At the beginning of the term, I asked my Class 12 history students, why do we study history? They responded with the usual and a little more:
- “To learn not to repeat the mistakes of the past.”
- “To understand human behaviour.”
- “To understand the present, why things are the way they are.”
To go a little deeper, I said that history is not just the study of the past but also the study of change. I then brought in what a Class 11 student had said: “Can we just study history out of a pure interest in the past, can we love history for itself? Have you ever thought that the ancients might have known some things that we don’t, for example might their philosophy and feeling for life have been more profound than ours?” Perhaps that was a stretch, but students then added two other reasons:
- “To appreciate how our ancestors lived”, alluding to our forebears not enjoying the comforts we enjoy today.
- “To understand the distortions of history that have been made for political purposes.”
The last comment caused me to say that none of them had said ‘heritage’, but understanding heritage is also a reason for studying the past and that, alongside the triumphs and inspirations, one must avoid the exaggerations and distortions that come when pride in heritage becomes the focus of history.
And then we commenced with the Indus Valley Civilization.
This is what my notes tell me, as I look back on the year and wonder, as I do on a weekly if not daily basis, what have I really taught anyone today or any day? Today, for example, was a typical teacher’s day on an exam-driven week nearing the end of the term—a unit test on USA and Australia in World History, followed by a video on the topic of ‘being Japanese’ from the perspective of Japanese minorities; a review of the unit test on ‘rights’ and ‘citizenship’ in Political Science, followed by opening the chapter on secularism, which starts with the outdated narrative that ‘every political party professes to be secular’; and then distribution of a sample test to those same Class 12 students quoted above who will soon be appearing for their board exam. As I grade the unit test on World History later in the afternoon, I go through the usual reactions of a teacher—pleasure and satisfaction at the in depth answers and well-chosen words of a few students and disappointment at the glaring mistakes and misunderstandings of others who I thought were grasping the content.
Which leaves me wondering, what then do I teach when I teach history? Some would say I merely ‘facilitate’ the learning of the student; but that strikes me as too facile. Why then can they not learn on their own? As seen from any student who takes leave from our residential school and studies at home for a period, they cannot absorb the feeling of history, having missed out on teacher-led class discussions. They did not have the teacher or their peers to question the text, to question each other’s assumptions, to look deeper, to bring in new information by writing on the board, to cover a few things that our text does not cover, or to challenge ourselves. Whether this is called ‘teaching’ or ‘facilitating’ is a matter of words. One must go beyond the assumption that all the teacher has to do is get out of the way of the child’s natural penchant for learning. If the teacher does that, then the child will learn by following their own wayward interests and inclinations. What they will learn is anyone’s guess, but they will not learn the subject, and maybe pick up all kinds of notions.
Again, having given ample thought to how I teach my subject, what exactly am I teaching? Recently, a guest visiting the school posed this question—why study history—in our faculty meeting. Thinking about it, I said, “to understand human nature.” In that way, history helps with self knowledge too. I gave the example that one thing you find repeatedly in history is one party attempting to dominate another party, and this suggests that in our human nature there is a recurrent will to dominate. All of us have violence within us. Some of the best questions in history, I said, relate to motives. It is what makes the chapter on the Mongols so compelling. What were the motives of Genghis Khan to leave his little corner of the world and set out on a vast project to establish the largest empire the world had ever known up until that point? And further, once you go beyond the brutality of conquest, we then learn about how the Mongolian Empire changed a large part of the known world. It resulted in the security of the Silk Road, expansion of trade, a policy of religious tolerance, and more.
Once we learn this, I then have my class wrestle a bit with the question, was Genghis Khan a brutal conqueror or a great unifier? The answer, arguably, winds up being both. So, do you think the violence is justified? I am always relieved if a student says, like this year, “No sir, I just don’t see how you can justify that amount of suffering, no matter what good comes out of it.”
The risk of asking this question is that students, and us adults too, don’t really know how terrible war is, how utterly destructive it is, even though the NCERT textbook has source material that says Genghis Khan commanded that “in the exaction of vengeance not even a cat or dog should be left alive”. Yes, it was a kind of ‘total war’ in the thirteenth century, well before the Second World War which is often seen as the marker for the kind of warfare that would not spare civilians. The reality of war, however, in all its barbaric cruelty and bloodletting and numbness is not something we can even imagine.
