Is it appropriate to connect current events to historical ones?
Our study of the Red Scare points to the affordances and limitations of our instinct to organize.
One of the stickiest lessons to learn, and one of the ones that I find myself relearning over and over again, is that organization is less useful, in itself, than we’re tempted to believe.
I was good at separating and grouping both things and ideas very early on; it came naturally to me, and it allowed me to control the mechanisms of my life in a way that I, a very anxious child, found comforting. When teachers began to teach us to categorize – at my Montessori school, we began in nursery school – everything they taught felt intuitive. The idea of placing like with like brought me pleasure. “Organization” gave name to things I already did, like separating my Skittles into little piles by color and eating them in order from worst to best (green to red, for the record) so that I could maximize the feeling of delayed gratification.
The implications of this apparently-natural process are wide, and claims that separating and ordering are entirely instinctive can be used to justify discriminatory beliefs (the Kenneth and Mamie Clark doll test in Brown v. Board of Education is one of the best known examples). It took becoming a teacher and working closely with neurodiverse students to fully recognize that other people’s inability to organize isn’t just a sign that they lack discipline: rather, organization isn’t actually natural for every person, the way that people like me want to believe.
Because it’s not always natural or easy, teachers, especially in middle and elementary schools, teach students to organize information, to group it and separate it. Those skills can grease the productivity wheel and, on an intellectual level, give those students access to higher-order intellectual skills like problem solving and communication. At some point in high school, though, it becomes a teacher’s job not only to teach students to group and separate, but also to introduce them to the dangers and limitations of those organizational practices. That’s where the trouble, and the opportunity, begins.
Especially during the junior year, when we teach US History and Literature, students realize that the neat categories of good and bad or connected and disconnected can’t really contain ideas and historical events in the way that they seemed to when those students were younger. Students look for the comfort of a list of examples of corruption, for example, but such a list makes it too easy to say something like: “(insert current event) is just like Watergate!” The connection is only valuable insofar as it allows students to imagine possible parallels, identify differences, and evaluate how to response to a connected but distinct event in a historically unique context.
In our junior year course, my teaching team and I have arrived in the 1950s and 60s, so we’re teaching the students about McCarthyism and the Red Scare. We also try to explore the questions of paranoia and loyalty through different media, like literature and art; the literary text that I’m teaching right now, John Okada’s No-No Boy, introduces students to not only the concern about loyalty but also the way that paranoia about outsiders and enemies shapes the relationships between specific racial and ethnic communities and the United States more broadly (both in the political and the cultural sense). Naturally, we’re also extending those concepts into present-day applications.
That connection is a form of categorizing – lumping by association – that’s drawing a lot of ire these days. What no one, proponent or critics, seems to think about is the context that leads into and extends out of that lumping process. The longer process that extends into and from organization is what makes the organizing process valuable.
I say that we “naturally” extend the subject matter into the present because, as I’ve established in previous newsletters, significant research has affirmed what also seems obviously true: that student motivation and engagement increases when students can see connections between course content and present-day life. In the case of the Red Scare, examples of connected concerns and paranoia fill the pages of our newspapers right now. This week, as I read a backissue of The New Yorker from April, this essay on Franklin Tao’s arrest as a Chinese scientist-spy really caught my attention. Not only the targeting of a specific group of people, but also the repetition, from officials, of the idea of “loyalty” echoed many of my students’ thoughts in response to our lessons about decades past.
For proponents of the DOJ’s China Initiative, this connection itself – however obvious it is even to the most literal-minded teenager – is dangerous and possibly even inappropriate to include in my curriculum. The connection between the two – a grouping of events and movements that students might call “American Paranoia” or “CIA investigations into outsiders,” depending on the aspects of the stories that align most in their minds – can look terrifying because, to those who see categories as means instead of ends, the connection insinuates critique. Adults today tend to jump to the conclusion that association is damnation, but for critical thinking, association and organization just the starting point for a nuanced conversation or exploration.
It’s a mistake to assume that categorization affords all items in the category a shared moral valence or outcome, and it’s dangerous to assume that in categorizing, all thinkers are insinuating such close, unquestioned similarity. This process of identifying a theme from history and using it to think through a present-day predicament is one of the primary processes that the paranoid anti-Critical Race Theory movement seeks to attack. But it’s a process that students and teachers and private citizens have done throughout history, because it reflects the reason why we teach History in the first place: to learn how to act and behave in the present based on the trials and errors of the past. A healthy society rests on its citizens’ ability to think historically.
