Picture this unpleasant scenario: an American school group travels to foreign countries around the world, walking the streets of cities as diverse as Rome, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, and Moscow. Their American tour guide does nothing but disparage every place they go. In one city, he speaks at length of high crime rates and which parts of town to avoid; in another, he takes them on a tour of the country’s most polluted rivers; and everywhere, he encourages students to criticize the food and mock the accents. Upon their return to the United States, the weary travelers breathe a collective sigh of relief. Thankful to be back in a place where people are intelligent, moral, and practical, they determine to never again set foot in a foreign country.
The thought of such a wasted and counter-productive trip is enough to make one cringe. Foreign travel ought to make one more broad-minded, not simply confirm one’s prejudices—especially an educational trip, whose goal is to help travelers see the world from outside their own limited experiences.
Unfortunately, this scenario is depressingly similar to how many high school and college students learn about history. Studying the past could be treated as a remarkable adventure comparable to a grand tour around the world. Teachers could broaden their students’ minds by introducing them to cultures very different from our own, but still worthy of our respect and curiosity. The men and women we study could become new companions with unique insights to share and valuable experiences from which to learn.
Instead, what are students more likely to learn in their history classes? That everyone in the past was narrow-minded and bigoted; that historical documents should be read with suspicion and subjected to relentless deconstruction; that studying the past is most essentially an exercise in studying varying modes of oppression; that ours is the only time period worth living in, because only we have progressed far enough to know the right way to live and to organize society.
Is there a term for “xenophobia of the past”? That, it seems, is what students are most likely to learn when history is taught this way.
The truth is that the study of history, done well, ought to enlarge our view of the world in a way that makes us more humble—not more conceited—about our own times. As C. S. Lewis wrote,
A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.
Studying the past with the goal of learning from those who came before us can be one of the best cures for what Lewis called chronological snobbery, the widespread fallacy of assuming our superiority to past generations.
As we—whether teachers or parents—introduce our children to the thinkers, leaders, and common people of past generations, recounting their deeds and reading the books and letters they left behind, we have a great opportunity before us. We can show that we are, in essence, world travelers, visitors to faraway times and places; observing both the good and the bad, but coming away with a deeper appreciation for what we might be able to learn.
How do we know if we’ve succeeded? If, upon returning home, our children yearn to go back.
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“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
― L.P. Hartley