I’m with UkeIke. History should be taught as a whole.
Of course, that’s impossible from a practical standpoint, you just have to make some divisions and adopt some type of perspective.
Some options for divisions:
- Geographic - teach the course of history as it relates to some physical region of the globe. For example, European history.
- Political - the history of some particular nation. For example, American history.
- Chronological - dividing history into discreet blocks of time. For example, 20th Century history.
- Ethnic - the history of some identifiable cultural or biological grouping of people. For example, African American history.
There are others.
Some possible persectives:
- Political history; told from the point of view of changing governments and rulers.
- Technological history; told from the point of view of changing human capacities as technology appears, spreads, is lost, is applied, etc.
- Social history; told from the point of view of the ordinary daily life of common people.
- The “Great Man” approach; told from the point of view that certain individuals arise who shape the course of history and whose lives in some sense define history.
There are others.
In high school, history used to be taught almost exclusively using a combination political/chronological division and from a political/Great Man perspective. This was simply because the most easily obtainable and interpretable historical material tends to deal with the ruling classes. Social history is a relatively new thing: “old school” medievalists, for example, often don’t give a damn about how the peasants really felt about the church in the tenth century. They were only peasants, after all, and all the documents of the day were written by nobility and clergy, so that’s what medieval historians should concern themselves with. Similar effects carry over to other areas.
My impression is that most of the claims of “hidden history” that the powers that be “don’t want us to know” are essentially just dissatisfaction with the perspectives and divisions used in High School classes. If you assume that a kid is supposed to somehow get a realistic grasp of human history in High School, you can legitimately argue that they should learn history from all the angles. Of course, you’d have to be an idiot to think that’s ever going to happen.
I was a substitute teacher in a high school for a week teaching Algebra; we spent an entire week on the goddamned straight line. “Y=mX+b! I’ve explained it a hundred times! What the hell don’t you understand? AHHHHHHHHHHH!”. And that was a private prep school.
Teachers have to adopt some perspective that covers a realistic amount of history from a high enough level that broad trends are visible, and it has to be easily assimilated by adolescents. Traditional approaches did this, admittedly at the expense of many marginalized groups. But it wasn’t necessarily a conspiracy to “hide the truth”.
It is not clear that the more inclusive approaches now being offered are producing a student body that has a historical method they can use with efficacy. (I’m not talking about a set of social positions that can be justified with history, here - the PC game - but rather an intellectual handle on how to approach history from any scholarly method at all).
I think the best approach is to modify the traditional high school history stream to include mention of marginalized groups, especially in those places where they made significant contributions to the larger movements going on. Fredrick Douglass would be included; Crispus Attucks would not.
