‘Lies My Teacher Told Me’ and America’s Post-Truth Era
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
This is happening a lot among more than just historians and it's a serious problem. Some things are true and that has consequences. Ignored, reality will pass us by.
In the 1980s no one cared, because the discourse was purely academic in nature. By now postmodernism has gained widespread adoption in education, social sciences and political theory. And the citation from above is the direct result of that.
If not, that's a huge problem. If your philosophy/epistemology doesn't understand that some things are simply lies, and some statements are simply intending to lie, that leaves a huge vulnerability for liars to exploit.
Edit: The statement that contents are "political" is a classic unfalsifiable claim, thus is an invalid argument. Evidence demands counter-evidence.
Yeah we can agree that textbooks should not make objectively false statements, but that is not really the difficult part.
People don't want to own to what they did. Not individual criminals, not states, not governments, not religions. Especially not when there's financial consequences.
(but the fact that western governments also hide disgusting acts they committed does not change the fact that there is a serious scale difference)
Perhaps ironically, the best way to understand what Nazi Germany was trying to accomplish is to read what they wrote about it - which is pretty much tantamount to "teaching the Nazi narrative," isn't it?
WW2 looked very different from the perspective of each state actor. It even looked substantially different to a common soldier or citizen of each state than it did to the state's leadership.
The Nazi leadership wanted expansion of the German state to include all of Europe. Most of the Nazi leadership wanted to exterminate "undesirables" within the borders of that state as well - but to the German citizen drafted into the Heer in 1942, it was about keeping the Communists at bay, and as the war wore on, about keeping the advancing Red Army from raping and pillaging what they saw as their homeland.
Honestly, I don't know how we should teach it as a society. I know how I teach my kids - I give the best overview I can of the motives of each major state actor and then reference individual accounts of people living under the regime. I do my best not to assign right or wrong to their actions, excepting things that are obviously morally repugnant like the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the actions of Unit 731, and the Rape of Nanking.
This isn't accurate. As I understand it, the theory was that the state should control "the race". Which means that it would decide who has children with whom, control marriages, who educates them, how, where and why. In other words, control everyone, everything, to get a perfect society. The goal being improving/purifying "the race" further. The thing that makes it different from a bond movie is that it's not a singular "evil genius" type of guy but 20-30% of the population trying to do that.
I pity whoever had children in Germany in the 1930s because that must have been terrible, no matter how German you were. Granted, the experience was vastly different for Jews, but it wouldn't have been a good experience for anyone.
The "first" holocaust, so to speak, the beginning, was the state euthanizing psychiatric patients with no hope of recovery (real ... and imagined, like gays). Then they went after the long-term ill, like people in coma or with serious illnesses (this was before widely available antibacterial treatments so there was no shortage of such people), and generally everyone who was a burden, eventually including everyone who was perceived to not be 100% dedicated to the state, in the opinion of the idiot bullies that worked in the police and the various state services.
Like in the Soviet Union, what the Nazi state did was give people like teachers, police officers, army, gestapo (let's call it their FBI equivalent), ... absolute control over normal citizens. Needless to say, this power was not really used for the stated purpose, but to allow sadistic bullies to utterly control everyone around them. God help you if your kid did better in school than the assistant principal's kid. To let scared politicians torture 100 people to death because someone let their dog poop on their niece's law. To let moral busybodies in the state arrest all children and have them perform hard labor in a camp because there was a girl that got pregnant unmarried (Nazis arranged marriages), or had a kid with someone other than the arranged partner. To let bureaucrats take away children from their parents "because they didn't raise them right", and then (usually) torture those children (given the motivations of those people, like the assistant principal referenced above, I think you can "understand why" they would torture those children). To have the mayor declare that the fact that 10 people died from starvation because there's no food in any store, and it's the fault of that evil enemy, not the fault of him diverting all the food to a party in his garden for his wife's cat's birthday.
The thing people don't seem to understand is how the human mind works. Under such circumstances, you might expect people to revolt, but that didn't (and doesn't) happen. People wouldn't revolt, not even the Jews being deported. What do people do when they're tortured ? The vast majority ... try to join the torturers. That part is not different from the Taliban to the Soviets, to the Holocaust, except perhaps in scale and just how far they went.
