Radical Hope: Or, the Problem of Uncertainty in History Education

Abstract

Curricular questions of what and how knowledge should matter take on particular urgency when the knowledge at stake refers to cultural devastation in history. Whereas narratives of progress and discourses of “protecting the child” continue to dominate the public imaginary, a number of curriculum theorists have begun to explore the multiple ways in which educators have and continue to represent such histories in the classroom. This emergent literature offers a theory of pedagogy not as a set of skills to apply, but a way of asking questions about the ethical obligations, ontological crises and anxieties at work in efforts to teach and learn from difficult histories. My article elaborates on the problem of uncertainty from the vantage of two psychoanalytic thinkers who are also interested in the work of introducing the child to a world that fails: D.W. Winnicott’s discussions with mothers on the problem of “disillusionment” and Jonathan Lear’s discussion of “radical hope.” In bringing together these examples, I offer a theory of education that articulates what is hopeful about the capacity to tolerate the disillusionment of both learning from and living in difficult times. At stake is a model of history education that can survive the disillusion of the promise of certainty and still dream of tomorrow.

Notes

Notes

1 Here is how Stanley (1999) represents his response: Nazis were, are [I corrected myself], people who believe that if you are blond-haired and blue-eyed, and especially white skinned, you should rule the world and that everyone else should either be your slave or be killed. In the 1930s after coming to power in Germany, they took over Austria, and many other countries in Europe.... Although they do not control governments anymore, Nazis are still around. And no, they are not “bad guys” like Darth Vader or Cruella De Vil. They were pretty well ordinary people like you and me. But what they did was murder millions of people, mainly Jewish people, because they weren’t blond-haired and blue-eyed, and what they did was evil. Indeed it is the essence of evil. (pp. 41–42) I gather Stanley’s response into an endnote—and not in the body of the text—because my concern is not its adequacy (or inadequacy), but rather the ambiguities and uncertainties of meaning that tend to be forgotten in the desire for an “answer” to history’s difficult questions. It is fruitful, in other words, to imagine historical pedagogy not only as an application of curriculum or, in answer to a question, but a work of symbolizing the internal conflicts that historical knowledge sets into motion, and that provoke questions of history in the first place.

2 The emphasis on history’s affective traces works against the contemporary turn to historical consciousness in education, where the grounds of knowledge are primarily rational, and where the conditions of learning require the application of critical-thinking skills to analyze the validity of representations and to build from evidence plausible historical accounts (Seixas, 2006). Of course, the aim for critical thought is important and is itself reasonable. But to the extent that history can also evidence the irrational ends (and so limits) of human reason, what is also required, I think, is a theory of history education that can notice the conflicts—wishes and anxieties—that both obstruct and constitute our very efforts to make sense of the world as historical.

3 With producer Janet Quigley, the early talks were published in a pamphlet entitled, Getting to Know Your Baby. A second pamphlet, The Ordinary Devoted Mother and Her Baby, consisted of a series of later talks (ca. 1949–1950) produced by Isa Benzie. Both publications went quickly out of print. As a response to requests for the re-issue of these pamphlets, Tavistock published The Child and the Family in 1957 under the editorship of Janet Hardenberg. A few more talks, mainly concerning wartime evacuation, were included in the companion volume, The Child and the Outside World. In 1964, Penguin published selections of both volumes under the title, The Child, the Family and the Outside World.

4 Lear (2006) describes this defensive position this way: “Instead of facing up to the challenges that the world presents, one stubbornly clings to a dreamlike fantasy—as a way of wishfully avoiding those challenges” (p. 116). This sounds a lot like the omnipotent thinking that characterizes Winnicott’s first time of illusion. Hope, on the other hand, offers a different way of responding to the world and in particular, the difficult fact of vulnerability that defines the human condition. Lear understands vulnerability to be a direct consequence of our existence as “finite erotic creatures” (p. 119). Finitude refers to a whole family of vulnerabilities that remind me of Winnicott’s second time of disillusionment: that we are born into a world we did not choose, we are not all-powerful or all-knowing, we cannot be the masters of ourselves or the world in which we live, our beliefs can be mistaken and we cannot predict either the future or the outcomes of our intentions. It is the erotic component of Lear’s human formula that reaches into Winnicott’s third time of re-illusion, or hope, for it suggests that even under the condition of lack, we nonetheless reach out to the world in the desire to grasp (or re-find) what we understand to be meaningful, or satisfying or good.

5 It is important to note that Lear’s point is not that the Crow would have experienced European contact as hopeful; rather, he is interested in considering what is hopeful about the ways the Crow coped (and survived)—in both ordinary and surprising ways—in this destructive context.