History is full of leaders who are now widely perceived by the public as villains, such as Hitler and Pol Pot, and social institutions that are now widely perceived as immoral, such as slavery and colonialism. But in their own time, these people and ideas enjoyed support from substantial segments of the population.
How do history educators, at the university level or in primary and secondary schools, teach the perspective of the side that is now considered repugnant by the modern mainstream? What does that lesson plan look like - do you assign texts arguing a point of view that the students will find objectionable? Can you take a neutral stance and withhold value judgments so the students form their own opinions from the given facts? Is there a risk that empathizing with the reasons why people at the time held those beliefs might actually sway some students into agreeing with them?
For example, this question is prompted by two controversies about history education and discourse in the US this week: the annual Columbus Day / Indigenous Peoples' Day debate about how to contextualize Christopher Columbus's achievements as an explorer vs. his subjugation of Hispaniola, and a news report that a Texas school district interprets the state's new education law as requiring teachers to present "other perspectives" about the Holocaust. How do you teach the perspectives of enslavers or Nazis?
I am a secondary school history teacher, so I hope I am qualified to answer this question to some extent.
Using Sources is the way to do this in my books. I apply the context of the time and then the students analyse and dissect Sources that I present. For example, when discussing slavery in the southern United States, we might look at a series of Sources that show the brutality of life on southern plantations (the 'Whipped Peter' photograph with some context is one that really piques their interest). However, I also include this Source below:
"The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care nor labor. The women do little hard work, and are protected from the [anger] of their husbands by their masters. The negro men and stout boys work, on the average, in good weather, not more than nine hours a day. The balance of their time is spent in perfect abandon. Besides, they have their Sabbaths and holidays."
Extract from Cannibals All! Written by George Fitzhugh, 1857.Context: Fitzhugh was a white southern sociologist who often argued that slaves were like children who needed protection and guidance. He was a vocal supporter of slavery throughout the mid-19th Century.
We then break down the Source and discuss why the author holds such views that seem so counter to the other Sources that we have seen from the same era. Depending on the students and the class, some handholding is needed and often I need to add guided questions to help students really think about why the author is saying or doing certain things. This allows them to understand that slave owners had reasons for their decisions, even if they may now (and even at the time) seem repugnant.
Can you take a neutral stance and withhold value judgments so the students form their own opinions from the given facts?
The reality is that regardless of how 'neutral' I am in the classroom, I'm the one that has made the lesson in the first place and have crafted the tasks and worksheets to achieve the learning outcomes I want from them. There is no neutral lessons in that sense. In the classroom, however, I present the information and allow them to come to their own conclusions - usually with some guidance or questions that might get them to think deeper about those conclusions. There are also moments when I have to explicitly say that this specific view is not acceptable anymore.
Good question. I think you need to consider that teaching history has several goals. 1) conveying content (the things that happened in the past) 2) imparting skills (reading critically, analyzing data, crafting arguments, writing/speaking effectively) 3) introducing students to historical debate.
I put 3 last because until graduate school this is arguably the least important skill taught by historical training. It is usually introduced as we train students to think critically about what historians say. That is do the arguments make sense based on the primary sources.
The issue you bring up is an important part of that kind of training, but I would push back slightly because most of the example you use aren't really areas of debate among scholars.
So to use the tangible example of Columbus. There is no current scholar that would claim Columbus was a great explorer, yes he was the first but his rational for reaching the Americas was based on faulty math even for the late 15th century. His actions on Hispaniola are not morally defensible, and even there he was not particularly unique in what he did. He copied earlier Castilian and Portuguese strategies used on the Canary Islands and Africa.
In short, there is no debate about Columbus on the terms you describe. Yes, earlier generations of scholar may have viewed him more positively but the state of the field has changed. If I wanted to impart that shift to students I could certainly assign readings from different eras to capture that shift, but pedagogically I would rarely do that unless I was teaching an upper level undergraduate class or graduate seminar.
In short, I am more likely to have students read about current debates rather than great shifts over time. An exclusively historiographical course would do as you suggest but those are relatively specialized and rare.
When I was a student, I did a traineeship at EuroClio, the European Association of History Educators. They were founded at the request of the Council of Europe. When they started in 1992, there were a lot of countries in Europe that were undergoing political transformation, whilst also dealing with inter-ethnic and inter-religious tensions and they would help local educators to write inclusive teaching material and provide (free) training for teachers throughout these countries.
