Why I, as a historian, really appreciate content warnings

I posted this on Facebook earlier and as it's an argument that seems to crop up every few days at the moment I thought I'd add it here. Two additional points: 1) People can be strong and capable and intelligent and determined and still need things. We should not be shaming people for requesting an accommodation, even if it turns out not to be practical. Equally, just because someone can deal with something when they have to doesn't mean they should always have to. 2) I haven't taught a seminar on the Holocaust although I have covered some harrowing material related to other events. I hope that any student of mine would feel comfortable asking to take a short break / leave the room for a minute if they needed to collect themselves before continuing. If I return to tutoring in a future role, I'll be sure to make that explicit. There's no benefit to shaming people into suffering in silence.

A thought on trigger warnings etc. speaking only for myself...I work in Holocaust education at the moment, specifically looking at photographs of atrocities. I look at and think about a lot of very horrible things as my actual job. This is, as I'm sure you can imagine, not very pleasant. I'm never going to be fully desensitised to it but I can maintain some critical distance in order to do my job. 

If someone springs a horrific image or a graphic description on me without warning, when I haven't had chance to get myself in the right frame of mind, then it will have a strong effect on me. My brain will automatically connect it to similar images or draw comparisons with other graphic descriptions. This could go on for hours. From experience, the images will make their way into my dreams. I'll dream about friends and family members being in these images, having these things happen to them. 

I'd like to be able to choose to avoid certain topics and material sometimes not because I'm a coddled, fragile little snowflake who needs to grow up and accept the real world for what it is, but because I want some control over when and how I encounter this material. I need to carve out a few hours every day when I'm not thinking about genocide, sexual violence, dead bodies etc. so that I can carry on doing this work. Deny me any sort of space which is reliably safe from this stuff and I will have to quit. Just a quick heads-up about what's coming is enough for me to mentally prepare myself, or remove myself from the conversation for a bit. That way you can carry on having the conversation without the interruption caused by my turning green, going dizzy, putting my fingers in my ears and trying to think about kittens, or (for repeat offenders after several warnings) throwing my drink in your face and never coming near you again. 

This is a plea from someone who's never been the victim of an attack or witnessed anything traumatic. If someone who *has* been through a traumatic experience asks you not to spring something on them without warning, then don't bang on about free speech and victim culture. Treat it the same way as an allergy: you can make all the peanut butter cookies you like so long as you warn people what's in them.

Stefan Collini on University Funding Reforms

The full article is well worth a read as it goes into some detail about how the government will attempt to control student numbers while maintaining the façade of university autonomy and student choice. This passage is from the final paragraph, and states something which should be right at the core of education policy:

The expansion of the proportion of the age-cohort entering higher education from 6 per cent to 44 per cent is a great democratic gain that this society should not wish to retreat from. To the contrary, we should be seeking to ensure that those now entering universities in still increasing numbers are not cheated of their entitlement to an education, not palmed off, in the name of ‘meeting the needs of employers’, with a narrow training that is thought by right-wing policy-formers to be ‘good enough for the likes of them’, while the children of the privileged classes continue to attend properly resourced universities that can continue to boast of their standing in global league tables. There is nothing fanciful or irresponsible in believing that this great public good of expanded education can and should be largely publicly funded.

One of the benefits of disorganisation...

...is that sometimes it saves you from having to retract a hasty post.

I was going to blog about this Observer article earlier today, under a title along the lines of "Government significantly improves the relevance of my research into the pressures placed on Third Reich academics". The gist of the article is that the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) had been coerced into making research on the "Big Society" a priority, in order to secure funding. If true this would be utterly reprehensible, starting universities down a path to becoming little more than Conservative Party think tanks (as if that wasn't enough of a problem already).

