EDUCATED HISTORICAL AWARENESS

Lecture for Flemish history teachers at the Catholic University of Brussels, October 17th 1998

This nineteenth century engraving shows the Serbian nobleman Milos Obilic attacking the Turkish sultan Murad. It happened on June 28th, 1389, the day before the historic battle of Kosovo. Obilic had gone to the enemy camp, all by himself, with the pretext of surrendering to the Turks. It was the only thing he could do. The scoundrel Vuk Brankovic, one of the Serbian prince Lazar's cousins, had been accusing him of treason. There was only one way left for Obilic to prove that not he was the scoundrel, but Brankovic.

 Having arrived in the Turkish camp, Obilic did not surrender, but performed his last heroic act. He killed the sultan, a crime for which he would of course pay with his own life. Obilic had sacrificed himself for his people. He had become a martyr in order to prove that he did not commit treason. His sacrifice, however, was in vain. The next day, June 29th 1389, the Serbs lost the battle of Kosovo. The road into Europe lay open to the Turks. Centuries of 'oppression' would be the result for the Serbs and the other christians at the Balcans.

Obilic's act is symbolic for the role which has been played for centuries by the Serbian people. They sacrifice themselves defending christian civilization. They are the martyrs, but no one seems to understand them. And now they are threatened by NATO bombings - even though they are having the best intentions for christian Europe. The whole world is against us, we must protect ourselves - the words of a young Serb nationalist, quoted in a Dutch weekly magazine (De Groene Amsterdammer, June 1st 1998).

This is the Serbian version of what happened in 1389 and what these past events mean for the present. The story of the hero Obilic and the scoundrel Brankovic can be found in any Serbian history book. The battle of Kosovo is solemnly commemorated each year at June 29th. In 1989, 600 years after the battle, Yugoslav president Milosevic announced at the commemoration that he would put an end to Kosovo's autonomy. This country had belonged to Serbia's heritage for centuries. The struggle with the muslims for the possession of this land which started 600 years ago, is still going on.

The stories about the 14th century events in Kosovo most certainly belong to a 'common frame of reference' in Serbian society. 'Serbian society' values the importance of this story being stamped upon the memory of every Serbian child. As a natural consequence, Serbian history education performs this duty. Serbian commentators and columnists can freely use the names of Obilic and Brankovic to compare modern heroes and scoundrels with these models. Everyone immediately knows what they are talking about. The Serbian people seem to have a well developed historical awareness. They know the facts about their history better than most people in the more developed western European world, better than the Dutch for instance, who seem to neglect their history education.

Is this the way in which history educators should judge these facts? Or should they decide that something is seriously wrong with historical awareness in Serbia? Is historical awareness the natural product of knowing the stories from the past which have been handed down traditionally from one generation to the other for centuries? What indeed do we mean by historical awareness? When we consider the way in which Serbs handle the stories about their past and the conclusions that they arrive at, we condemn their conduct. Their thorough knowledge of their past apparently isn't the only thing we value. We consider the way in which they handle the stories about their past at least as important, maybe more important than historical knowledge by itself. The way in which Serbs compare a battle which took place 600 years ago with present events in Kosovo is in our view historically unacceptable. Knowledge about the past, we must conclude, does not automatically produce historical awareness. The stories themselves are not that important, but the way in which we use them is something that really matters. Fot this reason I prefer to speak about educated historical awareness rather than just historical awareness. It is obvious that some awareness about the past is present in any human being. No one can live without memory. Everyone knows stories about times gone by. The greater part of this awareness about the past, however, is spontaneous and uneducated. This spontaneous and uneducated awareness is shaped by tradition, stories, legends and myths. Important events very often acquire mythical proportions in popular tradition, especially when a struggle between 'good' and 'evil' is involved. One needs to think only of the mythical proportions of the image of a fairly recent past: the second world war. Heroes and scoundrels, good and evil are abundantly present in the popular image of what happened in the period 1939-1945. If history teachers would do nothing but tell stories about the past, they would add hardly anything to the kind of knowledge young people draw from popular films, TV programs, and comic books. All of this is 'uneducated historical awareness'. It is the way in which history treats people who have not been trained to consider things at a critical distance and from a more philosophical point of view. Dealing with the past in an uncomplicated, unsophisticated way easily makes people liable to propaganda and indoctrination. History education, or rather: story-telling about the past, guarantees nothing. On the contrary: it might be used for highly undesireable purposes.

In a democratic society, history education has a task different from just telling stories about the past. The awareness of 'days gone by' which is a spontaneous awareness in any human being, should be shaped. The study of history should be a serious, conscious and systematic way of thinking, in stead of a passive and naive consumption of stories told by someone else. A way of thinking which should be acquired and developed to a more perfect level. Leraning history could be compared by the way in which young people learn their mother tongue. Everyone learns how to understand and speak a language outside school, in a spontaneous manner. It is the task of schools to teach children how to read and write and how to handle their mother tongue in a more perfect way. In schools students learn the rules of grammar. The spontaneously developed 'awareness of language' becomes more sophisticated. Part of this consists of learning 'more language' (i.e. more words, words that do not belong to their normal vocabulary), but a great deal of teaching is devoted to the structures and rules which can be distinghuished behind the words. Students should develop into independent users of language.