They always started (and most likely still do) with a local team that was as diverse as possible so all voices were represented. This team was then paired with international specialists on didactics, text book writing, etc as well as teachers from previous projects who were or had been in a similar situation, knew the tensions, emotions and fear involved and how to overcome.
Obviously, these were all teachers that were willing to build bridges, but they too had fears, prejudice, anger, etc. So the first focus was to build trust within the team, but also to make sure that all the controversial and sensitive issues were discussed and not ignored. I talked to some teachers who were involved in projects like that, for instance a few teachers from Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) who wrote teaching materials about the joint history of the Social Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (same material for all countries, but in their own language/alphabet). The 2 Serbian teachers told me that the first meeting was in Croatia and they were driving to the meeting in the old car of one of them in the winter with horrible weather. They were so scared of what was going to happen. Would the others be willing to listen to them? Would they team up against them as the Serbians were considered to be the agressor by most other parties? They almost turned around 3 times, but everytime decided they had to at least try. And it wasn't easy and there was the occasional hostility, but they were heard and the trust was build.
At that time (2008), they had already started preparations for a new project to also write inclusive joined teaching material about the actual Yugoslav Wars and that resulted in the LHH project, Learning History that is not yet History. Here, teachers from BiH, Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro worked together to write non-biased free educational material. They have a website that is also in English, http://devedesete.net/
They have just started a new project with teachers from all former Yugoslav countries (BiH, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, North-Macedonia and Slovenia), LHH2.
The basis of EuroClio teaching material is always promoting critical thinking, multiperspectivity, mutual respect, and the inclusion of controversial issues. They use a lot of primary sources and challenge children to think about their own perspective and the perspective of the other. But the other basis is training the teachers. That same Serbian teacher who was talking about that first meeting, also told me how happy she was with all the didactics training she received. She used to just come into class and dictate the material and the students would write it down. That was how she was taught to teach and that was what she and all her colleagues did, even though they were not happy about it themselves. She happily applied the training she received from global experts on the latest insights on didactics and textbook writing in her own classroom and within months, every single one of her colleagues (not just other history teachers, all teachers) had asked her if they could observe a lesson, if she could help them to change their teaching, etc. And teachers from other schools started to approach her as well. She said that she and her colleagues were blooming like plants in the desert when it finally started raining again.
One of the experts that helped them was a teacher-trainer from Northern-Ireland. He had started as a teacher-trainer in the 1980s and each year had students that approved of political violence against the other side. And these were future teachers. So, he really understood the difficulties that these teachers were facing. Which really helped the local team, as it didn't feel like "people from Western-Europe who don't know what mutual hatred we have to deal with on a daily basis, but tell us how to do our job" but rather as "people who understand what we are facing, who treat us as equals, and give us tools and skills to build our own custom bridges"
On the website of EuroClio (https://www.euroclio.eu/) you can find a lot of free resources on this and many other projects. From teacher's guides and educational material to research.
I can also recommend https://contestedhistories.org/. This website is managed by the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation and EuroClio. The Contested Histories Initiative looks at controversial history in public spaces, for instance the statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia. On this website there is also a lot of information for teachers who are confronted with situations like these.
Interesting questions about the field of didactics I work in. I think it's more populary called instructional design in the US and has different roots and influences in the anglosphere compared to Germany.
Since I teach seminars about history and traditions for the German military, which naturally includes the world wars, war crimes and the East German history and reunification, I can give a perspective how history was taught in divided West and East Germany and nowadays in reunited Germany and especially the Bundeswehr.
So with regards to Germany, let's have a look first at teacher training and the educational system. Education is a matter of each individual federal state, so it differs in details across Germany.
However, all teachers in Germany have to study at a university to get a Master's degree in teaching and do a 2 year on the job training in a school afterwards. At university, they have to choose in which track of the German school system they want to teach, specialise in at least two subjects they want to teach and have to take seminars and lectures in didactics. The two/three subjects are often close to each other, so history teachers often also teach either German, English or political studies or they teach maths, physics and computer science. Besides their subjects, they also have to take didactics, which is usually divided in to general didactics and specialised didactics of their field. General didactics is about general theories and methods of learning and teaching which can apply to any field. The lectures usually start with an introduction of the psycholgy of learning theories (Constructivism, Cognitivism, Behaviorism, Chomsky and the competence discussion etc. pp.) and end with teaching methods like group projects, discussions and so on. Specialised didactics focuses on the didatical theories and methods of the subject. Teaching maths differs from teaching Russian and differs from teaching history. One didactical method that is in this way unique to history and political education/civics would be a visit of a concentration camp or another site of Nazi terror.
