Cole, Elizabeth A. (Ed.) (2007). Teaching the Violent Past: History Education and Reconciliation. Reviewed by Ricardo D. Rosa, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Cole, Elizabeth A. (Ed.) (2007). Teaching the Violent Past: History Education and Reconciliation. Rowman & Littlefield Pp. 376         ISBN 978-0742551435 Reviewed by Ricardo D. Rosa University of Wisconsin, Madison November 14, 2008 Elizabeth A. Cole’s collection of essays in Teaching the Violent Past: History Education and Reconciliation parenthetically references important debates in the field of education – particularly social studies and history education. The text circulates around debates such as the purpose of history education (intrinsic vs. extrinsic positionalities), the role of history in fashioning “national integration,” constructivism versus transmission models of history education, political indoctrination or “facilitator” type of pedagogical inclinations and key themes in sociology of knowledge and culture including classic Marxian debates on base and superstructure models which impinge on how we are to understand the role of historical text in the process of reconciliation. (Although the text does bring up these debates, I am mischaracterizing the language it invokes.) Indeed the very paradigm through which historical engagement with violence is assessed from histories from below to post-structuralism’s questioning of whether or not one can arrive at historical truth are all present in the text, although these theoretical debates are not sustained throughout at a deep level. It is an exemplar text on nine cases of reconciliation that one may utilize as an entry point to deeper debates in historiography, form more comprehensive reconciliation policy, and that can be exploited by social movements in the effort to ground more concrete forms of justice seeking. The text is well organized. It raises standard questions on the topic and arrives at important, although predictable conclusions. I will initiate this review by pointing out the major conclusions of the text. I will then proceed with aspects of the text I found to be under-developed and omissions important to the project of reconciliation. I will end with how a teacher might make use of this text, since its very title ‘Teaching the Violent Past’ signals an immediate pedagogical encounter. Teaching the Violent Past: Predictable and Uneven Conclusions Several conclusions are reached by the different authors of this text. Obviously, these conclusions must be read in alignment with the local context of engagement. Due to the limitations of space, I will highlight those conclusions (in no particular order) which I feel to be relevant cross contextually – even though they are not invoked in all of the case studies here. First, there is no stability in the way history texts encode the past since the past is always re-interpreted based on “evolving national needs…[and] shifting political control…[and major] political events (Chapman, in this text).” The way in which the text arrives at this first conclusion is at times simplistic. To great a focus is placed on ordinary political establishments and policy making as opposed to the role of politics from below and the social tensions embedded in the project of interpreting the past as a result of their presence. Here, I would certainly include the very resistance to history education that students bring to the classroom. Second, in a rare moment in the text and in contradiction to the point I made above, Takashi Yoshida concludes that “commitment to promoting reconciliation in East Asia cannot be expected to come from above (p.74).” Of course, I would extend this not only to East Asia, but throughout all the cases presented. Third, Julian Dierkes in line with a number of scholars focusing in on the European Union and how this economic and political structure functions to re-define the boundaries of the nation state and the citizen, emphasizes that in the case of Germany increased political and economic Europeanization has led to the centralization of discourses of interconnections between nations. This certainly becomes an important point for further research in the field. Dierkes also concludes that although the focus of history writing from “below” that began in the 60’s lent weight to more accurate accounts of Germany’s victims, it also led to a loss of moral clarity particularly regarding the Holocaust. This conclusion is suspicious given the extensive scholarly industry on the holocaust and its inclination to be manipulated to further the cause of human misery and simultaneously eclipse important moral questions raised as they intersect with other exploitative and outright genocidal crimes of the past and present. Fourth, history textbooks need to be dethroned (Clark, in this text). Instead, more use needs to be made of texts produced by Aboriginal people themselves, primary sources, and protest songs. All of these suggestions are important, yet important questions are left open. Scholars who identify with groups victimized historically are not necessarily producing material in the interest of the people they claim to be representing and to include only one type of discourse amounts to an essentialized construction of the entire group. Furthermore, how teachers actually take up these “alternative” materials is debate-able. In my own teaching, my students and I have found value in deconstructing dominant discourse in textbooks and we have had fruitful dialogues on how these texts are produced and marketed. Fifth, in analyzing the case of Northern Ireland, Alison Kitson (who extensively deals with how teachers articulate the issues) correctly argues that the role of the teacher is key in promoting reconciliation. She fully accounts for obstacles placed before teachers making it difficult to centralize reconciliation as an objective: teaching diverse groups, the pressure to follow prescribed curricula, the preparation for exams, the pressure to construct engaging lessons, and so on. Kitson also observes that the geographic location of schools play a role in pressuring teachers towards “safe” teaching. She states that this is really a