The faculty and participants in the Master's Program are committed to the study and teaching of history and government as disciplines essential at once to both our humanity and our life as citizens.

As citizens, we are part of a particular political community. Government is the study of the principles and institutions through which a body of people organizes its common life. History functions for that community as memory does for an individual. Without memory, an individual has no identity, ultimately, no existence. With false memories, an individual will have a distorted sense of self, misconceptions of personal virtues and vices, and hence little chance of living a better life. Without history, a political community has no identity, ultimately no existence. With false memories, a political community will have a distorted sense of itself, of its strengths and weaknesses, and hence little chance of charting a true course, no matter how it organizes itself.

Making government an object of study assumes that we can escape our present circumstances enough to reflect on them. Similarly, for history to serve us as both human beings and citizens, as we have just argued it does, it must be possible for us to escape ourselves, our present understanding and to understand the past as it understood itself. Is such escape possible? If we begin with the typical assumption that there is a subjective world and an objective world, then we might wonder how we can escape ourselves, the subject. We might even be led to adopt a radical skepticism, the view that escaping the subjective is impossible, that all we can know is our own experience, that the world and those others who inhabit it are in some fundamental sense unknowable. If this were the case, all the more might we conclude that past worlds and their inhabitants are impossible for us to know.

Does such a radical skepticism make sense, however? The most radical skepticism presupposes that we live in a world and we have knowledge of it, for how could we doubt the world, if we did not know it? Having knowledge of the world, however, does not mean that we cannot have doubts about this or that event or be mistaken. But doubts or mistakes are not sufficient justification for thoroughgoing skepticism about the world and those who inhabit it. As the philosopher Donald Davidson has argued, "there need be nothing we are indubitably right about for it to be certain that we are mostly right about the nature of the world. Sometimes skepticism seems to rest on a simple fallacy, the fallacy of reasoning from the fact that there is nothing we might not be wrong about to the conclusion that we might be wrong about everything." (Davidson, p. 45)

Davidson's attack on skepticism or our isolation in an unavoidably subjective world derives from reflection on what must be the case given the common experience of learning a language and communicating. "Words and sentences derive their meaning from the objects and circumstances in whose presence they were learned." Language and thus thought is not an imposition of a subject on a world but evidence of the futility in understanding the world as riven into a subjective realm that must struggle to overcome a gulf that separates it from the objective world. Distinguishing between the "subjective" and "objective" is only possible because the world has, in effect, given itself to us in thought and language, which renders null the notion that we cannot know the world.

More generally, following Davidson's approach, we can argue that there is no unbridgeable gulf between us and those around us. We experience other people as autonomous agents—all too autonomous—who interact with us and thus inhabit a common world with us. This is a primordial or foundational experience and, as Davidson in effect argues, our mistakes and doubts depend on and take place in a world, which includes experience and knowledge of others, to which we firmly if somewhat mysteriously belong.

The past, history's subject, is part of the world we inhabit. We are not walled off from the past, then, since we are not walled off from the world. The passage of time does not affect this. If there is some unbridgeable gulf between us and the past, asks Samuel Wineburg, when does it start, after a year? But if after a year, why not after a month? But if after a month, why not after a minute? Why not instantaneously? If the unbridgeable gulf between us and the past does exist, then it must exist instantaneously. (Wineburg, 1999) But if it exists instantaneously, we are back at something like the erroneous division of the world into a subject, which we know, and an object, which remains always other than us and beyond our understanding. Since this cannot be, then, the present and the past, and the ways of thinking and living of those we encounter in the present and the past, are equally accessible to us. Consequently, the study of history can be the study of the past, not merely the study of our so-called subjective opinions or interpretations of the past. To paraphrase Davidson, to acknowledge, as we must, that we can be and often are mistaken about a past action, about its occurrence or its causes and consequences, does not require or justify a rigid skepticism about all knowledge. As a practical matter, to which we will return, the past and present are accessible to us in different ways, but nonetheless accessible. Also, if we can be open to the past in this way, then we can be open to the future as well, and are not enslaved to whatever current dogmas guide our political life. We are free to understand and thus able to choose.

It is a paradox of the greatest importance for education that although we are not necessarily separated from the world, we often are separated from it. Wineburg presents a compelling example of this (Wineburg, 1999). He describes a very intelligent high school student who, given an assortment of primary documents about the battle of Lexington, learns much about this engagement between colonial volunteers and metropolitan professionals. The student displays admirable traits as a learner, including an ability to monitor his own cognition, which Wineburg calls an "enviable" skill. The student enters into the drama of the battle and tries to experience it as the participants might have. Yet, Wineburg concludes, in the end, the student's comments reveal that his learning was constrained by his inability to escape his own sense of what was appropriate conduct on a battlefield, "to contemplate codes of behavior—duty, honor, and dying for a cause—foreign to his world." The student learned a certain number of facts about the battle but in a larger sense he failed to understand it because he was unable to understand those facts as participants in the battle would have understood them. Because he could not grasp views so different from his own, the student was left with a narrow, impoverished understanding of the human condition. It also left him, as Wineburg suggests, less able to understand an important historical development, the European confrontation with native Americans, which in part manifested itself in different understandings of what was worth fighting for and how the fighting should occur.

