How Do We Teach History?

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How do we teach history? Universal history, that of science, art, education…anyone – how to teach it?

The great German philosopher, Karl Jaspers, married to a Jewish woman, spent the Second World War at their home in Heidelberg, constantly terrified of being captured and transferred to concentration camps. For some fortuitous reason, this never happened. He tells us, “After enduring this threat many years, externally, we emerged unharmed.” Their transport to the concentration camp had been scheduled for April 14, 1945, but two weeks earlier, on April 1, Jaspers was rescued by the Americans.

After the war, believing in an unlimited scope of human communication, he helped reconstruct his country’s universities. He advocated promoting a process of profound transformation among the German people who felt a generalized guilt for the atrocities committed under Nazism. He insisted that without embracing this feeling and changing, the German people would be unable to reconcile.

His heeding was ignored. For his compatriots, acknowledging their political complicity with Nazism was too much. Jaspers, in what appears to have been an act of protest, went into self-exile in Switzerland, renounced his German nationality, and finally died there.

This decision must have caused him exceeding heartbreak. He had trusted with reasoned faith in profound encounters among people. (His close friend, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, affirmed that Jaspers could call for dialogue even in conditions of universal flooding). Thus, his protest was not a detachment from his commitment but a last attempt to summon the German population (including himself) to repentance.

Jaspers was a forerunner of the current empathy boom – Not a general, abstract empathy in the form of universal love (of everyone and no one), but a face-to-face, person-to-person empathy, a genuine encounter with one’s neighbor. He once said, “I cannot reach all human beings. If I wanted to correspond to everyone, that is, to everyone I meet, I would fill my existence with superficialities and deny myself (because of this imaginary universal possibility) the only truly historical possibility, that of an authentic rapprochement among individuals.”

Jaspers, then, believed that people’s interactions solidified history. He did not recognize anything like a spirit of the people nor a force that moved the masses that did not come from real people. Hence, he attached incomparable value to teaching. The acute pain he must have felt when he was removed from his Chair during Hitler’s regime! This also explains his radical effort to rebuild the University, where the most authentic human encounters could occur freely. His famous book on German responsibility – The Problem of Guilt – originated from a series of lectures at the university, face-to-face with his students and the public.

To think, like Jaspers, that individuals make history means (and here we come to the subject of teaching) that those who delve into the study of the past have valuable information from the outset. That information can be summed up in one sentence: People in the past were just like us. Indeed, when learning history, I can find the best fact by looking at myself: all human beings live or lived their lives like I do; they all are or were on the planet identically to me. Thus, from the outset, I can propose to my students that they imagine historical events as if they were living them.

Perhaps this sounds too poetic, but it is true. If we want to avoid a caricatured or overly mechanistic view of the past (as if society were operated by mechanisms and not by human beings), we must assume this living dimension of historical actors, a flesh and blood dimension. (I hope that at this point, it is clear I do not think of empathy as recognizing the qualities of the other (which would be more like sympathy) but I see it as an intuitive way of experiencing what someone else has lived, even when it is negative.)

Years later, Jaspers’ French student Paul Ricoeur, also a great philosopher, added his perspective on the knowledge of history: In an interesting article, Professor Luke O’Sullivan tells us that Ricoeur’s interest in the subject arose in part from the need to confront those who dared to deny the truth of the Holocaust. In his vision of history, Ricoeur, like Jaspers, appealed to recognize one’s participation in events and even to the possibility of a personal reconciliation with the past, giving a less central place to subjectivity. Without denying this or the value of individual memory – for example, the victims’ testimonies – he believed, above all, in documented historical truth. “Those who deny the great crimes will find their defeat in the archives,” he said.

The fact of documented truth in history (a science of facts) adds something to our idea of empathy: it cannot be a superficial act, simply putting ourselves in the shoes of another without knowing part of the path he traveled in them. Empathy implies knowledge. For some, the two terms are synonymous. Thus, Ricoeur explains that this knowledge must be evidence-based, i.e., it must be constituted as a science so that (again in the words of O’Sullivan) “in the absence of an authentic historiography, we are not left just with the official versions produced by nation states to serve their ideological ends.”

But there is something else to consider: When we get to know someone from the past empathetically, some things in their life will seem alien to us, some will pass unnoticed, but others will feel so familiar that for a moment, we will think we are seeing ourselves. That may not be pleasant: it carries the risk of recognizing ourselves not only in the strengths but also in the weaknesses of others, in their vices and virtues, in their most sublime and heroic deeds but also their most criminal and atrocious ones.

In conclusion, knowing the past of a society comprised of individuals who create a common history requires at least these three elements: empathy, historical truth, and self-knowledge. In my opinion, only if they nourish it can history fulfill the role that Ricoeur attributes to it in public life: “to allow a society to let the ghosts of its past properly rest.”

The word ghosts is very pertinent when discussing the correlation between these three elements: if we understand them in the sense of spirits, and we see them as animators of both people and facts, we can say, metaphorically, that when we study history we know the facts simultaneously as our spirit flies to animate them. Without the spirit, that is, without our empathy and will to know ourselves, the facts remain empty, as mere containers, at best as mere caricatures. In the same way, the spirit by itself, without the truth, without the container of documented facts, travels without direction, not knowing where, not alighting on anything, or does so in the wrong place.

