Chapter 10: The Denial of Desire: How to Make History Education Meaningless

Among the most common suggestions for reforming the history curriculum is to emphasize the nature of history as a discipline. Although there are a number of potential advantages to such reform, it also carries with it the danger of discounting students’ perspectives on history, and as a result, the subject may become increasingly meaningless to them. There are three principal ways in which this may happen. First, designing the curriculum around a strict chronological sequence may reduce students’ motivation to study history and, ironically, stand in the way of developing their understanding of historical time. Second, ignoring issues that arise from students’ historically grounded identities may leave them susceptible to the divisive uses of history that they encounter outside school. Finally, focusing exclusively on the logic of history as an academic discipline, and distancing it from the variety of ways in which history is used in the wider society, may lead students to dismiss the subject as one that has little relevance to their own lives. Rather than asking students to deny their own interests and perspectives, educators should seek to deepen and enrich students’ ability to use history in a variety of contexts and for multiple purposes.