The student's experience with the battle of Lexington draws our attention to the fact that while there is no logical impediment to our escaping our own experience and coming to understand others, as a practical matter, such escapes are quite difficult. "Presentism—the act of viewing the past through the lens of the present," Wineburg argues, "is not a habit but a part of human nature, a characteristic way we have of dealing with the world." It is one of an array of what psychologists call heuristics, cognitive shortcuts, that allow us to function in a world that gives us too much information and too little time. These heuristics help explain the paradox that we are at the same time open to the world and others and yet closed off from them.

We understand teaching to be an art that tries to correct our natural inclination to be absorbed in our own present world. Students enter classes with knowledge, presuppositions, experience and opinions. This is the starting point for all learning (Wineburg, 1996, p. 429). Learning and effective teaching must take account of this starting point because it provides the materials that students use to build additional knowledge. The teacher must start where the students start, which is often with a set of received social constructs or stereotypes, prejudices, and opinions, and get them to think through these to build knowledge out of opinion. What we encourage students to build is not just another social construct to replace the one they previously held. Thinking in this way puts us back in the trap of subjectivity, a trap which in fact does not and should not hold us. Accordingly, we understand the building of knowledge and, ultimately subject mastery, to be an active process that begins with social constructs but moves beyond them.

Again, Wineburg provides a useful illustration (Wineburg, 1999). After observing the student dealing with the battle of Lexington, Wineburg presented a collection of original documents on Abraham Lincoln to college students and professional historians. He found that most of these readers, including the professional historians, dealt with the contradictions or ambiguities in Lincoln's words about blacks by placing Lincoln in one of several ready-to-use categories, for example, "racist" or "cynical politician" drawn from their own experience. He describes in detail one historian, however, who at first did this but then, recognizing the complexity of the documentary record, considered other possibilities. The historian in effect asked questions of Lincoln by questioning the documents before him. As he found answers to his questions in the documents, he pressed on, checking these answers against other statements, until he developed "a nuanced and sophisticated understanding of Lincoln's position," one well beyond the stereotypes that satisfied most of the readers.

As students and teachers of history and government, we aspire to be capable of the careful, questioning reading that Wineburg's historian demonstrated. We aspire to make our students capable of such readings. For students and teachers alike, this requires, in Wineburg's words, that we recognize "the narrowness of our contemporary experience" and open ourselves to "the expanse of the history of the species."

Our experience as both students and teachers leads us to conclude that the kind of reading we aspire to and wish to encourage in others is best learned through the use of primary source material. As our most direct unfiltered access to the past, primary sources—diaries, state papers, speeches, letters—pose most forcefully the challenge we face in constructing historical knowledge. History, as a body of knowledge, is built from these documents, as exemplified in the work of the historian whose encounter with Lincoln Wineburg documented. In working with such documents, students learn interpretive skills such as comparing one text with another; assessing what kind of document they are dealing with and how that might affect their understanding of the information it provides; and placing the document in a specific context. (Wineburg, 1991, p. 77) Secondary studies are a convenient and necessary aid in developing a student's understanding of historical context and the workings of government, but even the best of such studies do not offer the potential shock of the unfamiliar provided by primary materials. Properly mediated by a teacher, students can experience this shock and learn from it.

The kind of documents used in the program reflect the focus of the curriculum. It is primarily for teachers of American history, many of whom also often teach government and civics classes. For this reason, the curriculum will focus on what might be called political history. We feel that this focus forms the best basis for addressing the needs of the program's primary student population, since political history allows us to integrate history and government. It is here that history's unavoidable political effect also becomes important. As we have argued, by establishing our corporate memory, American history as a discipline establishes the identity of our body politic. In telling us whence we have come, it inevitably helps shape where we decide to go. This political effect of history is another reason why the coupling of history and government or civics is not adventitious but essential.

The program's emphasis on political history and government does not mean that it will ignore the kinds of history that have come to prominence over the past several decades. Indeed, to do so would make little sense, even if one's concern was solely "the great acts of statecraft." One cannot fully understand the achievement of someone like Lincoln or even the changing content of his language without understanding the social character and structure of mid-nineteenth-century Illinois and America. Our curriculum aims, therefore, to integrate what we have come to know of "the daily routines of ordinary people trying to make ends meet" into a comprehensive study of American history and government.

Because the core of the program is participation in intensive classes, the program's success will depend on creating an atmosphere of mutual respect for the diverse body of students and faculty that we will work to attract. Indeed, we would contradict our view that the study of history enriches our humanity by leading us to understand those in the past as they understood themselves, if we failed to provide an atmosphere in which all participants felt their views and experiences were valued.

References

Davidson, Donald, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001).

Wineburg, Samuel, "Historical Problem Solving: A Study of the Cognitive Processes Used in the Evaluation of Documentary and Pictorial Evidence," Journal of Educational Psychology, 83 (1991).

Wineburg, Samuel, "Subject-Matter Knowledge in the Teaching of History," in Advances in Research on Teaching, Volume 2 (JAI Press Inc., 1991), pp. 305-347.

Wineburg, Samuel, "Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts," Phi Delta Kappan, 80, no. 7 (March, 1999), 488-499. http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kwin9903.htm, accessed November 1, 2003.

Wineburg, Samuel, "The Psychology of Learning and Teaching History," in The Handbook of Educational Psychology, (Eds), DC Berliner & R Calfee (Macmillan, New York, 1996).