That's why such a system can keep existing and continue itself. It's victims want to join, not revolt. That's why these systems can grow. In the Soviet Union, such a system existed for a further 30 years at least. Ask a few ex-Soviets, the bureaucrats were let loose there for much, much longer than in Germany.
The important thing to realize is that the US police/FBI/CIA/... contains many people that aren't all that different from their counterparts in 1930s Germany and, given the chance, they would do the same.
But of course, people have forgotten. We just need more laws, more powers, more investigations, to make society just and to make sure those damn rich bankers don't get away with everything, don't we ?
Not true, there are multiple instances of Jewish uprisings - most famously the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the Sobibor uprising and multiple others. They just lost.
By the way, why do you use the euphemism "deported"? They were murdered.
I guess I meant they first got deported, then murdered. This is also what it looked like where they lived. They were put on trains (and I would argue, things were rather clear from, say 1941 onward. "Wir haben est nicht gewusst" is bullshit). Before 1940 or so, it was only deportation. Later forced labor, then mass-murder. This was accepted and even assisted (e.g. the "Jewish councils") by perpetrators ... and by victims, and by wittnesses.
Please don't think that I intend to deny what happened, that is not at all what I intended. I guess I've just read the term deported many times online, and in movies. I feel somewhat ashamed that I do see what you mean complaining about that being a euphemism and I do apologize deeply. That was not clear to me, but it should have been.
No they didn't. They wanted to expand the German state to include areas with significant German population (Austria, Sudentenland, Elsass, Slovenia etc.) and then they wanted to expand the state eastwards into Poland and Western USSR for "Lebensraum".
Germany occupied France, Belgium, Denmark, Norway etc. for military strategic reasons. They had no plans of incorporating these countries in the Reich, which would be counter to the whole Nazi ideology of a German ethnostate.
You're right, I didn't differentiate between the areas they aimed to conquer for Lebensraum and the areas they intended to conquer for strategic purposes. Should I have? Why? Should I have gone so far as to mention that while they didn't intend to occupy Britain, they certainly intended to bomb them into submission?
"Nazi Germany wanted the German state to include all of Europe" is accurate, just incomplete. They also didn't intend to invade Switzerland or Sweden. They fought alongside the Finns for most of the war, until they fought against them.
Hell, you could even go so far as to color the actions of some of the German military staff as anti-Nazi even as they fought against the Allies - Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, for instance. Things like that are important pieces of information for historians and other interested people, but are they really important enough to cover in a high school history class?
Infinite nuance.
I find it interesting, even though I don't have the academic historical chops to independently assess its accuracy.
Example: In the episode called Miss Buchanan's Period of Adjustment, Gladwell explains that Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (the famous school integration case) had a severe consequence. It caused a large fraction of African American schoolteachers and educators to be thrown out of work. He points out that teaching was a major source of 1930s-1950s knowledge-work employment for African Americans was teaching in segregated schools. Quite a few Euro-American school boards obeyed the ruling admitting African American students, but did not employ the teachers from thew schools they left.
http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/13-miss-buchanans-per...
If schools deviate they risk losing funding...and frankly most teachers are happy to read from a script.
In fact, I would invite you to take a look at the common core standards for English/Language Arts. They are hardly a curriculum script. They offer significant flexibility and opportunity to individualize content for your teaching context. Despite all the problems and issues I face on an average day, being pressured to teach canned curriculum is not one of them.
The other unfortunate side of AP classes is that much of history classes is taught well before the AP class. I had 2.5 years of history in high school: One semester was a law education class, only offered to "advanced" students instead of geography (a real shame, as I think the class was one of the more helpful classes I took), one European history class, and one AP American History.
The American History class was the most interesting and probably the most free, actually. My particular class used a college-level book and the teacher would add in things that weren't covered by the book and she'd point out where the book might be misleading or wrong. That class was also where I was introduced to "The Jungle", "Grapes of wrath", and Malcolm X's biography.
