02/19/2024
Here is a brief excerpt from a book I am writing on critical thinking activities for gifted students of history. This student population is often overlooked. Instead of just piling on the work to punish students for being bright, this book gives them challenging and intellectually stimulating activities that go beyond the scope of the ordinary textbook or classroom activities. That keeps them more engaged and prevents them from getting bored with work that is too easy for them. This chapter deals with the way history is oversimplified and forgotten over time in the mind of the general public, I think it would be of interest to anyone with even casual interest in history. Please let me know what you think of it.
21. Collective Forgetting and the Oversimplification of History
History is a complex subject. Historical events seldom have a single cause and the effects of them can be various and complicated. What’s more, historical knowledge is imperfect. What we know is limited by the written records that exist, archeological remains, and a perhaps a few other types of physical evidence such as artwork or photographs. No doubt, many more things actually happened than those we know about. How many words that were spoken were never recorded? How many documents and artifacts were destroyed or are missing? So much has been lost to time, such as the maps of Columbus, an account of what Jesus did between age twelve and thirty, and the majority of ancient books. Whole civilizations left very little or no written records. What we know about them is only through what others wrote about them. Many sources are written from the point of view of the winners in a conflict. Usually, no records exist from the losers’ point of view. Everything we know about some very famous people is sometimes from a single original historical document about their lives. Some cultures were very good at recording their history, such as the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. Because of this, they hold a disproportionate influence on the rest of the world. There were many other gods and religions in the ancient Near East besides those of Israel, and most of them had more followers and a greater geographical range, but almost no one today talks about other gods such as Tiamat, Baal, or Marduk. The reason is because these cultures were not as prolific or their written records have been largely lost.
We choose to retell the stories that we decide are worth retelling and ignore those we don’t know or don’t care about. If you look at a library or bookstore, the history sections are dominated by European and American history. The same stories are told and retold many times over, while other stories are ignored. There are thousands of books about Lincoln or Hi**er, but only a handful about Tamerlane or Menelik. What’s worse, what we do know tends to be oversimplified or collectively forgotten over time. For example, the American Civil Rights Movement is an enormously complex series of events involving thousands of people and many important leaders, but when it is taught in schools it often gets telescoped down to a brief recount of Martin Luther King and the “I Have a Dream” speech, as if this were the only event and he was the only civil rights leader. Similarly, there were many explorers, but most people only know about Columbus. Even of those who know about Columbus, many only know about his initial voyage to the Americas and little or nothing about the other three voyages.
Part of this is because of the way history is taught in schools. Most classes are survey courses that cover very long expanses of time. Textbooks are battlegrounds for competing special interest groups all trying to cram in their story. There are also pressures to eliminate some things due to printing costs and the physical limits of book size. Textbooks are also expected to contain study aids, collections of maps, and primary source documents. As a result, many things get left out. I have been a textbook reviewer for publishers and school districts several times. When I evaluate a textbook, I look for the depth of coverage of a book by taking the same subject and seeing how much space is devoted to it in each book. Some may devote an entire page to a famous event or person, some only a paragraph, some may leave it out entirely. It is shocking sometimes to see how superficially a subject is covered or how entire cultures or major events are simply skipped. One world history textbook I examined only devoted two sentences to Christopher Columbus, another completely left out the entire Viking civilization.
Teachers also vary widely in what they choose to cover. They all have their favorite themes, subjects, and personal preferences. Many struggle to complete the required course of study within the allotted time and the worst ones just give up and leave out whole units because of poor time management or lack of planning. Regretfully, this sends a message to students that that those eras and subjects don’t matter. Students are left with huge gaps in their understanding when this happens. If you are the student whose family’s or culture’s history gets left out, you feel marginalized and neglected. Finally, every teacher has their own strengths and weaknesses based on which courses they took in college and which subjects they chose to emphasize less. They are also limited by which books they chose to read or not read on their own. New demands from state laws and teaching standards may force them to abandon their favorite lessons and focus on some new subject that they may not know well.