It is the responsibility of teachers to encourage and ensure that their students make effective categorizations that organize the information in their worlds into relevant “buckets”; then, it is also their responsibility to teach them how to understand that those buckets are tools for deeper thinking, not ends in themselves.
What makes introducing students to the links between the past and the present challenging is that it can be hard to tell whether students are seeing the links or teachers are foisting their own, personal impressions upon students. If teachers do the connecting, and if teachers allow students to tacitly accept those connections as inherently value, then it’s true, that kind of connecting is dangerous in the classroom. It’s pretty unavoidable that an individual teacher or teaching team might choose a set of present-day issues to connect into a lesson on the past that diverges from what those students’ parents or political heroes want. In categorizing across time, a teacher – or any private citizen – isn’t or shouldn’t be making a truth came, but instead does or should make clear that they’re presenting a position intended to promote thoughtful historical thinking.
If a teacher draws a connection and then asks a student to build on that connection, her example becomes just that, an example of how to use history in our daily lives. Teachers can devise homework assignments that ask students to read newspaper articles and seek connections between rhetoric, events, or conflicts of the moment and the material that students study in their classrooms. They can even invite students to assess the assertions that they, the teachers, make (yes, this requires teachers to be willing to recognize that they are wrong). Teachers can assign essays that challenge students to make connections about the relevance of history and assert what they’ve learning – in fact, they can and they should. Students need to do more than just identifying and hearing about those connections and categorizations; they also need to explain them in enough detail that they recognize the nuances and drawbacks of their own arguments. They need to learn enough about the events that they compare to see that those events are rarely qualitatively parallel, and to navigate the use value of the comparison acknowledging that history doesn’t quite repeat itself, but rather, it echoes itself.
As a high school teacher, my job isn’t to teach students that things are categorically different or characteristically the same – it’s to teach them that similarities can also contain differences, and also that two things can be different but not categorically so. This is what it means to evaluate information. The China Initiative is not equal to McCarthyism, but, I think, it’s motivated by Red Scare paranoia that, we’re seeing now, is more deeply rooted in American society than we often acknowledge. The link is important only if I recognize both the perspective it offers me and the limitations of that perspective.
Our public discourse seldom reflects this kind of thinking.
The way that adults launch historical references around (often not contextualized or inclusive of meaningful nuanced) teaches children that their teachers’ encouragement to properly evaluate information doesn’t actually matter. Similarly, adults’ tendency to shut down others who connect historical moments to the present day by claiming “well, those are two different things” directs kids away from critical thinking and toward oversimplification, by pretending that complete matching or absolute difference are the only two options available in our minds. What kind of difference do you actually mean? How exactly is that connection you’re making relevant, and what differences or inequalities do you need to acknoweldge in the parallel? Opening those doors to complexity opens the doors to actual critical thinking.
Even as adults, many of us lean on organization to get through the day. We organize our calendars, coordinate them on Google, use Google to learn about the world, and sort what we learn into the useful boxes that will allow us to solve problems. The structure we create for ourselves is essential for our functioning, but if we treat it as an end – “once I see a connection, I have a good argument to make” – rather than a means – “once I order my ideas, I can think about whether and how and in which ways they connect” – we let ourselves avoid critical thinking in the name of efficiency and argumentation.
Connecting the past to the present without much thought beyond is dangerous. But that’s no reason to stop our kids from making those connections, from enacting the organization that many of us naturally do and the rest of us are taught to. Instead, it’s on all of us – in each field of industry, in our private and public lives – to challenge ourselves to use that instinct in the name of deeper, higher goals.
Your points about connecting the past to the present are explained very well. Certainly the skills of critical thinking are useful for connecting the Red Scare to current paranoia about CRT, for example. It is important to fully understand where there are similarities and differences. The same applies to connecting the present to the past, and critical thinking becomes even more essential. Contemporary journalism sometimes forgets that we can't layer a set of 2022 values on decisions and practices made 50, 100, or 200 years ago. As you say, we can make connections based on categories, but we have to resist judging the past based on our current standards and cultural characteristics.