As it happens, the AHRC has issued a statement rebutting the claims. Their position is that there was a pre-existing programme of research into a related area, and that although any conclusions from this now have increased relevance to current government policy, funding for individual research will continue to be decided by peer review based on its quality:

The AHRC has been working for over two years, since 2008, with four other research councils, on the Connected Communities Research Programme which has been developed through extensive – and continuing – consultation with researchers. At the core of this Programme is research to understand the changing nature of communities in their historical and cultural contexts, and the value of communities in sustaining and enhancing our quality of life. These issues are serious and of major concern. They also happen to be relevant to debates about the ‘Big Society’ which came two years later. To imply that these important areas for investigation constitute a government-directed research programme is false.

I'm not prepared to breathe too huge a sigh of relief. As Iain Pears explained in an excellent piece earlier this month, there are still plenty of reasons to be concerned about the preservation of independence in academic research. Even if this particular claim turns out to be unfounded, there still remain other hoops that applicants for funding need to jump through, including proving the 'impact' of the work (particularly difficult to prove when the research hasn't been done yet and won't be read by anyone for another four years). With so little funding now available, there is an enormous amount of pressure to make proposed research sound as relevant and economically beneficial as possible.*

What I have been seeing in my own research (funded by the AHRC) into historians and non-fiction publishing in the Third Reich, is that censorship and suppression were by no means the only ways by which Nazi ideology gained respectability as areas of academic consensus. Funding was made available for researchers to find evidence for and 'prove' the regime's foregone conclusions. By shifting the focus of research in a few small ways, academics in all manner of fields - from anthropology to Ancient Greek archaeology - could retain their status and funding, meaning that even the most seemingly apolitical papers would lend their support to the regime, and to its main goal of creating a "people's" or "racial" community (Volksgemeinschaft) in which all Germans would work together to reverse Germany's social degeneration.

Godwin's Law makes it tricky to invoke a comparison with the Nazis and still be taken seriously, and I'm wary of sounding more than a little hysterical in my concluding sentence. The fact is that every time I hear "Broken Britain" and "Big Society", I'm reminded of the ongoing debate about the role of the Volksgemeinschaft ideal in securing support for the Nazi regime, and this latest suggestion of academic meddling rang all too true as a result.


*It's difficult to say that in a way that makes it clear why this is not a good thing. Basically, if the benefits of the research are that obvious from the outset, there are chances of funding from private sources. AHRC funding should be for projects which fill a gap in current research, the impact of which we won't necessarily know until it's been completed (and will be tricky to quantify even then).

EDIT: Iain Pears has posted more on this topic today: http://boonery.blogspot.com/2011/03/ahrc-observer-and-mr-haldanes-principle.html

Feed the troll (to the goats)

In case you've been away from the internet for a while, this happened:

• Melanie Phillips (never a good name to have in the first twenty words of a post) wrote an article claiming that children were to be "bombarded with homosexual references" in lessons on all kinds of subjects. Tabloid Watch has a good run-down on how the story evolved to that hysterical point.
• Partly due to her use of the term "normal sexual behaviour", partly because of her clear disregard for the very serious and widespread issue of homophobic bullying in schools, and - I guess - largely because she so frequently writes 'kick me' on her own back, lots of people got very angry about what she wrote.
• Johann Hari wrote a very good, detailed explanation of how the 'gay agenda' extends no further than trying to reduce discrimination and bullying, and how no amount of references (or avoidance of references) to the existence of homosexuality will change the sexuality of children.
• Melanie Phillips wrote a follow-up article about how the reaction to her piece proves her point - gays and their liberal supporters want to smother free speech, Johann Hari has missed the point of her article (he really, really hadn't) and, hold the front page, threats against her person had been transmitted via email and Twitter.

What reassures me about this whole kerfuffle is that even though such an outdated, divisive and inaccurate piece was printed in a national newspaper, so many people had a problem with it. This is very definitely progress from a few decades ago. What is less reassuring is the form that this outrage has apparently taken. Even discounting the alleged death threats, most of it wasn't at all productive. On the day the article was printed, my Twitter feed was full of people informing the world, with differing levels of eloquence, wit and strong language, that Melanie Phillips is homophobic, and a bad person. This I knew.