position connected to their perception of possible negative consequences rather than actual risks they run. Teacher education programs therefore are critical in their role of assisting teachers to be prepared in tackling controversial issues, challenging misconceptions, and in making present-past connections. She also concludes that more genuine enquiry-based pedagogical approaches are necessary for the project of ongoing reconciliation. Of course, more important is how this methodology is ultimately taken up, since it is possible to implement any methodology regressively. Sixth, Rafael Valls, in documenting the challenges of representing a conflictive past following the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, invokes the need for analysis of “conservative and authoritarian right wings (p.170)” who are most opposed to restitution of past injustices. Under-developed, but also important is his discussion of the need for market analysis in order to understand non-state imposed self censorship of textbooks. Valls also overlaps with others in this text in his call for the de-centering of teacher centered classrooms and the pedagogical formations of connections between past and present. Seventh, in the aftermath of extensive violence, truth commissions may serve important roles in officializing histories that may be connected to the process of reconciliation. However, these commissions need to not allow institutions off the hook and need to “provide a benchmark and framework out of which further discussion can take place (p.193).” Oglesby, in analyzing the educational scene in Guatemala and Bleiker and Hoang analysis of Korea correctly assert that democratic cultures flourish only through democratic cultures and institutions. Teaching the Violent Past: Underdeveloped Themes and Omissions Just prior to writing some initial notes for this review, I accessed my email to retrieve the latest news on an 8th grade county history exam for my students, having yet to receive it. The first email I turned to was one from a high level county social studies administrator. I was immediately drawn, not to the body of the text as that is always quite predictable, but rather to what has become fashionable in institutional emails, the signature quote. This one read: "The fate of the empire depends upon the education of the youth…" Aristotle. Perhaps this was the clearest and most honest defense of this administrator’s position as the anchor between public education, the industrial testing complex, and the ongoing effort to subvert democracy by way of school privatization. The quote above signals one of the most enduring themes of history education and the process of ongoing nationalism: that is, the State simply will not allow the inclusion of historical narratives, however truthful, that function to undermine its legitimacy. If these narratives are included they are assimilated on dominant terms. As the Japanese playwright Akira Kurosawa (1982) has so succinctly claimed, “human beings are not capable of being honest with themselves about themselves.” I would extend the quote from individual realities to the way in which historical memory is (re-)encoded nationally through standard history textbooks. To move closer to historical accuracy would require the presence and constant formation of social movements able to rupture the discursive frames through which dominant historical narratives are made to make sense. Yet this effort at inclusion is insufficient. The deconstruction of the dominant historical text would require not just the inclusion of buried and marginalized histories, but a fundamental transformation of the way history is thought about culturally and the way in which it is done. Several of the authors capture this (in part) in their respective chapters. Indeed, Audrey R. Chapman in her discussion of the teaching of history summarizes in the after-word: The manner in which history is taught can be as important as its content, especially when the teaching is linked with efforts to promote democratic values and a human rights culture. The rote learning techniques and emphasis on memorization traditional in many school systems are antitethical to the development of a capacity for critical thinking and true learning competence… If they are to develop a historical consciousness with the ability to understand and interpret the experiences and conditions of life in the past and link them to the present and future, they need to become active participants in the process of learning (p.324). History textbooks worldwide continue to be read as if they are authoritative texts significantly closed from interpretation – this has, in part, been achieved through transmission models of education or what Paulo Freire called “banking” (Freire, 1970). Yet pedagogy must move beyond simply creating classrooms where dialogue and debate are valued. Beyond suffocating students with historical “facts,” very little emphasis is placed in most classrooms on exploring the role of historians and the collusion of intellectuals in crimes against humanity. An honest journey into any historical text must begin with a thorough commitment to the view eloquently captured by the historian James Lowen (1995) that “history is furious debate informed by reason.” No historical text will be all inclusive, yet we can approach the task of reading the historical narrative from an epistemology of un-containment that succeeds in posing the critical questions: Who is telling this story? What community of readers does the author construct? From whose perspective is this story told? Whose voices are absent from this text? What interests does this particular narrative serve? What is being shut out, even in the attempt to include? A number of the chapters in this text succeed in asking these questions to different degrees. Alison Kitson points out that one success of the Schools History Project (SHP) in Northern Ireland, a project established in the 70’s in reaction to the declining popularity of history in schools, is that it de-centered the teaching of history as grand-narrative “that implied some type of inevitability about the Irish “problem”- greater attention was paid