If we compare this to history education, we could state that education should partly consist of 'more history' (more facts, more stories, which do not belong to the normal 'vocabulary' about the past), but a great deal of history lessons should be devoted to the 'grammar of history', to the structures and rules which are necessary to speak the language of the past in sophisticated way. Students should develop into independent users of the language of history.

This does not mean that story telling should disappear from history education. On the contrary: the first access to the world of the past is meeting with 'living' persons, or persons made as much 'alive' as possible. Stories are an excellent tool which can be used for this purpose, not to mention pictures, movies, etc., either authentic or fictional. But the lesson is only beginning when the story is finished. Anyone who does not teach a lesson after the end of his 'story' (or video, or whatever) is a very irresponsible history teacher. Some teachers say that they are just telling stories to make their students like history as a subject, and that the stories themselves (as many stories as possible) are the right tool to this effect. But in fact, they are not teaching any subject at all. They are sending their students unarmed into the wilderness of myths, legends, propaganda, prejudice and error.

Now, which are the features of an educated historical awareness? How do we perceive that someone has been learning 'history' in school? It follows from the first past of this lecture that knowledge of facts cannot be the decisive characteristic. Facts may be remembered arbitrarily as data without any meaning. Stories may be connected with poorly argumented interpretations. Facts may be placed in a one-dimensional context only, excluding every possible different view. In all of these cases, we cannot speak of an educated historical awareness, however large the amount of facts and stories remembered. If a student does not comprehend that 'truth' is a matter of interpretation and that truth is at least many-sided, a fundamental element in his history education is lacking. Therefore it is an error to think that 'everything starts with the knowledge of facts' - as many history educators still think. Selection of facts in itself is interpretation already. Understanig the nature of facts maybe more important than the knowledge of a large amount of facts without realizing what they actually are.

An educated historical awareness is built up in five steps:

1 Questioning The first step is developing an inclination to ask historical questions about the world which surrounds us. To be able to do this, students need to consider things in the world around us as historical phenomena: things that have originated at a moment in time (how long ago?), that were founded by some people with some purpose (by whom, with what purpose?), or things that have resulted more or less coincidentally from the course of events (how can I explain these?). To be able to ask valuable questions, students must be knwledgeable and skilled. The must be able to formulate useful, 'researchable' questions. They must be able to deduice questions about relevant parts of a problem from a main question. They must be trained in categories which are used to describe societies, categories like politics ('how were decisions taken, who was in control?'), economics ('how did people provide for their material needs?'), society ('how did the rich and poor, or men and women, or different races, live together and how did they treat each other?'), culture ('what did people believe in and what sort of things did they consider beautiful and valuable, or worthless and ugly?'), etc. To be able to ask this kind of question in relation to a specific context, one needs to know some facts, but especially categories and concepts.

2 Establishing facts The second step does not only consist of learning certain facts, but especially learning what facts are. Facts are statements about reality based on reliable evidence. Students must be aware that things cannot be considered facts for the simple reason that they are printed in books or papers, or told by teachers. They should learn that evidence never 'speaks for itself', that it is always interpreted and interpretations depend on the questions that are asked. Only the combination of evidence and a person asking questions results in establishing facts. The evidence and the person asking questions are equally important. For this reason, every interpretation is personal and biased to a certain extent. Every story could have been told in a different way. This awareness is crucial. Some history teachers nowadays spend a lot of time teaching their students the methods and skills needed for judging the reliability and representativity of evidence. I wonder whether all of this is very useful and I doubt whether students younger than (say) 15 can do anything worthwhile using these skills. The awareness that every story could have been told in a different way is enough. It is also crucial.

3 Comparing and arranging To be able to interpret facts correctly, they should be connected with categories more or less familiar. Something totally unknown can only be understood by comparing it with a familiar phenomenon. The first question is this respect is: What does it belong to? Is this something political, economic, social or cultural? Have I seen something like this before? What is different about this? Is it unique? Can I compare this with something from the present world. If not, why is it different? The purpose of all these questions is categorising, answering the question 'What does it belong to'? This is necessary to be able to build up a systematic body of knowledge. This is not specific to history, other subjects must answer similar questions. Specific to history is that it deals with different periods. An important way of categorising is therefore a more specific question: To what period does this belong? Comparing phenomena from different periods is an imprtant element in debeloping historical awareness. Arranging and categorising sould be a students' activity - arrangements of facts in categories and periods should therefore not be presented by teachers in the 'correct' way. Students should be able to categorize new facts with which they are confronted, also outside school. To be able to compare and arrange facts, a student needs orientational knowledge as a frame of reference. This is knowledge in the main categories and periods, things like 'there has been a Roman Empire, and this was so and so long ago, and the period after that is called Middle Ages. Orientational knowledge could be compared with the knowledge one needs to be able to read maps. One should know that the north is usually at the top, one should be aware of the implications of scale, one should be able to recognize the basic outline of continents and countries. But a map crowded with data is difficult to read, and definitely useless as a frame of reference to be remembered. Orientational knowledge can only be useful if it is activated time and again. This means that the historical data that we want our students to remember must be those that can be used (and will be used!) as af frame of reference. This frame of reference must be a limited one, without much detail. It must be applied several times. This is the problem of traditional history education: many facts are taught only once, and remembered only once for one test paper. Students are bound to forget these, and the result of history education in that case is nothing, not even a limitred frame of reference. It is like trying to learn and remember a map full of detailed information. The basic outline remains hidden.