What I didn't learn until I read her article and went looking for the Schools Out website, was what exactly it was that she had portrayed as an "abuse of childhood". It looks like an excellent project. It also looks like it would benefit from some positive public attention, and the cooperation of more teachers and politicians. It would have been nice if, instead of stringing swear-words together and venting against one person's homophobia (which is unlikely to change, no matter how many people offer to beat it out of her) more people had publicised what it is that Schools Out is doing, and why Phillips' representation of this was false.

So here's the project. They have a donate button. If we use it as a Mad Mel-Induced Swear Box, it might bring something positive out of a needlessly negative couple of weeks.

Tuition fees: If access to education is the main issue, today's vote is irrelevant.

Something very important has got lost in the dramatic and newsworthy scuffles over higher education funding. Both sides of the debate are confirming a view of universities, degrees and graduates which should, in a truly progressive society, be challenged and overturned. I'm talking about the idea that society is divided into those who go to university, and those who don't. What is at stake in this vote is the question of how many people, from which backgrounds, will have the chance to pass through this magical land, to complete the transformation from non-graduate to graduate, and how much of that cost they should bear as individuals. The land and the transformation are taken as read.

A lot of anger has flared up on both sides at assumptions made by the other, and it is this binary presentation of graduates vs non-graduates which is clouding the issue to such an unhelpful degree. Here are a few of the stereotypes and tropes which have been crystallising for decades, and which are shaping the public and parliamentary debates:

• Hard-working people on lower incomes should not have to pay for other people to go to university and therefore go on to earn more.
• Those same lower-income non-graduates need other people to go to university to learn to become doctors, teachers and solicitors because one day they will need to call on that expertise.
• People go to university to gain access to higher earnings. Once they have passed through the system, they can afford to pay for their course.
• The awarding of degrees helpfully separates those who are intelligent and hard-working enough to pass a course from those who aren't. This is a good way to determine who is fit to do certain jobs.
• Too many young people go to university. Many of them are studying subjects which have no benefit to society, or the courses they are on are not of a high enough standard to guarantee that they deserve the status of 'graduate'.

This is all bunkum, and does not fit with the real-life examples people encounter every day. These two discrete groups do not and should not exist. After a few years doing a job, there is little to choose between an employee who studied for three years full-time before gaining any experience, and one who learned everything they needed to on the job. Most white-collar workers will have gained their skills via a combination of academic and on-the-job learning, having been through a mixture of training courses, work-experience placements, evening courses etc. You can (I think) become a qualified accountant by leaving school after your GCSEs, working for and being trained by a firm, working your way up through the ranks, attending a part-time course at a university or college, and passing certain exams. Or you can study for three years, maybe with a 'sandwich year' to gain more first-hand business experience, then join a firm to get more experience and expertise, then pass your final exams. How does it matter if one route makes you a 'graduate' and the other doesn't?

What I've hopefully illustrated here is entirely unrevolutionary idea that there is no natural division between graduates and non-graduates. This categorisation only exists in the elitist rhetoric of both sides of the debate: the politicians who wish people to pay more for their own elite status (and, as raising tuition fees is clearly not intended to plug the hole in the country's finances, to keep that elite status out of the hands of the more disadvantaged parts of society), and the current and aspiring students who are protesting to maintain the current slightly more open and affordable access to that elite status.

What we should be doing is tearing down that division.

Why should a university education consist of the three-year degree or nothing, regardless of how much it costs? Why should it be a choice of paying to have three-years' access to lectures, tutorials, library books, online journals, careers services, student societies and study-skills workshops... or having no access to any of this? Why are these institutions, which have benefitted from public funding of various kinds for so long, only there for the benefit of the lucky few who have the time, funds, and the previous qualifications to be allowed full access? Why should people who aren't affiliated with a university, including those who graduated a month earlier, have to see public libraries cut their opening hours, evening schools cancel courses or increase fees, smaller museums and galleries close, but still not be allowed to benefit from the resources on a campus on their own doorstep?

