Distinguishing characteristics of change and continuity among periods

Despite the changes from one era or culture to the next, there are often similar types of texts that show up throughout different periods.  The way that these texts evolve is reflective of the culture producing them, as such they can be really useful tools in charting change and continuity over time.  A compare and contrast exercise of this type is also valuable for reviewing past material.  Texts can include laws, speeches, biographies, histories, fiction, etc.  It can also be applied to art or music, whether religious, public or private.

There are different ways to do this.  One is to send your students off on a scavenger hunt in the library to find the primary sources and to write a compare and contrast essay, asking them to identify the features of the text that place it in a particular time, era or culture.  If you have been working with these sorts of texts all along than you can include a review assignment.  Venn diagrams can be used, but I also am a big fan of students writing in the cultural style of one or another, or switching styles within in a story.  Possibly, my favorite is a Mad Libs exercise.

The Mad Libs has the advantage of emphasizing certain vocabulary, while being a shorter, more condensed assignment than a larger writing project.  For example, in my Western Civilization class, I assigned excerpts from Roman Vitae (Lives) which were biographies of various famous men (for the most part) extolling or castigating their virtues and actions, thus revealing the societal mores.  Romans wrote about everyone from Alexander the Great to Hannibal to Julius Caesar.  Early Christians, living under Roman rule, adopted this practice for holy men, writing sacred Vitae.  These differed in several identifiable ways: 1) Early Christian Vitae were, well, Christian while Roman Vitae were pagan (until the conversion of Constantine); 2) Early Christian samples were typically shorter than their Roman counterparts; 3) Early Christian virtues included martyrdom, ascetic living and often included desert seclusion or giving up Roman secular living and offices for roles in the church, whereas Roman virtues were concerned with leadership; and, 4) the “characters” surrounding the Early Christian subjects were also slightly different, involving Church officials, than the Roman subjects who typically involved soldiers and senators.

The evolution of the Vitae continues into the Late Antique era and then the Early and Late Medieval eras.  The Late Antique stories focus on conversion and monastic withdrawal, with less emphasis on martyrdom, though it remains a theme.  By the Early Medieval, particularly surrounding Charlemagne, there is a revival in the Roman style of Vitae, but with Christian markers, such as churches, church hierarchy and, of course, certain Early Medieval realia and institutions instead of some Roman examples.  The Late Medieval, meanwhile, describes a new type of Christian living, the Vitae Apostolica, which is patterned on the apostles in the Acts of the Apostles and Jesus in the Gospels.  These Vitae stress preaching, serving the poor and sick and active involvement among God’s flock instead of withdrawal and seclusion.  Below are some examples of different Vitae from these different eras that I have used (typically in excerpts):

ROMAN

• Plutarch’s Lives
• Suetonious’s Lives

EARLY CHRISTIAN

• Eusebius on Constantine (in his ecclesiastical history)
• The Lives of Desert Fathers
• St. Anthony

LATE ANTIQUE

• Sulpicius Severus’s Life of St. Martin
• Gregory of Tours on Clovis’s conversion
• Bede’s Life of Cuthbert

EARLY MEDIEVAL

• Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne
• Notker’s Life of Charlemagne

LATE MEDIEVAL

• Life of St. Francis of Assisi
• Life of St. Roch

The Mad Libs looked like this:

Vitae Mad Libs

Roman               Late Antique                   Carolingian

_______1_______

Adj. (describing the individual of the Vita)

_______2_______

Adj. (describing the individual of the Vita)

_______3_______

Vb. (describing an action of the individual)

_______4_______

Vb. (describing an action of the individual)

_______5_______

N. (person, deity, group)

_______6_______

N. (person, deity, group)

_______7_______

N. (situation, event)

_______8_______

N. (time of day, event)

_______9_______

Vb.

_______10_______

N. (person, deity, group)

Vita

The _1_ man was _2_.  He _3_ other nations.  He always ­_4_ to _5_ in the morning earning the admiration of _6_.  When _7_ happened in the _8_ he was the first to _9_ his _10_.