I can find no better example of all this than the so-called “eugenic science” programs in Nazi Germany. Let’s start by recalling the historical truth that the range of empathy of the Nazis and their followers was quite narrow. For them, one does not have to identify with those, not of their race; this does not imply much effort: the shoes of the others -those like us, whose shoes we are going to wear – are made to measure. (The totalitarian regime is in charge of cutting everyone’s shoes with the same scissors.) As if that were not enough, within the race itself, narrower limitations are imposed, limiting divergences and making things even easier. The Nazis’ eugenics – as an attempt to control the reproduction of human groups considered inferior – resorted to isolating, sterilizing, and exterminating divergent populations by race, sexual orientation, or motor, neurological, and mental disabilities.

No one in a “superior” race is obliged to identify with people below them. On the contrary, it is well seen to reject and betray them. Someone whose inner terrors make him feel anguish about, say, a neurodivergent person or a homosexual enjoys the applause of society. And we all know how good applause feels. (Maybe that’s why they call us “social actors.”)

Thus, if it had been up to the Nazis, our current view of history would be pretty simple, and its teaching would be much facilitated (assuming that we would have been among the survivors). By definitively excluding the divergent populations, it would be easier to understand the world; everything would be limited almost exclusively to knowing what equals us, to accepting in others only what pleases us, and this – as we have said – with total social approval. Empathy, “truth,” and self-knowledge would be reduced to something quite schematic and would not represent much of a challenge. (After all, having a complete view of facts and people can be left for another day, as long as we have a good amount of social gratification from the presence of charismatic leaders, belonging to a community of equals, the continuous enjoyment of parties and other public events, and the existence of a sufficiently large group of undesirable people upon whom to vent our feelings of impotence, frustration, and hatred.)

Perhaps – it is only a hypothesis – the Nazi regime and the German people were defeated because of this progressive and increasingly unsustainable concealment of truths. Now, if we wanted to investigate this hypothesis, we would surely start by looking for the antecedents of eugenics in Germany. However, to our surprise, we would soon find that the German strategy only consisted of applying and carrying out the vision that had prevailed for decades in some scientific circles in England and the United States! Thus, we would be transported to a reality no longer so alien to us as that of the diabolical Nazis, in front of whom we drew our line. We would know it all began with Darwin’s heirs, including his children. I am not going to delve into that matter, little known but well documented. I will only say that the issue of avoiding the reproduction of groups considered inferior – less fit, impure – began as a veritable boom of so-called serious research, especially in those two countries, followed by publications and courses, and the organization of international congresses, the second of which, based in the United States, had as honorary president Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, who aspired to end deafness by sterilizing the population with congenital hearing impairment. From there, eugenic pseudo-theories would spread around the world (including Mexico, Spain, and other Spanish-speaking countries), reaching Germany, where they aroused the admiration of many, including Hitler, who applied them in their most radical versions, certainly in his fanatical and extreme way.

Despite all this, the United States and England became our great heroes.

Historical truths like this show us that the spirit of atrocity is closer to us than we realize. Thus, the ghost floats closer and closer to us until, suddenly, we are face to face, seeing our reflections in its eyes. A gaze into their depths (that is, a moment of empathy) would perhaps allow us to understand the (today ridiculous) goodwill of people who, in the face of the cruel discrimination suffered by dark-skinned people, proposed the solution of whitening them through genetic procedures. However, it would surely be difficult for us to see our traits in that attitude, since it would also risk accepting that there is room in us – even if unconsciously – for discriminatory attitudes not entirely alien from those who, in circumstances of collective terror, attempted the extermination of Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals and the disabled.

From the study of the emergence of Nazism and the lives of its leaders, the question could arise: by adding a few doses of familiar cruelty and leadership skills, and leveraging twists of chance and a social context to perpetrate historical revenge, how long would it take to lose all scruples and throw oneself into the commitment to exterminate the opponents?

How many more things will we deny before admitting that we, too, can commit acts of barbarism? How many truths, if history does not hide them from us, will we hide from ourselves? What part of humanity can we not see because of those two blind spots: what is hidden from us and what we hide from ourselves?

Faced with these challenging questions, we remember the one that brought us here: How will we teach history? The answer lies in the guidance of this entire article, but a more direct formulation is this: We will teach it in the same way that we would like future teachers to teach our history; that is, primarily, with empathy, encouraging our students to seek the traces of the past and relive it with all its qualities and defects; that they always investigate the truth and appeal to it rigorously, returning frequently – with Ricoeur – to historical science, and allowing both truth and empathy to maintain a continuous dialogue; that they always be vigilant that subjectivity does not hinder the flow of truth and that the search for truth does not hinder the inclusion of themselves; that they verify the information they receive to the point of exhaustion and investigate alternative and hidden data (and also question these, of course); and that they do not stop asking themselves at all times how much they are reconstructing history with their own terrors and prejudices.

Let us try to understand, together with them, that only with knowledge and empathetic consideration of our time and any other stage of the past will it be possible for us to identify our advances and setbacks, our successes and mistakes, our virtues and heroisms, and when necessary, our crimes and atrocities.

To conclude, let us instill in our students the constant embrace of that pillar of our identity that the great Roman comedian Terence summed up in one sentence: “I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.”

Translation by: Daniel Wetta