In short, how is it justifiable to keep all of that knowledge and teaching expertise behind such high walls? Where does this leave the interested amateur, the employee looking to move to a different sector, the employer who wants their workforce to have the most up-to-date knowledge?

Here are a few ideas, which I readily admit are off the top of my head:

• University lecturers should run short, affordable courses for anyone who wants to come along, regardless of age or previous qualifications.
• People should be able to pay for a month's access to the university library and its online resourses over the summer break, when these facilities are underused.
• Systems need to be put in place by which amateur research projects can be assessed by academics, published by university-run journalsand given the chance to make a contribution to knowledge.
• All universities should provide some free-access e-learning courses, covering a mixture of core knowldege from different subject areas, study skills, and current developments.

I also have a question for all of my fellow students who have put the time and effort into protesting over the last few weeks. If this is about solidarity and fair access to education, would you be willing to put the same time and effort into sharing your notes and the knowledge you've gained with one of the unfortunate sixth form graduates who decided they could not afford to join your number? Would you put one hour a week into running an open-access course, writing a free online guide, publicising an open lecture? Are you actually willing to undermine that elitist division between graduates and non-graduates? Or is this all a knee-jerk reaction to an attack on our privilleged, well-guarded domain?

Free, fair access to education at all academic levels can be achieved whether fees are set at ten pounds or ten thousand pounds. Knowledge is free, so long as we are willing to share it.

If an infinite number of historians...

I've been trying to catch up with podcasts from the skeptical community, and something in the latest* Righteous Indignation niggled at me for slightly the wrong reasons. It was an item on the proposed revisions to social studies textbooks in Texas, and this was the end of host Trystan Swale's bit:

George Orwell, of 1984 fame, famously said that, “He who controls the present, controls the past. And he who controls the past, controls the future.” Of course there are rational people on the state education board fighting these changes, and any insidious changes will be slow and creeping, but this is one of the reasons why I think that the continual promotion of the ideas of the Enlightenment and scientific reasoning, and investigation into bullshitters and snake-oil salesmen needs to continue through vehicles such as this tremendous podcast. Rewriting history to agree with your rhetoric to me is morally bankrupt and intellectually bankrupt, and ironic coming from a religion that lays claim to moral superiority.

While I agree that the proposed changes to the curriculum are clearly an act of politically-motivated revisionism, and could have a very negative effect on the quality of education, I can sense an underlying assumption on the part of the podcasters here which needs to be examined. This is the assumption that there is a 'correct' version of history, which should be found in all textbooks. In other words, that there is a fixed benchmark against which the accuracy of the information in these books can be measured.

Sorry to go all postmodern on yo' asses, but there isn't. Or at least, it's not as fixed and clear as you might hope. Yes, if a book states that the American War of Independence was started in 1509 by a secret society of Welsh feminist trumpet players, it can be pretty conclusively disproven with reference to a vast body of archival evidence. On the other hand, when it comes to assessing which factions of revolutionaries deserve the most credit for victory, and the creation of the United States... there is no 'fact' to be uncovered, just a mass of different interpretations to be weighed up. If this sounds like I'm working up to the line “teach the controversy”, it's probably because I am. But I'd like it taught well.

When 'science' is taught, it is really the scientific method which is being learned. Ok, you get some facts like the structure of cells, or that some stuff floats, but wherever possible this is not taken out of a book, but demonstrated practically. Even better, the kids perform the experiment themselves and discuss their findings (before being told what it was they did wrong). 'Science' is not a static, monolithic thing you can memorise for an exam. It's a system, an engine, constantly adding new knowledge to the pool, or designating previously held 'truths' to be false.