This was a short exercise, part of a larger homework assignment, that asked the students to think about the differences in vocabulary that marked this largely laudatory style of composition.  It asked them to further assess the different values of each society.  Students can be asked to select one time period, or can be asked to create separate samples for each period—particularly in this case, as there are only ten words to supply for each sample Vita (singular of Vitae).

While an assignment like this can be modified to work really well with young students focusing on unit vocabulary, who may need to be reminded that ancient Romans did not have cell phones, it also works really well with more advanced students who can read more complex primary sources.  It is a simple way to explore societal norms, but it can also be a way to highlight someone who was bucking the trend if enough primary sources are engaged.  In this way, it is easy to see how this might be developed into a larger project that would cover more ground and call for a deeper analysis.  Not only that, but such an analysis may also reveal which authors were emulated.  A perfect example of this is the Roman historian Livy who is repeatedly emulated during the Middle Ages—especially the Late Medieval—and later in the Italian Renaissance.

Speaking of the Italian Renaissance, this is also an exercise which can emphasize that these eras we use are largely conceits, created for convenience.  The need to break the vastness of the world’s history down into easily manageable units led to the creation of all of these periods and eras.  But, they are also misleading.  Seldom does a culture in history end and abruptly shift to a new culture.  Sometimes there are momentous or catastrophic events that seem to bring to an end one era and make way for another, but it is often difficult to discern how sweeping such changes actually are at all levels of a society.  The Italian Renaissance is often advertised as one such abrupt change, but it is more often than not greatly exaggerated.  It was, for example, far less sweeping than the Muslim acquisition in the matter of a century or two of the Near East, northern Africa and Spain.  All of the attributes of the Italian Renaissance began their development in the 1100s, from cities to economics, and from Roman revival in learning to art.  The biggest difference would be revealed in the artwork and the development of the humanistic attitude that identified everything before it as lacking, until one got so far back as the Romans themselves—an attitude adopted by many subsequent generations of scholars.  Europe never let go of Rome, however, and it continually returned to Roman writers and precedent.

Another challenge of eras and periods is the experience of those living in the different eras and periods.  That is, did everyone experience the Carolingian Renaissance?  How far reaching was it in its society?  What about the people of the 12^th Century Renaissance, or the Italian Renaissance?  Did the experiences of women change?  What about slaves?  None of these considerations damns the usage of periods and eras, but they should encourage us not to be slaves to our constructs.  This is a useful challenge for students and can be introduced in different ways.  These can build off exercises like those suggested above, or can be independently employed.  One way to do this is to emphasize who is writing the sources in the unit’s corpus?  Some of the eras I mentioned were limited in authorship to Church officials—monks, bishops, etc.  Others are more broad.  Also, who was the audience?  By the Late Medieval and the 12^th Century Renaissance, women are already increasingly being included in both authorship and audience.

These sorts of source exercises really challenge students to think about our ability to access different members in society and the limits of the sources perspectives.  It is useful as a thought experiment to ask students to think about what other types of sources a culture might produce—and then supply some samples for review.  Court records, for example, are often a good way to access the experiences of the illiterate, but these have their limits, too.  Archaeology also provides added perspectives.  As do art and music to a degree.

Cultural Illiteracy and the History Vacuum

I recently read a couple of articles that I thought were poignant and related.  (Special thanks, here, to Gleb_Tsipursky for bringing them to my attention via Twitter.)   The articles come from CNN’s “Subject Matters” column, by Sally Holland, and Insider Higher Ed’s guest editorial, “Sorry”, by Stephen Brockmann.

Read the articles by clicking on the links below:

“Subject Matters: Why students fall behind on history,” Sally Holland, CNN.com

“Sorry,” Stephen Brockman, InsideHigherEd.com

These two articles are both talking about the struggle within our society to engage our young citizenry in history (and the humanities) and the vacuum of cultural illiteracy that has developed in recent years.  The two articles point to different causes, but they are addressing the same effect.