I oddly don't remember as much about the actual test (it was 20 years ago), but it wasn't nearly the same as other standardized tests at the time. If I remember correctly, it was more based on thinking and processing history than memorizing facts.
Here's a listing of the tests given in VA... http://www.doe.virginia.gov/testing/sol/released_tests/index...
A significant portion of my family is made of teachers and this is not true at all. In healthy (most) schools, teachers have enough wiggle room to tell students "This portion of your textbook is wrong/biased in a weird way". In some cases, they may be prohibited from saying specific things and other oddities, often by old and angry boards of education or similar, but if an educator actually believes in the importance of teaching children, they will find a way to impart the needed knowledge.
You can easily see this in situations like how heavily underpaid teachers still go out and purchase their own supplies because the schools do not give them the tools to do their jobs. Many teachers go above and beyond what their contract states.
Remember that teachers have often seen multiple different education standards and decrees come and go, and therefore understand actually educating is more important than meeting the minimum standard
Demanding nuance of a particular kind in history pedagogy, as you see often these days, is just a bad-faith "isolated demand for rigor" that has the effect of privileging the worldview of those demanding the selective nuance.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands...
A bit more humble approach would do everybody much better, since every single country out there has done things to be ashamed of, or outright utterly horrible. Realizing you are not that much better than the other guy may bring some sense of equality that I don't see in current world (american life worth more than some other, modern colonialism done by former colonial powers including US, Russia and probably China, and so on and on).
History as remembered by the public is always going to be fragments made into a mythos. The problem is that some of that mythos defines the propaganda contours of the present, whether that's people saying the US civil war wasn't about slavery or whether it's Brexiteers saying that "no deal will be fine because we survived the second world war".
On another note, it is interesting to see the flag has the gold trim around it in this shot.
I found it offensive, but at this point in my college career the fight had been abraded out of me. I tried doing the assignments dispassionately, writing things like "Taking for granted that there is an omnipotent entity at the helm of the universe, I think the author contends that <rest of my answer>".
I'd get my paper back with every secular apologism scribbled out in red, and comments on the margins that were like "JESUS LIVES" and other such academically cool business. Also he was giving me D's. This was a state school, not a religious one.
Having fought 25% of my professors that ended up being lunatics no appetite remained in me to take this one to the tribunal. So, I salvaging my grade by feigning conversion. I started writing incomprehensibly unrelated answers to short essay questions. A question might read something like "In what way was Dostoevsky influenced by stoicism." I would answer "God is great!" My reward was A's.
I no longer find anything within a normal distribution of human arch-types strange.
At every given point minorities have faced huge resistance for the simplest of things and basic human equality and dignity - and I suspect every adult educated citizen knows this - and the effects of these continue to fester. It's not 'complexity' if you historically discriminate against people they will suffer and there will be far reaching multi generational consequences. This can't be wished away in denial, how can a problem remain unsolved after 200 years?
We hold others coming out of hundreds of years of colonialism to standards we often to do adhere to ourselves and which these societies lacking development, wealth and time have not had an opportunity to develop.
This becomes another way to not shine the torch on ourselves. Redlining, housing policies, access to education, employment, credit, segregated living and education and the police & justice system will not pass scrutiny. And this has so far escaped global attention and censure but at some point the USA as a whole will be held to account for the condition of the minorities. And at that point the depravity of Pioneer and Volker funded studies by people like Charles Murray - whose work continues to be used even on an educated forums like this regularly, revisionist history and blaming others will not hold because we do not accept these excuses from other countries we hold to account.
Often, uncomfortable truths are avoided where contemporary standards differ wildly from a historical context. This is unfortunate because students do not understand that "normal" changes over time. This is probably most pronounced wrt race relations (e.g. what passed as normal race relations in 1860 throughout the entire US would be considered outrageously racist now...or the idea that in 1943 Americans sympathized with imprisoned Japanese citizens, the normalcy of anti-Semitism throughout most of history etc).
Instead children are taught to view the past through the standards and tastes of the present, and history becomes a matter of making moral judgements and shaping present morality (a valuable function but not the point of history). But indeed even our study of history will one day make great history...what happens when history is written by people who have never had to kill to survive?
