Brooklyn

I had a great morning with Catholic middle-school and high school teachers from the Diocese of Brooklyn and Queens.  We gathered in the basement of the Brooklyn Historical Society to participate in a Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History professional development seminar.

The topic for the day was "Religion in America."  I lectured on the way that "Christian America" rhetoric has been employed by Americans from roughly 1800 to the present.  I have now had two wonderful sessions with Catholic school teachers from the five boroughs.

When I do these seminars with teachers, I not only teach them content, but I try to challenge them to think historically and to get their students to do the same.  During the Q&A session, one veteran teacher, who has recently been doing some work as a substitute, shared a story with me related to his use of Was America Founded as a Christian Nation in his classroom.

In a recent class the teacher led a discussion of the Declaration of Independence. When the students learned that Jefferson, a slaveholder, wrote the words "all men are created equal," they began to protest, calling Jefferson and the slave-holding founders 'hypocrites." The teacher had a hard time controlling the student's outbursts on the subject.

In a related situation, the teacher read a letter from John Adams to his wife Abigail (the letter happens to be published, in part, in Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?). The letter, which was written on October 9, 1774, describes Adams's experience attending mass in St. Mary's Catholic Church in Philadelphia while he was in town serving in the First Continental Congress.  It describes Catholics as "poor Wretches, fingering their Beads, chanting Latin, not a Word of which they understood...."  Needless to say, Adams does not paint a very flattering picture of Catholicism.

The teacher prefaced the telling of these stories by saying that my book "got him in trouble" with his class. The African-American students did not like Jefferson, while the Catholic students were angry that the Adams letter was introduced..  The teacher wanted some advice as to how to deal with this, since everyone seemed to be angry with his choice of documents.

What kind of advice would you give to this teacher?

First, I said that it was not the responsibility of the history teacher to support or condemn, at least initially, the documents that he or she has assigned in class.  Nor should the teacher allow the students to do so until they have fully understood the documents as part of the historical world in which they were created.  What was it about Jefferson's world that made him defend slavery?  Why did Adams have such a negative view of Catholicism?  THIS is the primary task of the history teacher.

Students will naturally argue with ideas that they find to be immoral. They will be attracted to some of the characters that we introduce to them, and they will despise others.  This, according to Sam Wineburg in Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, is their "psychological condition at rest."  It is natural to condemn Jefferson for his hypocrisy.  It is also natural, if you are a Catholic (or even if you are not), to be offended by the words of John Adams.  But if we allow this kind of condemnation or praise to dominate our history classroom, we make history, to quote David Hackett Fischer in Historian's Fallacies, a "handmaiden to moral philosophy."

As Wineburg suggests, historical thinking is an "unnatural" act.  It is not normal or natural to try to understand or empathize with people in the past that we might find morally reprehensible.  Yet this is what MUST happen if true historical learning is going to take place.

This is why it is absolutely essential that a history teacher develop a culture in his or her classroom that is conducive to the unnatural discipline of historical thinking.  Every classroom has rules of behavior--no talking when the teacher is talking, no chewing gum, raising one's hand to ask a question, respecting the teacher.  Yet rarely do we establish rules about what is a permissible mode of inquiry into a historic text and what is not.  I encouraged this teacher to explain to his students that they must treat a particular primary document as a guest in their classroom much in the same way that they have learned (I hope) to treat a guest in their classroom who does not come from the past.  I call this the "discipline of hospitality." Students must learn to listen before condemning.  They must show respect to the historical actors that they will encounter each day in their history classroom and beyond. 

A culture of historical inquiry must be established on the first day of class and sustained throughout the entire school year.  As a substitute teacher, this particular teacher has not had the opportunity to develop this kind of culture and it is obviously clear that the teacher he has replaced has failed to do so.

This made for some very interesting conversation and reaffirmed why I really enjoy working with teachers.