to the ways in which historical knowledge was constructed (p.126).” Students were therefore better able to problematize the various constructions of historical knowledge. Beyond these questions, we must create spaces where the emotional engagement with critical questions both in history and in the present is anchored to positive political projects that allow youth a sense of hope. Cole’s collection of essays and their attempt to address some of these key questions are impressive even as the book meanders around the notion that teachers should also take a political position even as they construct those spaces for students to debate the key questions above. To not do so, invariably speaks to a hidden curriculum through which students learn that adults should not have political positions or disclose them publicly. This is certainly a hypocritical lesson that prevents any attempt at reconciliation and the (re) building of democratic cultures. Although the text does include the importance of pedagogical methods in the process of reconciliation, I found the discussion under-developed. Perhaps deeper questions could have been raised and points made regarding the deepening of democratic cultures in schools. Student voice must be welcomed and the space for the articulation of resistance not only to the text but also to context (i.e. the position of the teacher and other students) must be nurtured. This pedagogical inclination functions to apprentice youth into a critical discourse capable of engaging texts at multiple levels of historical truth. While we should push for multiple representations of history, assisting youth in drawing out their critical capacity to deconstruct what has been culturally constructed as “authoritative text” is equally, if not more important. This would require a widening of what we engage as “curriculum.” Critical and sustained dialogues must be engaged regarding standardized testing, power in the classroom, the culture of the institution of schooling and so on. To question how textbooks close down democratic possibilities without simultaneously looking at the various ways in which the institution of schooling structures misery and reproduces inequality amounts to a counter productive pedagogy. Youth, in the U.S., who are engaging history texts that are applauded for multiple representations of the U.S.-Mexico war and the aggressive and outright criminal intervention of the U.S. and yet are placed in classrooms behind the school’s stage due to their subordinate linguistic status (a classic practice in U.S. schools) remain subordinated curricularly. Institutional neglect speaks as forcefully to non-reconciliation as the omission and lies in textbooks. Both should be part of curricular concerns. The democratization of information must take place while simultaneously democratizing the institution of schooling. Furthermore, our pedagogies need to be linked to wider concerns that position us in ways where the brutal realities of poverty, racial discrimination, heterosexism, patriarchy, and the oppression of “illegal” (as if this marker is even possible) immigrants moves through us all. Let me highlight the case of the U.S. here for a moment. The fact that Cole’s text does not include the U.S. is an astounding omission. The text also neglects cases in Africa. Of course, this neglect is of no small consequence. As Michael Apple (1991) has observed, “we must give serious attention to changes in official knowledge in those nations that have sought to overthrow their colonial or elitist heritage. Here, the politics of the text takes on special importance, because the textbook often represents an overt attempt to help create a new cultural reality (p.11).” Cole’s work could have traveled greater theoretical depth if colonial, anti-colonial, and “post”-colonial historiographies were mined. This omission reads as not just a mere oversight, but a clear move that plays into the ideological position that what is done here and what is done in our name abroad does not constitute the form of violence which the text deems worthy of engagement. In a post 9-11 U.S. where the impulse towards a construction of a victim mentality runs rampant, this omission is significant. Significant connections are not made between the violence that the U.S. has done in the world and the violence returned. Furthermore, the nation was founded and built on extreme violence which was always in ironic contrast to the official narratives encoded in texts like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. When not unleashing blatant attacks on African American women and children, Bill Bennett, the former Secretary of Education from 1985 to 1988 and the former director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under George H. W. Bush, likes to spar with intellectual giants. In debating (well, he did the best he could) Chomsky, he asked the question and proceeded with his own answer: “Is there any nation that acknowledges its errors and its sins and its crimes and the things it has done that are not consistent with its principles more than the United States? No, there is not (CNN, May 30, 2002).” Granted, Bennett’s assertion here is an ethnocentric exaggeration, but the reality is that history textbooks are certainly more inclusive of marginalized narratives today than prior to the 1960s civil rights movement and the rise of critical histories. Again, these marginalized narratives are included in ways that do not discomfort the descendants of those who pillaged the land, commodified and raped black and brown bodies, relegated poor white people to a life of desperate servitude and engagement in wars for the protection of their own privileged status while simultaneously constructing racialized narratives that kept these same people in hope for the protection and privileged life that white supremacy promised. Furthermore, U.S. schools actually do a better job on fixating on the horrors of the holocaust while simultaneously skimming the genocide of Native Americans and remaining selectively silent on Israel’s atrocities in the Middle East (Finkelstein, 2000). Bennett is right that there is some inclusion. Yet, applying Bennett’s own