Learning history less about learning what happened than why

Wednesday, 23 March 2022

“In 2022, when misinformation on everything from the efficacy of vaccines to the motives of journalists threatens to overwhelm societies, the teaching of history and the attendant evaluation of evidence is more important than ever,” writes Morgan Godfery.

Morgan Godfery is a senior lecturer at the University of Otago and te ao Māori editor at Metro. He is a regular opinion contributor to Stuff.

OPINION: Sometimes it’s hard to justify the study of history when other, seemingly superior, forms of knowledge are available.

The advocates for the study of STEM – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – can point to everything from vaccine development to high-rise apartment buildings as triumphs of their particular fields.

Historians might make more modest claims for their field, understanding that apparent breakthroughs – whether vaccines or high-rises – are often contingent on chance encounters or dependent on a certain set of circumstances. Would the “Musket Wars” of the early 19th century, for example, have happened without the impressive current account surplus at the time between the Māori trading tribes and Sydney?

Probably not.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern sits down with Waikato Times journalist Aaron Leaman to talk about the push to get schools teaching New Zealand history. (This video was first published in September 2019.)

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The New Zealand food, flax, timber and marine markets and their proximity to a hungry Sydney made importing everything from muskets to nails possible, so one could argue that the country’s economic settings made the butchery that followed possible. Or perhaps not. Were there other factors at play?

For students of the high school history curriculum in the 20th century, what was learned was often just a series of facts. The date of the Norman Conquest of England (1066) or the date of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (1840). For many years reciting certain dates was a mark of high culture.

But the point of a historical education isn’t just to learn when things happened. It’s to evaluate why things happened, and their continuing impact through the years. And so the chief skill of a historian is the evaluation of evidence.

A good student of history might correctly argue that linking the strength of the early New Zealand economy and its current account surplus with the Musket Wars is a very long bow indeed. At the time the English-speaking world was drowning in arms – think of the American Revolution, the East India Company’s various activities, and the developing conflicts in Australia – and so how could muskets not make their way to New Zealand? And besides, much of the trade in arms was illicit anyway.

Morgan Godfery: “New Zealand’s new history curriculum merely brings us in line with the rest of the world. We’re teaching our own history.”

In 2022, when misinformation on everything from the efficacy of vaccines to the motives of journalists threatens to overwhelm societies, the teaching of history and the attendant evaluation of evidence is more important than ever.

So it’s difficult to take critics of the country’s new history curriculum seriously. In ACT leader David Seymour’s words, the curriculum “threatens to indoctrinate students in left-wing ideas about colonialism, the welfare state, gender identity, and ‘cultural appropriation’”.

I suspect Mr Seymour and the colleagues who share his view haven’t actually read the thing they’re criticising. The curriculum does nothing more than teach orthodox and settled history, whether it’s the events and interpretation of the Treaty of Waitangi or the lead-up to the Springbok tour, and the anti-nuclear protests in that decade of dissent (the 1980s).

New Zealand is something of an outlier in the developed world because we don’t teach our own history. The Americans teach rather zealously the history of their revolution. The Australians teach the founding of their contemporary – that is, colonial – society as well. But in New Zealand that teaching was always optional.

In my high school history class in 2009 we were taught the history of the New Zealand Wars and its historiography as well (in other words, the study of how the understanding of that history of war has changed). But our class and high school was likely an outlier.

When I reached university, many of my friends and colleagues had learned about England’s War of the Roses rather than the much closer, more relevant New Zealand Wars.

So New Zealand’s new history curriculum merely brings us in line with the rest of the world. We’re teaching our own history. This is important for all kinds of important, but perhaps intangible reasons: it helps secure a sense of national identity, it helps us understand why society is structured the way it is – and whether this is good, bad, or somewhere in between – but more importantly it equips a generation of students with the skills they need to evaluate evidence.

Historians work in archives, judging the credibility of sources they find, cross-checking and cross-referencing claims and counter-claims, and building a coherent and cogent narrative from it all. This is what we’re primarily teaching students of the new history curriculum. This is an unqualified good.

In the age of misinformation, that might make history perhaps the most important form of knowledge of all.