Cultural Iliteracy

Western Civilization has certain traditions and assumptions that inform our society; these influence our legal system, political system, moral and ethical codes and educational approaches.  It differs significantly from other traditions; it has flaws both historically and currently; it often neglects other societies and traditions or looks down upon them.  It is also the culture from which we emerged.  Learning about our civilization’s heritage is also a means for acknowledging its shortcomings and provides a stable platform from which to contrast alternate traditions.

Unfortunately, however, traditions that are not passed on from one generation to the next die. If an entire generation grows up largely unexposed to a particular tradition, then that tradition can in essence be said to be dead, because it is no longer capable of reproducing itself. It does not matter whether the tradition in question is imagined as the Western tradition, the Christian tradition, or the Marxist tradition (and of course both Christianity and Marxism are part of the Western tradition). Traditions are like languages: if they are not passed on, they die. Most traditions, of course, have good and bad elements in them (some might argue for Christianity, some for Marxism, relatively few for both), and what dies when a tradition dies is therefore often both good and bad, no matter what one’s perspective. But what also dies with a tradition is any possibility of self-critique from within the tradition (in the sense that Marxism, for instance, constituted a self-critique from within the Western tradition), since a tradition’s self-critique presupposes the existence of the tradition. Therefore the death of a tradition is not just the death of the oppression and tyranny that might be associated with the tradition, but also the death of progressive and liberating impulses within the tradition.

~ Stephen Brockmann

Teachers in high school and middle school notice the problems at a young age.  Students do not retain material, nor do they make necessary connections between time and space as they learn.  We have moved away from memorization drills, which seems to lead to a greater enjoyment, but, while it opens the door for greater opportunities in developing thought processes, there clearly are problems with retention and cognition.  On top of this, students seem to have a lower common-denominator of shared knowledge which requires more teaching than the curriculum may assume necessary.

At Caprock High School in Amarillo, Texas, teacher Jeff Frazer said he’s surprised by how many of his incoming students know that the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 but don’t know that it was a list of grievances against Great Britain.

“I think they learn information by itself, in isolation,” Frazer said of his students. “But putting the big picture together is not happening.”

And during the comparative religions unit at Rutland Middle School in Rutland, Vermont, Ted Lindgren regularly asks students, “What is Easter about?”

He said they invariably bring up the Easter bunny but don’t know the significance of the holiday to Christianity. It shows a lack of cultural literacy, Lindgren said, that they have to compensate for during class.

~ Sally Holland

The field’s potential impact on how we think is itself born out of Western Civilization’s traditions.  This is relevant not only to cultural literacy but cultural fluency and is an important asset for one’s ability to participate in our cultural institutions–not least in our participatory-based political system.  As Brockmann says, we fail to adequately learn even its shortcomings or to understand precisely how this tradition and society contrasts with others.  Without the ability to learn about our own past and its own strangeness and differences we will fail trying to learn about other cultures and traditions.  This also leads to failure in progressive attempts to break from the supposed tyranny of Western Civilization and create a successful inclusive curriculum.  As Sam Wineburg has written in his explanations of historical thinking as a curriculum goal, lacking engagement with our own culture’s foreign attributes will necessarily stunt our ability to deal with the contemporary foreign cultures around us with which we are in ever-increasing contact.

What’s the cause of the current set of circumstances?

Holland’s article focuses on the perspective that is twofold: on the one hand, the amount of content is overwhelming for teachers and, aided by crummy textbooks, often reduced to trivia; on the other hand, history has been deemphasized in schools at an ever-younger level because it is not part of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) testing.  Even in cases where state-mandated tests exist, there is often a large gap between the testing and the period of learning.

World history teacher Troy Hammon of Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis, Indiana, said he is constantly weighing how much “trivia” he teaches, like names, dates and places, and when to try to help his students relive history.

For example, Hammon had his students take on the roles of individuals who may have taken part in the Crusades of the Middle Ages. The students then answered questions based on their knowledge of that time. Hammon believes this helps his students better understand the Middle Ages.