There is also the constant problem of the gap between history which is lived through and what is taught in schools. There is a period of history that the adults who are teaching the course have lived through. They are intimately familiar with these events because they remember them as news events. They were directly affected by them. They may have even participated in them. They expect everyone to be familiar with these events and are surprised by how little young people know about them. This is the origin of the common complaint, “Kids today don’t know anything about history.” By contrast, the young people may know about recent events, but they may not be able to fully comprehend their context because they are just beginning to understand the world. They lack the experience, long-term memory, and perspective of adults. They did not live through the events that preceded recent events, so they may not recognize their underlying causes or antecedents. The events that happened before they were mature enough to understand them still need to be explained just like any other period of history that is unknown to them.
The trouble is, those eras are usually not taught in their schools. Recent history is seldom included in textbooks or courses of study. If it is included, it is usually glossed over very quickly or overgeneralized. Many recent events are left out entirely. Some teachers rush through recent history at the end of the year and do not fully explain it. The events that become most important to a young learner, chiefly that which occurred right before they were born and those that happened while they were small children, are often missing from their history classes. The diagram below helps to illustrate this problem. The upper timeline is that of the student’s lifetime. The lower one is that of the teacher.
When the teacher was young, he or she had a timeline similar to that of the current student. They learned from older teachers who also had a gap between what they learned in school, what they lived through, and what they had to learn on the job. These gaps are never perfectly filled. If the student became a teacher, they would still have to go back and learn the things in between the point in history where their teachers ended the course and when they became old enough to understand historical events. The cycle goes on and on. Inevitably, some facts and understanding fall through the gaps. Some things are learned imperfectly or incompletely. Some things are lost by each generation. If the student becomes an adult who never takes history in college, reads history books on their own, or keeps up on current events, the gaps in their knowledge may never be filled or may even widen.
A personal illustration is in order here. When I was a child, it was many years after World War II, yet the war was still very fresh in many people’s memories. The aftermath of the war was still influencing current events. There were many veterans who told their war stories in oral histories, books, and public speeches. Many of them were still influential in education and in government. My high school US history course literally ended with the close of World War II. Most textbooks also ended with WWII or with a very skimpy, overgeneralized chapter called the Postwar Era or something similar. This trend continued well into the 1990s, when textbook publishers finally realized that they had better start going into some detail about events in the second half of the twentieth century because so many years had passed since the end of the Second World War. Some have improved their coverage of the Cold War and other major events of the late 20th century; some still talk about the postwar era in very vague and incomplete terms. Most textbooks still don’t have much to say about events in the 21st century and we’re nearly a quarter of the century in. World War Two was nearly 80 years ago. A lot has happened since then, but the textbooks have still not caught up.
I can remember veterans getting very offended when modern students had never heard of the battle in which they fought. To them, everyone should know about it. It should never be forgotten. To the general survey course teacher, they feel lucky if they can just get their students to understand the causes, general course, and outcome of the war in a few days. They are very unlikely to focus in on a single battle no matter how much it upsets the veteran. They are not doing this to be insensitive. It does not mean they are a bad teacher. There is just too much to cover each year and never enough time to do it. For the teacher, every year is a conscious choice of what to cut because it is impossible to cover it all. This is further compounded by the fact that new events are happening all the time. These new events shout for attention and must soon be included in the textbooks. That means what was in the previous edition of the textbook must be continually condensed and oversimplified. Many important things must be cut to make room for the new events. The teacher’s task is also made difficult because there are very few teaching materials written about recent history. It is up to them to learn about the events that took place since they were in college as well as whatever events that their professors left out because they thought they were too recent to be considered history at the time.
When an event is fresh and recent in everyone’s mind, there is a detailed collective memory about it. A senior citizen may tell you about his or her hippie days in great detail. He or she can remember all the song lyrics, protest events, key leaders of social movements, quotes from controversial presidents, etc. They might get very upset if a young person today has never heard of Timothy Leary or Wavy Gravy, but how can contemporary children know about these things if they have no memory of them and no one has told them about them? How can a teacher spend time on them if they have only a few days to cover the 1960s? As the hippie generation dies off, fewer and fewer people will remember events such as Woodstock or the shootings at Kent State. Eventually, for most people, all that will be left of our understanding of the 60s is a condensed, oversimplified memory of events that is retained in the pop culture. If you look up hippies on the internet, you will already see many errors in the way hippie fashion and beliefs are represented. For example, based on the way hippies are presented in the popular media, many people get the false impression that all young people in the 1960s were hippies, used drugs, or opposed the war in Vietnam. The conservative youth who rejected hippie fashions, never used drugs, or supported the war are almost never represented in movies or textbooks. In time, the hippie era might be reduced to an oversimplified, overgeneralized caricature of itself instead of the historical reality.
