it has a few obvious omissions:

Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao Zedong only once — in a chapter on etiquette.

The current regime has long since jettisoned most of Mao's ideology, though they are not ready to denounce his atrocities. So they've settled on an oldie but goody - they're going to ignore him. And if this policy remains in place, Mao will fade from Chinese consciousness. This may seem ludicrous. Mao's legacy is ubiquitous in China - how could he be forgotten? But it's easy enough - my students today, born on average in the mid-1980s, not only do not remember Ronald Reagan - many have never heard of him. History, besides the things I listed in the previous post, is what we choose to remember. Those on the right who complain about an overemphasis on minority history in grade school curriculum, or who say there's too much talk about slavery, Indian removal, or the struggles of the early industrial working class, think that these things are unimportant in large part because they don't know much about them. They have, through the choices of their teachers and their own choices in reading, been exposed to a version of history that marginalizes these issues. When they are confronted with a different version of U.S. history, they see it as being incorrect. It is not what they "know" to be correct. If the current curriculum changes remain in place in China long enough, in a generation or so we'll be faced with a nation that "knows" that the legacy of Mao - who? - is trivial.

It's really that simple to remake the past. If you control the conversation about the past, you can turn the past into anything you want. You can even make Mao disappear.

Thinking Like an Historian

I started my historiography class today. I announced to the students that I would teach them how to think like an historian. Tall order – but doable. First of all, it’d better be doable, or my job as a history professor is rather pointless. But doable also because I have seen it happen. The secret is not a hard one, though one it took me a couple of semesters of teaching classes like this to catch on to. You can tell them the steps of critical analysis from an historian’s point of view all day long: “Examine the kinds of sources the author uses; think about the kind of language the author uses to describe different subjects; think of these two different books as conversation – are they arguing, saying the same thing, what?” And many more such questions. You can tell them to ask these questions all day long, all semester long, and you won’t get much of anywhere. You have to show them. You have to lead them by the hand, example by example, until it sinks in. With some, it’s a slow osmosis, while for others, it just clicks one day, and you can see the wheels suddenly start to turn. Anyway, I plan to post on some of these issues in coming weeks. Blogging about historiography – yeah, that’ll get me to the top of the Technorati rankings!

High priced textbooks

The Detroit Free Press had a story yesterday on the problem of high priced textbooks and some of the ways students are trying to deal with it. There are some retailers, notably online ones, that are trying to capitalize on this crisis, but the root problem remains. And a crisis it most certainly is. When I was an undergrad, back in the late 80s, my most expensive textbooks were those big fat books for chemistry and calculus (I may be an historian now, but my first undergrad major was electrical engineering). At that point, those books ranged from $50 to $70, and I only had to buy one or two of those - most books were half that much. My most expensive book bills were $120-$150 a quarter, and once I got past those big auditorium classes, my book bill dropped below $100/quarter. The textbook I assigned in my World Civ I class (Stone Age to Counterreformation) this fall, a paperback half volume (containing the first 23 chapters of the 44-chapter hardback version) is $87 from Amazon. I'm sure our book store charges a few dollars more. At those prices, a student can easily have a $400 or $500 textbook bill each semester. There's a reason some of my students don't buy their books. What happened?

To try to entice professors to order them and students to read them, publishers have filled books with huge amounts of color, images, and all kinds of features. They've also invested heavily in online materials, and textbooks increasingly come with CDs or passwords for online access. Some of the online stuff is useful - I find using the Internet is an easy and cheap way to give my students access to primary documents, though I don't need an expensive publisher’s site to do that. Many things are online already. The Internet History Sourcebooks Project is a good place to look for them. All those bells and whistles are distracting, too. Try reading one of these textbooks - all the inserts, images and maps have become too much, making it hard for the eye to follow the text, for the reader to know what they are supposed to be reading. Some of this kind of thing is good, but there is a limit. They are no longer books that you read. They've become more a hybrid cross between a book and an online newspaper - vaguely narrative, yet jumpy and episodic, easily leading you in ten different directions at once and thus leading you nowhere. I'm sorely tempted to get out of the game altogether and just assign some cheap classics, the kind of things you can get for a few bucks - maybe Sun Tzu's Art of War for China, and The Iliad for the West. Or I could take Jonathan Reynolds’s experiment to its obvious conclusion and have students bring whatever old World Civ book the could find cheap somewhere. Could make for interesting class discussions.

The Decline of the West

There’s a great but disturbing op-ed in the Washington Post today about the poor vocabulary of college students. Michael Skube, who teaches at Elon University in North Carolina, laments that his students don't know "impetus," or "brevity," or, for that matter, "novel."

How does one explain the inability of college students to read or write at even a high school level? One explanation, which owes as much to the culture as to the schools, is that kids don't read for pleasure.

You may be thinking you've never heard of Elon and it must be a lousy school. No, it's a small, quality liberal arts college. I actually interviewed there once and was quite impressed. The fact is, students don't read any more. Heck, I have students who, largely for financial reasons, don't even buy their textbooks. And their lack of reading limits not only their vocabulary, but their critical thinking skills. I'm certain that this has a lot to do with why the increasingly conservative media gets away with so many lies and distortions. People who don't read will not develop the skills needed to see through the mendacity. It makes them terrible students and poorly informed voters. And I don't have a clue what to do about it.

Exam desperation

I don’t teach science, but the history equivalents of these answers have crossed my desk before.