Reaction

Keith Benson Analysis of Curriculum Reaction Paper #1 Dr. Ben Justice 1.31.2008

In reflection of the weeks’ readings “Schwiegen! Die Kinder! or, Does Postmodern History Have a Place in Schools?” by Peter Seixas, Anver Segall’s “What’s the Purpose of Teaching a Discipline, Anyway? The Case of History”, and “Two Cheers for Postmodernism” by William Stanley, it seems the issue of how history should be effectively taught in high schools was a non-issue. Paradoxically, all three authors advocated, through suggestions and suppositions, teaching history to students in the postmodern approach, but offered little concrete evidence to support that it is superior to the “collective memory” approach or the disciplinarian method. Consequently, this reading, to a high school history teacher, appears yet another conversation between academics that have very little practical application within the confines of the public school history classroom. These readings, as read collectively, left me unfulfilled. Sexias, in “Schwieggen! die Kinder!”, accurately describes the pedagogical method in which history is taught in high schools – the best story method. The idea that in the interest of preserving and forming a nation’s common identity and values, and to convey a consistent, albeit, simplistic message expediently, most primary and secondary schools, public and private, employ this collective memory approach. Further, Sexias and Stanley in both essays, explain the disciplinarian method as combining the “best stories” from multiple perspectives with students arriving at differing interpretations of the events being analyzed. Finally, all authors in each article convey the postmodern approach as method that seeks to take the

disciplinarian method level to higher cognitive levels by adding elements of application and synthesis of historical information by considering the context in which the information was conceived and relating it to the prevailing climate of the present. While the distinction between the pedagogical methods is clear, no suggestion is offered about how to implement the more complex postmodern approach within a 42 minute class, within the confines of a state mandated curriculum, among students with different learning abilities, which by the way, probably have no interest in becoming professional historians. In support, even as I reflect on my own scholastic and even early undergraduate experiences in history classes, the best story method always seemed the approach employed. It was not until I declared history as a major, and began doing the discipline, was I introduced and taught in other fashions. Also, Stanley in “Two Cheers for Postmodernism” describes some of the criticisms of postmodernism, which essentially were that postmodernism plunges students deeper into the depths of relativism, and that high school students cannot begin to effectively understand more complex concepts of understanding when analyzing historical events. While I do agree students are capable of learning and developing the skills required to learn in a postmodern fashion, I am aware that students in high school lack much of the foundationary information required to effectively gain from postmodern approaches.