Motivated learners

E. Davis, “Learning by heart”. Image: Wikimedia

My oldest kid started middle school this year; he now has individual subject teachers instead of a single teacher covering everything. In general this is good, but it has also meant a sixfold increase in the early-year getting-to-know-you process. Each time a teacher asks, I try to give them some relevant details about his personality, strengths, weaknesses and so on. It’s also been interesting to hear what each teacher considers their role to be. There’s some variance.

For example, at first I thought it was a good sign that his history teacher made the following thesis statement: students don’t just study history to learn facts, because, “The experiences and ideas of people who came before us can help us think about the choices we make, the communities we build, and the kind of world we want to create today."

As someone who sees alarming historical parallels between contemporary society and the fractious period I studied in graduate school (England 1640-1675), I really appreciated his approach to the subject. In my reply, I tossed off some line about how I’m glad my kid is being encouraged to think this way, not least because of the “apparent national disinclination to learn the lessons of history.”

I nerd sniped myself. This line has since ricocheted around my brain, making me doubt a fundamental assumption that I’ve held for at least a few decades.

I meant my comment as an appeal to some kind of shared historical consensus. Tyranny is bad and comes to a bad end. Human rights will in general be expanded. Governing society by reference to theological strictures is counterproductive. Graft and dishonesty are worth condemning, even if prevalent. You know, real Obama 2008 shit. In my defense, I came to think about politics between about 1996 and 2008. The lessons of those years have also been, shall we say, varied.

But I’m not at all confident anymore that the lessons of history are as clear as I blithely assumed. Or rather, they’re clear to me, but I hadn’t appreciated just how niche that opinion is. What I thought of as “not learning the lessons of history” is probably better understood as "looking at history and seeing something completely different.” There are obviously plenty of people who look at history and find different lessons: Societies lose their identity as they become diverse. Economic markets are zero-sum. Crime can be punished out of existence. Take your pick. These lessons are wrong (yes, I still think that word is ontological, not descriptive), but students get their conclusions wrong all the time. There’s no longer a teacher to ask for a ruling.

I happen to think that the decadence of those opinions, the bald fact that they can only flourish in a society where basic needs are met, is a mark against them. But again, the mere fact of the variety is alarming.

This is, I hope, merely the result of becoming middle-aged. But I worry something else is afoot. The utter sneering contempt for learning, for consensus, for any kind of humility or judicious assessment or taste, the reduction of knowledge to leverage and power, seems different. I think there’s a whole class of powerful actors today who aren’t only uninterested in learning from history, they instead want to cite history to support whatever course of action they’ve set upon. Against that backdrop, I can’t decide if my son attending a history class with that grandiose mission statement is optimistic or delusional.

To paraphrase the Upton Sinclair quote: it’s hard to make someone understand something when their salary—and identity—depends on them not understanding it. Shall we try anyway?