History is the same. The idea of kids learning 'history' from a single textbook, or even a limited selection of textbooks, fills me with horror. History is not a 'story' to be learned by heart and recited. History does not, strictly speaking, exist to be learned. What can be learned is the discipline of history, the methodology of historians, and – as a basic starting point – some of the main things that the majority of historians would consider to be accurate: key events, dates, and actors; probable causes and consequences; aspects of everyday life at different times – whatever gives the lessons some substance, and interest. This should be done, at all levels, via proper engagement with sources (not just texts), examination of locations and artefacts where possible, and the development of critical thinking skills. Something like:

“Right kids, based on this information about French and English weaponry and on the location of the armies, who do you think won the battle of Agincourt? Discuss it in groups for a bit; your homework is to find out the answer – and remember to double check with at least two different books! Next week, we'll discuss a little how historians define one side as 'the winner'.”

What should emerge from this is a sense that history isn't something which is remembered and preserved down the ages, but something which is constantly being pieced together, reshaped and reinterpreted by new information or different methods of analysis. The most useful thing which can emerge is the knowledge that everyone, however well-intentioned, 'rewrites' history, and that statements along the lines of “x was our past, therefore y should be our future” are always total hogswash.

*Second to last, i.e. episode 49. I'm a slow proof-reader.

Cameron wants a return to narrative history in schools. I don't.

David Cameron has pointed out that the BNP "are not pleasant people". Well done him. On the other hand, the same Q&A session brought up this:

A mother raised the issue of her two children not knowing what it was to be British because they did not learn history at school.

Mr Cameron said: “It is one of the great betrayals of school children that we have swept away with narrative history.

“We should be proud of what we have achieved as a country. Teaching people about the British Empire does not mean covering up the bad things that happened. It means having an honest explanation about the good and the bad.”

Now, I'm seriously contemplating a whole academic career of looking at narrative history and the problems it throws up, especially when it's the main way that history is spoon-fed to children, and especially when one of the aims is to "be proud of what we have achieved as a country". Naturally it would be unthinkable to cover the history of the British Empire without bringing up "the bad things that happened", but simply covering the negative sides isn't necessarily enough.

I'm currently reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, which has some brilliant observations about the way in which atrocities can be trivialised or brushed over, even when the events are described accurately (very long quote coming up, but it didn't seem fair to cut it down):

Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvard historian, was the most distinguished writer on Columbus, the author of a multi-volume biography, and was himself a sailor who retraced Columbus’s route across the Atlantic. In his popular book Christopher Columbus, Mariner, written in 1954, he tells about the enslavement and the killing: “The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide.”

That is one page, buried halfway into the telling of a grand romance. [...]
One can lie outright about the past. Or one can omit facts which might lead to unacceptable conclusions. Morison does neither. He refuses to lie about Columbus. He does not omit the story of mass murder; indeed he describes it with the harshest word one can use: genocide.
But he does something else - he mentions the truth quickly and goes on to other things more important to him. Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important - it should weigh very little in out final judgements; it should affect very little what we do in the world.
It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others, This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographical information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map.
My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the mapmaker’s distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian’s distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economical or political or racial or national or sexual.
Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker’s technical interest is obvious (“This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation - for short-range, you’d better use a different projection”). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not an intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations.

I don't have enough information on current history teaching in schools, and I know that many people are scathing of the 'transferable skills' approach which has taken time away from providing children with an overview of British history. On the other hand, I don't want to see a return to the situation 100 years ago, when history was taught to the proles primarily to foster unquestioning patriotism and respect for the all-important drive for 'progress'. I'd much rather children learned that one narrative, from a single narrator, is never enough to understand past events, that every historian has a point of view and limits to their knowledge and understanding, and that critical thinking skills are the only real protection against the bullshit they'll have to deal with when they enter adulthood.

It doesn't surprise me all that much that the leader of the Conservative Party might prefer the Victorian approach.