This happens in all eras and will continue to happen no matter what. Other than professional historians, few people have an accurate understanding of what life was really like in past eras. They base their opinions on what they see in entertainment or read in fictional literature. They may watch the occasional history documentary or video on the internet. All of these sources frequently have historical errors in them. Even historians can make mistakes and often are corrected by other historians. Some of our most cherished notions about history have been proven to be false or myths. As new evidence is discovered, historians constantly revise what is accepted as historical truth. If a person only studies history as a young student, and never as an adult, they are left with an incomplete knowledge of history. They may cling to outdated or false notions.
The movies and TV compound this problem. Many people rely on them as their only source of history after they finish school. Producers are not interested in telling the truth about history. They are simply interested in entertaining people and making money. They often make many errors in their “historical” movies. They portray characters with inaccurate costumes and makeup. They include anachronistic speech or objects. They conflate several different people into single characters to economize on screen time. Today it is in vogue to cast people who look nothing like the historical characters that they represent. This further confuses people. Some directors present a distorted version of the past that is a wish fulfilment world where everyone got along and was nice to one another instead of accurately portraying past racial and class conflicts. This glosses over past realities and problems as if they never occurred, and we have nothing to learn from them.
Most moviemakers do not consult with historians, cultural, fashion, or arms experts to ensure accuracy and veracity. Some just make sloppy errors because they didn’t do their homework. The worst offenders deliberately misrepresent history in order to make an artistic statement or propagandize for their pet causes. To them, a historical setting is just like any other fictional setting. They don’t care about accuracy. Their fallback excuse is that they are making a work of entertainment and not a documentary. What they refuse to realize is that they are misinforming people who have been fooled into believing they are seeing what really occurred in history. Many script writers inject modernisms into their scripts. They make characters say things or act from motives that did not exist at the time. The net result is that viewers of their media are getting a very incomplete and inaccurate view of history. The trouble is, most people do not have enough training in history to recognize and resist these errors, so they just accept what they see hook, line, and sinker. Popular media, such as homemade video applications, websites, and social media posts contain many serious historical errors. No one fact checks them and the creators are not held accountable for their accidental or deliberate errors. Yet many people accept them as equal to books in their accuracy and value.
Finally, human memory is frail. We tend to forget a lot. When we are young, we can recount things that happened to us in great detail. As we get older, we tend to simplify our stories. We may even forget or accidentally change details. We may even subconsciously enhance our own role or claim to have said things that we never did. When parents or grandparents try to pass down their stories to their descendants, they may be too young to understand or appreciate them. Young people may not be interested in the stories of their elders. Sometimes elders withhold stories because the subject is too sensitive for young ears or too difficult for them to comprehend. Sometimes the experiences are too painful or embarrassing to relate. When the children become young adults, they may feel too busy to sit and learn the family history. Few people take the time to write them down or record an interview with elders. Tragically, some families wait until it is too late and the elder has passed. Who knows how many priceless interviews were lost over the centuries that could have vastly improved our knowledge of history if someone had just taken the time to record them?
In summary, what we know about what occurred in history is limited. It is incomplete and ever changing. What little we do know is often oversimplified and condensed as it is passed on to the next generation, because nothing is ever explained in the same level of detail as the person who lived it knows. As a result, many things get distorted, forgotten, or left out over time. Our collective knowledge of history is always reduced by our problem of forgetting and oversimplifying what we once knew. The only thing that remedies this is new historical research and instruction in history that tries to remedy this problem. Otherwise, nearly all of our past would be forgotten or reduced to legends and incomplete stories.
Questions for discussion:
1. Why is our knowledge of history imperfect?
2. Why does the way that history is told to young people get oversimplified or forgotten over time?
