Over at the blog of The Historical Society, Randall Stephens has some interesting thoughts about memorization and the study of history.
I am sure I am not the only history professor who tells my students that “history is more than just facts and dates.” This statement usually follows with a statement that goes something like this: “no, history is an exciting discipline of interpreting the facts and constructing them into a compelling presentation.” I want my students to get excited about cause and effect, contingency, change over time, and other tenets of good historical thinking.
Yet Stephens reminds us that the details of the past are a necessary starting point for the study of history. He writes:
A student will need to know what actually happened in the past before he or she can go on to write history, tell a story, formulate arguments, and do the interesting work of interpretation.
That’s not unique to history. Content and some basic memorization are a the heart of most disciplines. Biologists have to learn anatomy and classifications. Others in the hard sciences must memorize formulas and need to have a grasp of mathematics. Language requires plenty of memorization. And on and on.
History professors, though, blush a bit when they ask students to memorize a list of names, ideas, dates, and the like. A student of Antebellum America should know the difference between John Calhoun and John Brown. A student in a course on the Early Republic should be able to distinguish a Federalist from an Anti-Federalist. A student in a colonial history course will need to know that the French and Indian War came before the American Revolutionary War.
This could lead to some interesting conversation about the United States survey course. (Or any history survey course, for that matter). In my institution, the survey course is usually the only chance I get to introduce the discipline to non-history majors. So should my focus be on making them memorize facts? Or should I introduce them to historical thinking? Lendol Calder has made a strong argument for the latter.
And then there are the history majors who take my survey course. While I certainly want to introduce them to historical thinking, I also want them to gain a sufficient knowledge of the facts of early American history as a building block for their deeper study of the past in upper-division courses.
Any thoughts?
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I do think it's an interesting question; certainly a broad knowledge of content let me slide through numerous discussions and helped me start to piece together different themes in history. At the same time, though, I also believe that survey classes should be used to introduce students to the tools of the trade as opposed to just content.
On a third side, though, are they necessarily mutually exclusive? Couldn't moving over content in a course be used as a jumping-off point for students to learn more about thinking historically with different events? As I've read it, historical thinking would require learning content and, in fact, make it more interesting.
Tim:
I think they are mutually exclusive. Thanks again for reading.
As a social studies major planning on becoming a teacher, my opinion is that teacher, as you said, is more then just a bunch of facts, dates and names.
I've found in working as a TA for a US history survey course that the students need to learn the facts, some dates and names, but if they are put in context of a theme, they often don't even realize they are memorizing, much less memorizing facts, names and dates.
-Not that this a trick or anything, it's just that when you put facts, names and dates in context, they suddenly use that traditional dryness.
Thanks for the post, David. Keep reading!