Still, what am I teaching: is it just the content of the subject? I hope not! I had no interest in history myself until Class 11, when I had an unorthodox teacher who would question the assumptions of students in the class on topics that weren’t in the syllabus. It was 1983, the year that Israel invaded Lebanon—a pattern that sadly repeats today, although it is Gaza now—a good number of my fellow students were Jewish and repeated simplifications they had undoubtedly heard at home, such as “the Palestinians left in 1948 and they weren’t coming back.” “Voluntarily?”, the teacher would ask. And the questioning of assumptions began, even on controversial topics of religion and identity and even at the risk of a student relaying what the teacher had said to his or her family at home. For the student would never have the knowledge of the teacher, neither the breadth nor depth of understanding, nor likely would his parents have it regardless of their level of education. This teacher would also mimeograph supplementary reading assignments and ask us not to answer a set of questions on it, but to come back to class having read it, and each of us had to ask ‘one intelligent question’ about the assignment. What he meant by ‘intelligent’ had more to do with critical reading or mindful reading and the ‘why’ questions as opposed to questions with a ready answer.
History requires study, not only in terms of knowledge, but in some training of the mind—borne from understanding evidence and bias and correlations, from the habit of comparing and contrasting societies and civilizations and nations across time periods. The conversations this teacher had with a student or two in class on a subject that did not concern me, like Israel and Palestine, nevertheless had me looking for more in my high school library and checking out the first history book I ever bothered to read, bearing the title The Fertile Crescent, on the Israel-Palestine conflict. I still remember the laminated brown book cover. To my astonishment, I discovered that there were claims to a land that dated back not a few decades but thousands of years. It was that conflict, in fact, taking place in real time then, that taught me ‘historical thinking’, or taking a current issue and thinking evaluatively in terms of history.
But what am I teaching, besides the miserable memorization for exams, besides the awful repetition of violence—’man’s inhumanity to man’—that sadly makes up for a good amount of human history? Our World History textbook, in just term two covers confrontation of cultures, displacing indigenous people, disease, slavery, death and misery on a mass scale, industrialization, colonization, the pollution of the environment, war and genocide, world wars, decolonization and so on. The greatest advances in science become the greatest threat to the world in the form of the nuclear bomb. But aren’t advances in science and medicine, art and culture, the true legacy of humankind, that has made our lives better, what we have salvaged after a run of perhaps 250,000 years as Homo sapiens on a planet that can barely contain us?
Today, humanity confronts problems it never had before. The spectre of climate change. Mutual destruction. The challenge of living sustainably. Mental health. And if it can be argued that war is less than it was, it can also be argued that hatred is more than it was. The common person who merely followed orders as a soldier in times past is today both the victim of, and participant in, the vast cesspool of ‘social media propaganda’ that feeds on the pride and anger that in times past only the rulers and religious leaders and elites were ‘privileged’ to have. Social media has magnified and amplified the dark side of human nature, even as it has connected people across the globe in matters of empathy, good will, and beneficence.
It then comes as no surprise that I have often thought, paradoxically, that what I hope we learn from history is to be free of history. Through the process of studying history, can we slowly lay aside our pride, prejudice, pettiness, fear and so on? Can we check our tendency to violence, to self-aggrandizement, to absolutist thought and feeling? Can a sustained, in-depth holding of the past teach us to respect it but to be free of its excesses? Is the importance of moderation, reasonableness, compassion, peace, tolerance, and inclusion something we can take from history, even if it means understanding human frailty, which is surely a lesson of history? And humility? But in these nationalistic times? Who will stand up for it? Who will correct the propaganda of aggressive leaders and manipulators who aim to drive us into a single view of the past, absent its complexity, its discrepancies, its nuances? It is a tall task.
“You’re swimming on the surface”, I found myself telling my students this year, “go deeper”. “Question the assumptions. Ask why. Listen to what each of us has to say. What do you think?”
At the end of the year, it is rewarding to see the students more excited about history. Their sensitivity to depth and complexity, their knowledge, their written and verbal communication skills have all improved, in different measure for each student. Are they better human beings? Maybe, but the f ield of action is not theirs yet. One can only sense that they are more thoughtful, more intellectually curious, and more sceptical of blanket statements about the past. As my old teacher used to say, “I hope history teaches you to develop a healthy scepticism.”
This article is part of the Journal of the Krishnamurti Schools No. 27, 2024, published by Krishnamurti Foundation India.