4 Explaining After questioning, establishing facts (as answers to questions) and arranging them into categories and periods, the fourth step is explaining. Why did things happen the way they happened? What were the causes and consequences? We can distinguish again between 'educated' and 'uneducated' explaining. It is common knowledge to argue in terms of causes and consequences. When an accident happens, we want to know the causes in order to prevent future accidents. This is 'uneducated' explaining; if students apply this kind of explanation to history, they do not show an 'educated historical awareness'. They should apply some basic rules for historical explanation, such as:

• No monocausal explanations. We can never argue that one particular thing was the cause of something else. Historical reality is a more complex one. There is always more than one thing that could be identified as a cause. An important question in this respect is, whether some cause has been decisive.
• No determinism. Determinism is the idea that a certain cause always results in the same consequence, something like: if water is heated to 100 øC, it will start boiling, provided that the air pressure is 1 atm. Such a relation between cause and consequence hardly ever exists in history, and if it exists, it is usually something a very minor matter which is explained. An important quewstion in history always is: could the same cause have resulted into something different? In this respect it is interesting to study the unrealized possibilities of the past. Could Hitler have won the war? Was the Seciond World War inevitable after the harsh conditions of the Versailles Peace Treaty? Asking these questions is of course much more interesting and worthwhile than presenting the 'correct answers' in the way in which this is often done in history lessons.
• Be aware of consequences that were not meant by any actor. Many developments in history are the result of coincidence. How can we explain such developments? Are human beings in control? How much influence can a single person have? The developments which led to the outbreak of World War I are a good example.
• The relative importance of causes (occasions, circumstances, decisive causes). The estimated relative importance of causes is also a matter of personal interpretation.

5 Imagining, valueing and judging The fifth step is one which involves all previous four. It is creating an interpretation, an 'image' of the past. Every human being creates an image of the past for him- or herself. An educated human being creates this image in a way which shows educated historical awareness, i.e. using the considerations mentined in the four previous steps. When the image is created, we should assess the value of what we have concluded. This is the most difficult part, but perhaps the most important as well. The following elements are involved:

• Values. What do we mean by values? They are things that people 'value', things for which people will sacrifice a great deal. If things are considered very valuable, people may be prepared to sacrifice a lot of many, their reputation, or even their lives for it.
• Which values do I consider important? Students should be aware of the things they value and how much they are prepared to sacrifice for these. They should also learn the origin of these values. Every human being belongs to a certain period, a certain culture and lives in the circumstances that belong to that period and culture. Values belong to one's culture, period, social position and circumstances.
• Which values were considered important by people in the past and in what respect do they differ from my own values? This question involves the important aspect of 'perspective'. Everyone is tied to a certain posistion in time, and - to a certain extent - a certain position in society. One's position in time is impossible to change, for travelling in time has not been invented yet. People form the past were as much tied to their position in time as we are to ours. This means that they did not have information at their disposal that we have. They could not predict the consequneces of their acts, but they had to act according to what they thought would be the best thing they could do. On the other hand, we necessarily see the past form the perspective of our own time. We cannot temporarily 'forget' the consequences that we know about. E.g.: people having to decide what their position would be towards fascism in the thirties, not aware of the fact that a secnd world war and a holocaust would follow, were as much tied to their position in time as we who know about the war and the holocaust. We have limited possibilities for 'standing in other people's shoes'. Eeven the greatest expert on the Middle Ages has 'never been there' and will always consider things form a present point of view.
• 'Position-boundedness' (Standortgebundenheit, a concept developed by the German sociologist Karl Mannheim) of others and yourself. Everyone is more or less tied to his or her position. How far we can 'move from our position' depends on the amount of information we have at our disposal. If people in the past did not have the information necessary to be able to see and judge things in a different way, e.g. our way, we cannot condemn them for that.
• The tension between explaining and judging. By explaining something we make things to a certain extent more acceptable. Fulling understanding the motives of an SS camp guard in a concentration camp nearly automatically results in a less negative judgement. Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner, understanding everything is forgiving everything, as the French say. Does this mean that we should not explain? But that is impossible. The tension between understanding and judging belongs to the discipline of history, and we should develop our own way of handling this problem.

 This page published in English, May 16th, 1999.