conclusion and his insistence that there is a great nation because of its acknowledgement of past crimes, where does that leave us in a reality where: Columbus Day celebrations are the norm (a celebration of genocide), Lakota infant mortality rate is five times higher than the U.S. average, teen suicide rates hover at 150% more than the national average, 97% of Lakota live below the poverty line, unemployment is at 85% (Lakota Freedom Delegation, 2007), historic uranium mining on Navajo land and unregulated water sources flowing into the land has created long term effects of cancer still unaddressed and treaty rights continue to be a source of tension between the government and a number of Native American nations. Acknowledging past crimes continues to be important, yet we need to also construct pedagogies able to link the various emotions that arise in the classroom as a result of such acknowledgement to positive political projects that address the current manifestations of those crimes. This requires us to not only resist rote teaching and standardized testing in favor of dialogue and debate; it also means that we must be ready to rupture the four walls and be involved in social movements and direct action. Reconciliation is meaningless if youth are only seen as players in a democracy of the future rather than as perfectly capable human beings to engage democracy in the present. Pedagogies that simply deconstruct the historical narrative may easily slip into an additive multiculturalism or a voyeuristic tourism of past violence and injustices that function to simply keep youth awake in classrooms. We need not engage in pointless debates on whether or not textual reconciliation produces economic redistribution, a more humane culture, and so on. Textual reconciliation must be connected to a social justice discourse that refuses to disconnect such moves to the current lived realities of material and cultural oppression. There are glaring omissions in this text that should come as no surprise given its genesis in the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs – a centrist organization. The organization has provided a stage and a haven for scholars whose ideas I don’t consider centrist but cryptic conservatism that functions to set parameters on the discursive range of the projects it supports. The list includes the orientalist leanings of Bernard Lewis, the seductive globalization advocacy of Thomas Friedman, and the slippery discourse of Lou Dobbs’ anti-outsourcing while minimizing his racist immigration rhetoric. I don’t mean to claim that this text is conservative in its treatment of violence and reconciliation. In the end, any move towards the creation of a more humane world must be applauded. What I am claiming is that it is limited discursively and so it shuts out important lines of inquiry. In its introduction the text lays out the hope of textual reconciliation and the basic task of history education in the service of meaningful reconciliation. Cole writes that …new history textbooks and programs can help to establish a new narrative of the nation, including a new portrayal of the self and those previously designated as Other, either before conflict or as a result of the process of the conflict itself. Former enemies or excluded groups who might have been largely omitted from official histories can be brought back into the national narrative as agents who made positive contributions to the life of the nation (p.20)…[She continues] This process implies promoting students’ ability to approach the past with scholarly detachment, with moral judgments suspended, and then to use their knowledge to contribute to an enhanced moral understanding of present dilemmas and their own future obligations (p. 22). One of the core assumptions here is that history education and the process of textual reconciliation only takes place in the realm of formal institutions and in texts advocated by adoption committees and the state. This excludes informal sites of social interaction and intellectual production such as: the village square, film (both mainstream and independent productions), summer camp, alternative radio, internet based mediums (blogs and the like), community theatres of all types, stand up comedy shows, or as one African American student in my history class recently confided after posing a deep question to the class regarding the Black Power movement, “I get my information from the barber shop.” Many students (particularly marginalized students) already enter the classroom with diverse discourses regarding past conflicts or apply counter-establishment discourses on current conflicts to questions centering on the past. Furthermore, a history text that inadequately represents the crimes of those who are dominant does not signify unitary readings particularly when we consider class struggles, racial oppression, levels of political clarity, and other forms of difference. These counter readings are also usually more pronounced when social movements are on the ground. Also problematic is the notion that “present dilemmas and future obligations” can be understood and acted upon within a simplistic notion of “national narrative.” There is value in problematizing the role of states in producing violence and reconciliation processes (or lack thereof) after the fact. However, such an affiliation to the nation state evades important questions regarding globalization, transnational structures that produce misery in the lives of many, and eclipses the role of transnational movements in pushing the boundaries of reconciliatory projects. This aspect of the book is also underdeveloped. Nancy Fraser eloquently observes that in “the wake of transnationalized production, globalized finance, and neoliberal trade and investment regimes, redistribution claims increasingly trespass the bounds of state-centered grammars and arenas of argument (Fraser, 2008).” Considering that major transnationals have shown greater profit than the gross national product of many economies and that major crimes are being produced by these deterritorialized corporations, one might conclude that although narratives like Cole’s text are reflective and