It is good to understand the most different things, either to avoid them and their root cause, or to adopt the things people in history have done better than us. History repeats itself :D
There were people back then who thought it was an outrage too. Maybe you should be more uncomfortable with the past.
The common meme that the vast majority of people in the antebellum south thought slavery was OK is a great example of this. It doesn't even pass the smell test unless you either don't have a good sense of just how many people were enslaved at that time and place, or you don't think slaves count as people.
That isn't to say that the morals of the people dictating how society worked weren't different at the time, just that getting the phrasing right does matter.
Even that is a somewhat controversial statement - as the author mentioned, historians (or anyone who is interested in and studies history) are apt to bring in nuance. From my understanding from reading the correspondence and journals of people in that era, people in the antebellum South weren't "OK" with the institution of slavery to the same degree. Some thought it was wrong but the most practical option, some thought it was abhorrent, some had their opinions colored by their own fortunes being tied closely to it. Some where abject racists even by the standards of the time.
It was a controversial and nuanced issue at the time... like every other political issue in the public arena.
You negate your own point when the second clause clearly implies that you're still applying the fashionable standards of today.
To demonstrate how the future may be different, you need to apply different standards. The future may well consider today's environmental degradation as simply a necessary step to the glorious future they live in, and be amused at the parochialness of the people of the time who were worried about it. They could use the metaphor of an egg; shortly before the chick hatches, the egg environment is getting pretty nasty, full of waste products that have nowhere to go. The chick can project that death is certainly around the corner if they don't stop growing soon. But it can't stop growing; it must hatch.
(Before you go "But jerf...!" and start trying to tear that metaphor apart, bear in mind I'm writing from the perspective of an already-glorious future here, not claiming it is absolutely something true of the present.)
Another heterodox idea I've considered is that the future may well mock us for our concern over the environment when the real threat was technological tyranny the whole time, except the tyranny probably wouldn't let alone learn that much about the present time.... But the general idea holds; there are plenty of future threats that may turn out in the end to be far more dangerous than the environment and for it to have been a near waste of time in the end to put so much effort into the environment instead of dealing with $THREAT.
To get here, I'm also projecting into the future the subconscious idea that most of us carry that there is something inevitable about the way the future went and that somehow people should have known. A modern example of this is that it's really easy to look at history and say Y2K was overblown and everybody should have known it. But at the time, it was a rational fear, and the reason why it didn't happen is that people worked really, really hard. So in the future, if some other disaster overtakes humanity, I fully expect the future to project back on to us a belief that we should in the here-and-now already know about this threat and have been dealing with what seems to them to be patently obviously a bigger deal than the environment.
In the real here-and-now, where the future is not known, taking good care of the environment is a rational move. But in the future they may really be cursing us for not throwing billions of dollars at friendly AI. Or whoknows what.
This mythos is playing out now in the Brexit debate, where because nothing too bad happened in y2k everyone who makes projections about the likely bad impact of "no deal", including the government's own preparedness staff, are dismissed as "scaremongering".
History becomes propaganda unless you watch it very carefully.
The future may well consider today's environmental degradation as simply a necessary step to the glorious future they live in, and be amused at the parochialness of the people of the time who were worried about it.
I'm doubtful about this outcome, though. If we do significantly degrade the environment, and even if the degradation was arguably necessary, I'm doubtful that "the glorious future" will judge us kindly.
Can you think of cases where current popular sentiment is similarly charitable toward the past? Overall, I think we are quite morally critical of the past, and not very accepting of the tradeoffs that were considered necessary at the time.
Whatever the real outcome is going to be, it is likely that you'd be doubtful of it, though. People's track records on predicting the future weren't all that great even before tech took off on its probably-only-sigmoid-but-still-kinda-exponential-right-now curve.
"Can you think of cases where current popular sentiment is similarly charitable toward the past?"
