The Citizenship Business

This is the second installment (after “Why You Love History”) of something I’ve been working on. Hope you like it. —Jim

My principal professional credential is an unprepossessing one: I am a high school history teacher. I’ve spent my life lacking the lectern of the tenured professor, or the platform of a major media outlet. But I do have some compensating attributes that are relevant here.

One thing I’ve acquired in large measure because of my immersion in the past is a sense of proportion: I’m good at thinking—and talking—about time multi-dimensionally. I hope you’ve already seen that. There’s sometimes a temptation as one ages to see the world in terms of decline, as the changeable habits and circumstances of youth fade away and present you with ones that are disagreeable in their novelty. And I’ll confess I sometimes succumb to this (it’s endemic to aging, like arthritis). But when applied intelligently, experience is also a tool for apprehending continuity amid change, of connecting people and situations that may have more in common than they may initially appear.  This happens to be my specialty.

Another is that I’ve spent my working life among the young—indeed my job involves inhabiting classrooms filled with replenishing stocks of people who never age from year to year. There are two important ramifications for this. The first is they are my homework: I can only be useful to my students insofar as I pay attention to who they are, where they are, and how we need to adapt to the world we share, a task made easier when we understand how we got here. One way I’ll know it’s time to retire is when I lose interest in them. That fear is a motivation to stay alive. Fortunately, I’ve always had kids who have inspired me, have given me hope, have kept me young at heart for a little while longer. Curiosity is the most precious raw material in the world.

The other ramification of working with the young, and a credential that I consider important here, is that I have learned I can take nothing for granted when it comes to talking about the past. My charges are, by definition, ignorant. It’s my job to inform them, but information is meaningless unless it is framed, placed in a context, or sequenced into a story tailored to a moment and an audience. I don’t have the luxury of a pre-existing discourse to speak in historical shorthand the way a professional scholar does; the term historiography is meaningless to these kids. I have to understand such things, but they don’t. One of the biggest mistakes I hear my peers make is their effort to get students to “think like a historian.” I think to myself: God forbid: there are no jobs for professional historians anymore (better to aim for a more plausible profession like professional wrestling or Hollywood acting). In any case, my job is not in the history business. It’s in the citizenship business. That means using stories from the past to help my students think better. So they’ll act better.

It also means helping them feel better.

I’ll talk more about that next time.