engaging; the text may be preparing us for “future obligations” which may be non-existent or severely underdeveloped. If history textbooks fail to absolve (highly unlikely) the Bush administration and the legislative branch for entering an illegal war in Iraq and massacring hundreds of thousands what will they say about the complicity of corporations in fashioning foreign policy prior and in their crimes against humanity during the war. Ruthless environmental violence and crimes against humanity launched by corporations seem to fall outside the scope of the reconciliatory project sought in this text. Furthermore, little is said about runaway capitalism and market fundamentalism? Current U.S. history books are severely limited in their discussion of these matters. There may very well be some discussion of racism, patriarchy, and so on; yet the evils of capitalism firmly embedded in all of these markers are heavily underdeveloped. I’m convinced that the major limitation in this text centers on its use of ambiguous language. On page one, Cole writes that “the complex process by which deeply divided societies recover the ability to function normally and effectively after violence is known as reconciliation (p.1).” Granted, the term “reconcililiation” is explored deeply, particularly in the first chapter. However, terms of reference such as “deeply divided societies,” “post-conflict societies” (p.321) and monolithic conceptions of “violence” actually functions in the reification of those crimes against humanity which the book treats. All societies are marked by multiple and different social cleavages. The depth of those cleavages depends on where you stand in relation to its material effects. All divisions, all efforts to produce misery through the subordination of respective groups whether materially or symbolically must be treated as violent collisions with the potential of the ascendancy of more violence. To not frame violence within wider discursive parameters seems to me to be irresponsible political engagement. The assumption of this bounded geography of violence, or what Cole calls “severe human rights violations” minimizes the role of institutionalized structures that produce as much if not more misery and certainly perpetuates subordinate social relations over time. The social legitimation of violence against women in a myriad of forms is a case in point. Because this text does not open up the boundaries of “violence,” it does not treat language as a key site of struggle. As Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (1995), as well as countless anti-colonial theorists point out, language “remains the most potent instrument of cultural control. Language provides the terms by which reality may be constituted; it provides the names by which the world may be ‘known.’ Its systems of values – its suppositions, its geography, its concept of history, of difference, its myriad gradations of distinction – becomes the system by which social, economic, and political discourses are grounded (p.283) Discussions regarding the production of history texts in the dominant language and the sociolinguistic ideologies encoded are absent in this text. Is it possible, in the case of Canada for example, to arrive at indigenous textual recognition and reconciliation when the very effort speaks only to changes in the English textbook? Does this further normalize the centrality of the dominant language and assist in the seizure of efforts at indigenous language revitalization? These questions should also be central to this project. Illuminating Pedagogy and Teacher Education One of the key lessons that educators can extract from this text is that efforts at reconciliation through history texts alone moves us little towards the rupturing of subordinate social relations. Our very notion of curriculum must be widened. ‘Text’ needs to be understood and engaged as any opening that encodes meaning. Multiple sites where historical memory resides need to be theorized and pedagogically engaged. Furthermore, historical transformation requires a commitment to blur the boundaries between schools and the social context within which they exist. Teachers and students need to align themselves with political projects and social movements seeking to secure basic social goods for all and a more respectful and humane world – pushing the boundaries of reconciliation. Movement in this direction would also require teacher education programs to move beyond technical discourses on education and multicultural inclinations to self-reflection. Teachers must engage strategies that speak to the formation of flexible learning communities grounded in the community of one’s political praxis that is capable of intervening in the exploitative agenda of current schooling, which functions to de-skill teachers, limit their time, restrict the teaching of social studies and history, erase public space and thereby abstract reconciliation as a central objective. References Apple, Michael &Christian-Smith;, Linda K. (Eds). (1991). The Politics of the Textbook. NY: Routledge. Ashcroft, Bill; Griffiths, Gareth & Tiffin, Helen. (Eds.) (1995) The Post-colonial Studies Reader. NY: Routledge. Chomsky, Noam and Bennett, Bill. (May 30, 2002). On 9-11: Noam Chomsky Debates Bill Bennett. CNN. Finkelsein, Norman. (2000). The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. Verso. Fraser, Nancy. (Forthcoming, 2008). Abnormal Justice. Critical Inquiry. Freire, Paulo. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York. Continuum. Kurosawa, Akira. (1982). Something Like an Autobiography. Translated by Audie E. Bock. (First Edition). NY: Knopf. Lakota Freedom Delegation. (December 21, 2007). We are a Sovereign Nation: A Declaration of Independence from the USA. Counterpunch. www.counterpunch.org/lakota12212007.html Lowen, James. (1995). Lies My Teacher Told Me. Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. NY: Simon and Schuster. About the Reviewer Ricardo D. Rosa is a doctoral student in the department of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His areas of study include: curriculum theory and research, language, literacy, and culture, and social studies education.