It would be very hard. I am of the opinion that our current culture is excessively cut off from the past. While not every culture in the world necessary did things like ancestor worship (an extreme of past honoring), our culture is historically very unusual in its outright contempt for the past. And it makes me rather uncomfortable in a lot of ways because I think the 20th century is replete with too many examples of cultures going full on "let's start from a blank page and create the future that should exist!" and failing... several million bodies later.
I find myself wondering how much of it has been the natural severing of experiences due to the aforementioned changing tech (how can I emotionally attach myself to great-great-grandpa's experiences, when he lived his entire life on a farm, hardly moved from his village, and couldn't even imagine the job I currently have, etc. [1]), and how much of it is social engineering by people who essentially don't want you to find out just how many current political ideas have actually already been tried and failed, utterly and horribly. At the same time, in a lot of ways, I think we've changed less than we think, and our contempt for the past may well be one of those things that the future will have contempt for us for. For instance, it's obvious that we believe in many ways that we don't need "privacy" anymore, but it's not hard to see the current furor around social media as the beginning stages of laboriously recreating the need for privacy from scratch. It will be a different idea of privacy than what we had before, but having to tweak the lessons of old is something every generation has to do. How much pain could we have saved ourselves, though, had we tweaked our ideas of privacy instead of throwing them out entirely, only to rediscover them? (And that's before the totality of what the social media giants are doing has really come out and penetrated into the body politic. I suspect social media's troubles have just begun.)
[1]: Not just guessing that, by the way. That's what my family's genealogy has turned up. Seems like they moved maybe once in their lifetime, but certainly my ancestors were not travelers. My grandfather had enough of a hard time understanding my interests; I would appear all but an alien to my great-great-grandfathers.
Pollution and climate change are killing millions. For anyone in the glorious future looking back, I hope they will not be amused at how disturbing that is to us, but instead think, "yeah that was really terrible, thank goodness we got through it".
How emotional are you about the deaths of Roman soldiers in their fight against Carthage?
If you claim anything other than almost total emotional detachment, let me pre-emptively say that I straight up don't believe you, and think you're just saying it for dialectic purposes for the narrow purposes of winning points in this particular discussion, but that in all likelihood it will over a decade before this topic even crosses your mind again, barring perhaps memories of this conversation. Nobody cares. Nobody has the emotional capacity to care that much, because there's too much history, and too much tragedy in it.
No, future humans aren't going to be wringing their hands about whatever horrors we may have suffered. There's a certain amount of evidence that WWII has already passed beyond the cultural event horizon where almost anybody has any deeply felt emotional reaction to reading about it, despite the fact its vets still live among us.
(Also, this is very much exactly the sort of "but jerf!" I was talking about.)
(Also, HN fancies itself rather smart but I gotta say, having discussed this sort of thing now twice in the past couple of days, it does not seem to be populated by people who have any ability to pull themselves out of modern fashions, even hypothetically, even for the duration of a single message. The prospect that people of the future aren't going to look back on us as the Enlightened Ones who had all the answers seems to be something not very many people here can even begin to think. Well... I'll be sure to bring that up with the future when I meet it.)
But I'm sure you have your reasons for approaching history- and today's issues, for that matter- the way you do.
I doubt we would be judged over nonrenewable usage for advanced at the time tech if it takes say fifteen PHDs to understand how to fabricate a biodegradable future smartphone from say genetically modified algae based nanotech wafers that are subjected to a one hundred and fifteen step process.
For example: It is normal for low-paying jobs in the US to require drug tests, even though there are folks that think this is outrages and could even be harmful. All it really takes is enough folks doing the act or for such things to remain a legal part of being able to do some jobs.
Knowing what was normal - widespread, encoded in law, and other such things - is part of understanding what the struggle was all about. Normal doesn't equal correctness, just what was average and widespread at the time.
And that feedback is just from the States. Other countries and regions are different. Maybe here 18 is a magical age where you become an adult but in the far East its 16. In Amazonia it is 13. (I just made those numbers up, I do not know).
Makes you wonder, what is normal or moral to me that is just learned behavior and not really normal or moral?
> 13
This stuff depends on place as well as time.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1021569/Great-B...
[1] https://www.infoplease.com/us/marital-status/median-age-firs...