“History grows every year, no matter what,” said Jennifer Kravitz, who teaches world history, civics and economics at Rutland High School in Vermont. “So with this ever-expanding content, teachers are trying to balance teaching history content with helping students learn the essential skills they are going to need.”

~ Sally Holland

The resources provided to teachers at the secondary level emphasize “facts” but not thinking.  (I actually open classes by telling my students that we will not be studying facts, but interpretations of sources–hopefully reliable sources.)  Even so, the challenge of retention and engagement remains.

Brockmann opens his discussion much earlier than NCLB with the cultural wars in the 1980s.  He argues that these were not only counter-productive to either group’s goals, they also gutted the humanities of its respectability and dignity in the minds of the general public.  It created the image of the liberal arts as a bastard child in the academic arena, subordinate to more vocational majors such as business, which is a completely topsy-turvy understanding of education and its roots in Western Civilization.

A quarter of a century later, with the humanities in crisis across the country and students and parents demanding ever more pragmatic, ever more job-oriented kinds of education, the curricular debates of the 1980s over courses about Western civilization and the canon seem as if they had happened on another planet, with completely different preconceptions and assumptions than the ones that prevail today. We now live in a radically different world, one in which most students are not forced to take courses like Western civilization or, most of the time, in foreign languages or cultures, or even the supposedly more progressive courses that were designed to replace them. And whereas as late as the 1980s English was the most popular major at many colleges and universities, by far the most popular undergraduate major in the country now is business.

The battle between self-identified conservatives and progressives in the 1980s seems increasingly like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. While humanists were busy arguing amongst themselves, American college students and their families were turning in ever-increasing numbers away from the humanities and toward seemingly more pragmatic, more vocational concerns.

~ Stephen Brockmann

What is lost?   Perhaps it is irrelevant to you that America’s children are limited in their thinking about Easter to a basket full of candy and gifts delivered by the Easter bunny, but it is a tragedy regardless of whether those children are raised as Christians.  This reflects an unfortunate reordering of our values and mores–and I am not insisting on a Christian society, here.  The questions are broader than religion or life viewed through a religion’s perspective.  How do business courses prepare students for the cultural interactions of the modern world?  How do they replace philosophy courses that ask us how to think about how best we should live?  By what means do they teach the next generation to communicate, argue and understand rhetoric?  In fact, business schools must add such tangential courses to their programs because they recognize that their students are not getting a well-rounded education beyond the major.

How is it solved?

Indeed, how?  It requires a re-commitment to our society’s roots, even if we dispute the value of it’s ideals and practices.  It is not necessary to glorify it, but it is necessary to learn it.  We cannot possibly expect students to understand the conflicts that exist today or the necessity for self-education and participation in the community and civics without some grounding in what got us here–and I understand this to extend beyond our Founding Fathers, just as they looked beyond their British heritage in the founding of a new American civilization.  The value of testing-based education has been questioned long before NCLB and the idea that a multiple choice test can adequately evaluate a student’s ability to think historically is, naturally, absurd.

Brockmann believes that we have truly lost something, which is why he entitles his op-ed, “Sorry”.  Holland’s teachers appear to have few answers as well, though their myopic  concern about NCLB and state testing requirements smells like a scapegoat.  Naturally, students‘ lives have changed from the 1980s–not just their habits and activities, but also the way their brains develop as a result.  Will instructors be able adapt as necessary within the systems that exist–those systems born out of Western Civilization?  Probably.  When and what will be lost (and need to be recovered by later generations)?  Good question.  Students of the breadth and depth of Western Civilization will recall that the Romans looked back to the Greeks.  In succession, the Carolingians, 12th Century scholars, Renaissance Europeans and Enlightened thinkers all looked back to the Greeks and Romans following a decline in such interest and remembrance.  Enlightened thinkers looked back to the Renaissance, as well.  So, perhaps we are due for another flourishing in the long history of ideas from our extensive heritage.