Post Truth, Post Knowledge? The Trump Effect and the History Classroom

On Friday, the defence secretary. Michael Fallon said that NATO needed to do more to tackle the “false reality” being propagated by Russia. He argued that Russia’s production of “Fake News” was destabilising western democracy and undermining electoral processes. Claims like these are nothing new. For the last six months, the US has been awash with claims of “Fake News” being put out by both the Republicans and Democrats, and a simple search for the #FakeNews hashtag reveals some terrifying results. I find it striking that a country which was born of the declaration that some truths are self-evident, should find itself at the forefront of a post-truth version of politics.

All of this is very disturbing, not least because if we are in a post-truth world, there is a very real question about whether knowledge is important any more (I would argue that it is more so than ever - more on this soon). Naturally there has been much soul searching and even more hand wringing about how we approach the issue of truth having been downgraded in our political discourse. In some cases, people are drawing historical parallels and suggesting that we learn the warnings of the 1930s; to be on guard against malicious propaganda; to disbelieve the information coming out of the (insert the group you disagree with here) camp; and so on. 

​History lessons and the post-truth discourse
Followers of the Schools History Project will know that one of the founding principles of the movement was to help students see the relevance of history to their lives, and give them some of the tools to help understand it (Schools History Project, n.d.).  Over the last few months, I have seen numerous exhortations in the history teaching community for educators to warn pupils of the dangers of misinformation, and encourage them to be on guard against malign interpretations. Although well intentioned, I think this use of history misses the point of our discipline somewhat. In fact, I wonder if such an approach, namely using history to make pupils sceptical of information, has actually contributed to the post-truth problem.

“There is no such thing as historical truth, only interpretation.” I distinctly remember being told this by my A Level history teacher. I took this epithet quite literally in my A Level coursework, choosing an obscure topic and manipulating the historians to fit my chosen line of argument. There was no comeback on this, my teachers did not have enough knowledge of Polish attempts at unification to challenge my assertions. This served to reinforce the idea that my role as an historian was to make the facts fit my own line of reasoning. It also offers a salient reminder about why it is so important that history teachers are well versed in their discipline!

Even in my first couple of years of teaching, I maintained a similar stance to historical study. I loved introducing kids to the idea of historical interpretations; getting them to query and question the motives of authors; to dismiss problematic accounts and be sceptical of everything. It was brilliant to see kids challenging the books they were given and questioning the motives of the historical authors they encountered. Yet there was always a nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite right.

Looking back on all of this now, I genuinely believe that I, and others have contributed-, and continue to contribute- to a misuse and perversion of history. Indeed, even a cursory reading of the full SHP principles reveals a much more nuanced view of historical interpretations than many history teachers (myself included) have actually offered their students. The SHP for example are supportive of the idea that children should be encouraged to “develop their own opinions” on historical events and interpretations. However, the crucial phrase comes shortly after – such opinions and critiques should be “based on a respect for evidence” (Schools History Project, n.d.). This is where much of my early teaching on historical interpretations fell down, and wherein the danger still lies.
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In this series of blogs, I hope to unpick two main issues with the ways we currently approach historical interpretations in the classroom:

• first, the issue over oversimplification;
• and second, the rejection of historical truth.

I also want to spend some time discussing practical solutions to some of these issues which might be of use in the classroom.

Issue one: over simplification
One of the biggest issues I ran into in my early career was over-simplifying the concept of historical interpretations. Like many, I was content to encourage children to develop a “critical mindset” in the generic sense. What this missed of course was the fact that, by treating criticality as an independent "skill" I was only giving them half the toolset to deal with misinformation. I was effectively training pupils to be mistrustful without the grounding in period knowledge to substantiate such mistrust. A pupil who knows little about the Russian Revolution will struggle to say anything meaningful about Pipes’ or Fitzpatrick’s interpretation of it. I still see cases today where children are being taught to summarily dismiss historical research as “biased” or “inaccurate” rather than engaging with it properly. Even where teachers do engage more fully with interpretations of the past, children are routinely asked to make judgements about them based almost entirely on limited contextual information. A Victorian interpretation of Cromwell is bound to be positive because they loved Cromwell, didn’t they? A modern historian will want to sell books and make money, won’t she?

This generic mistrust of historical interpretation has not come from nowhere; there are strong links to the growth of postmodernism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As Richard Evans has been arguing for some time, the post-modernist stance on historical validity has failed a generation, and continues to have a pernicious impact. Evans argues, and I tend to agree, that we have encouraged a lazy scepticism of all information which has become debilitating to differentiating between fact and fiction; truth and lie; interpretations which are more compelling and those which are seriously lacking. By boiling all interpretation down to personal motive, we have made all information equally problematic to the point where truth becomes irrelevant. Children assume that either all interpretations are equally valid, because they are all open to the criticism of “author bias”, or conversely that no interpretations can be trusted, therefore we may as well pick the one we like best.

Worse than this, we often push children to be overtly sceptical of the interpretations with which we personally disagree. In my early career as a history teacher, I used to teach a unit on interpretations of the British Empire. We spent time unpicking the interpretations of Denis Judd, Lawrence James, and Niall Ferguson on the impact and legacy of the Empire. To my shame, I was often too ready to dismiss Fergusson’s interpretation as the ramblings of a right-wing neo-liberal with too much love for the Empire which “made the modern world”.
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The effect of this? In many ways, this is exactly what we have seen people doing in the US election, the EU referendum, and so on. Time after time we have heard from Trump that “CNN have reported it so it must be #FakeNews”, or that the BBC cannot be trusted to report the feelings of “hardworking” Britons on Brexit. ​People are so used to this lazy scepticism, and so ambivalent to the truth, that they retreat into the comfort of their own personal truths.

Now I fully stand by my view of Ferguson as a rabid neo-liberal, but I have changed my approach to dealing with his interpretations of Empire significantly. No longer do I spend time undercutting his argument by touting his neo-liberal standpoint, instead I encourage classes to engage with his evidence-choices, to note what he has emphasised and de-emphasised. In short to weigh his interpretation by examining the methods of its creation, as well as considering Ferguson’s own approach. It is only through engaging in this disciplinary process of understanding how an interpretation has been created, that we can really begin to challenge it, and in the process, our own beliefs on an issue.

I am going to wrap things up here for now. In my next blog, I will be addressing the issue of historical truth and its connections to the post-truth culture. I want to explore how the notion of historical truth has suffered at the hands of “genericists” and “cultural capitalists” alike, and why we need to be less scared of the term "truth" in our classrooms. 

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