Besides history, WW2 and the holocaust is also a topic in other subjects, like social science, literature or music. As a pupil, I had to read and analyse Anna Seghers »The Seventh Cross« in German and watch the US movie in English. We analysed dating adverts from newspapers of the Weimar Republic, Third Reich, West and East Germany in social science and discussed »degenerate art« in musical studies and art studies. We also had the A4/V2 as a topic in physics, but that was probably only done because Mittelbau Dora was near by and our physics teacher had some of Werner von Brauns colleagues as professors in university.
How do you teach the perspectives of enslavers or Nazis?
By contextualising the sources.
Some days ago I answered a question about East Germany's own national identity where I gave a literature list and also some East German movies I use in my seminars. They are not only shown but contextualised by me and analysed by the audience.
The didactics and methods I use were only developed in West Germany beginning in the 1960s/70s. Up until then, history didactics in Germany was divided into the rather primitive normative method of memorising and reproducing knowledge for primary schools versus the more science orientated history taught at the upper track Gymnasium.
Only due to the societal change in the 1960s, reflexion became a major goal in history and teaching. Historical thinking came to the fore and teachers were tasked with also teaching theoretical reflections on historical thinking [1,2,3].
East Germany, on the other hand, never underwent this development. History in East Germany, both as a science and subject in schools, was a tool to strenghten and consolidate the »class consciousness« [7]. It was a propaganda tool for the government, so much that the East German government invested a lot into opinion research, which was used to enhance the propaganda effects of history lessons [8].
West German scientists already analysed the East German scienc of history in the 1970s and were well aware of the propaganda intentions behind it [10]
The demanded reflection on historical thinking can be achieved by various methods. One I use in aforementioned seminars about the East German identity is the analysis of movies [4,5,6]. First I have to find a suitable movie, which is not that complicated since the whole catalogue of East German movies is known and available through the DEFA-Stiftung. A foundation set up by the government of reunified Germany to preserve the tv and movie productions of East Germany. Many of those movies are still aired on German TV, so it's easy to get a copy. One movie I use is »Naked among Wolves«. It is predestined for several reasons. There are two movies available, one filmed in East Germany in 1963 following the Governments official interpretation of history and a newer movie made in 2015. Both are based on a book by Bruno Apitz, which was heavily edited in East Germany before being published and there is literature available about that editing process and the influence of the government on the development process [9].In the seminar I start with teaching the simple facts about the subject of the movie - how the concentration camp system in generaland Buchenwald in detail was organised and how it was freed. The East German government focused on the communist resistance and tried to ignore the involvment of the US military, which shows in the movies. The 1963 versions follows the official line and shows no US soldiers but the 2015 version shows them. I let my students compare both versions of the movie and finally let them do research about the facts behind the movies, f.e. how the camp resistance was organised and how the camp was freed. They usually do so in groups and have to do a presentation of their findings and especially on their sources and how they used them followed by a group discussion. Which can be really interesting or hard to moderate when different biographies and perspectives clash, e.g. older East Germans and West Germans.
With regards to that Texas school district, the Holocaust isn't controversial at all, there are more than enough credible sources about it. However, there are new challenges emerging with regards to holocaust denial. There is new antisemitism and holocaust denial on the rise among muslim immigrants and 3rd generation children of immigrants. There is research being done about it, but I as a lecturer have no idea how to combat it, since I have no real idea about islam, muslim antisemitism and how to reach them. There is also a discussion going on among immigrants and 3rd generation pupils about class trips to concentration camps. Some of them claim that it's not their history, since their grandparents only came here in the 1960s while other groups like f.e. Poles have a complete different perspective on the Holocaust [12].
Another research topic for me currently is the use of the media and social networks to prevent radicalising pupils and how to help de-radicalise them. One rather new phenomenon that I absolutely cannot stand are selfies made in concentration camps or memorials. Don't flex your handbag in front of the Auschwitz gate.