Abstract
With all the panic about how the contemporary political and media landscape is awash with ‘fake news’, and the attempted response to that through fastidious ‘fact checks’, the late Hayden White’s lifelong exhortation to consider history as stories crafted by historians using fragments of the past must surely seem untimely. In his final scholarly intervention, White doubles down on this line, urging historians to consider practical uses of the past beyond the cloistered confines of disciplinary History (with a big ‘H’). Drawing on my experiences as a teacher in higher education, I want to show how practical pasts are regularly constructed: we are always selecting from fragments, stringing together facts, amplifying dramatic scenes, and muting minutiae. In other words, given the constraints of time and space—not to mention attention spans and working memory—teaching obliges us to treat the past in a practical manner.
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I have serious anxieties about identifying myself as a ‘historian of education’. Yes, by the most cursory indicators, I have done some work that explores complicated issues like race and religion in education by recourse to the past (e.g., Low, 2014a, 2014b, 2019). But surely to have so turned to the past to help understand the present is not sufficient to qualify one as a historian, is it? If not, then what qualifies one to be? And does one have to be a historian to write history?
It is because questions like these haunt me and taunt my attempts to construct a professional academic identity that I have found comfort in thinkers that challenge what it means to be a historian and do history. For instance, Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay ‘The uses and disadvantages of history for life’, published in 1874 as the second of his Untimely Meditations, has long been the underlying floor plan for how I have organised my thinking, research, and teaching of the historical dimensions of education. In this essay, Nietzsche straightforwardly asserts that ‘we need history’ insofar as it ‘serves living’; historical knowledge ‘atrophies and degenerates’ when it is used for ‘a comfortable turning away from life and action or merely for glossing over the egotistical life and the cowardly bad act’. The latter is abetted by teachers who traffic the idea that to be ‘educated’ is to accumulate knowledge, and especially historical knowledge, such that the student’s ‘head is filled up with a monstrous number of ideas derived from extremely indirect knowledge of past times and peoples, not from the immediate contemplation of living’. To avoid this, Nietzsche (1874) suggests that history’s proper role is to link greatness from the past to the present in order to build a great future: ‘The task of history is to be a mediator between them [i.e., exemplary greats] and thus to provide an opportunity and the energies for the development of greatness. No, the goal of humanity cannot finally be anywhere but in its greatest examples’. What he is proposing is history as exhortation to action, as motivating myth, even as therapy and spirituality.
In his time and perhaps in ours too, this approach to history puts Nietzsche at some distance from what most professional historians might think of as their proper task. But on his side, we can find the American historian Hayden White—‘a groundbreaking critic of conventional historiography’—who challenged professional historians’ disavowal of narrative, aesthetics, and imagination in the way they select and arrange evidence (Ball & Domańska, 2019). While the focus of this chapter is on White’s call for a ‘practical past’—the title of an essay under which he would gather his final works—it is helpful to note that it had been a long-standing concern of his. As early as 1966, White had put it to his colleagues that: ‘The contemporary historian has to establish the value of the study of the past, not “as an end in itself,” but as a way of providing perspectives on the present that contribute to the solution of problems peculiar to our own time’ (White, 1966, p. 125). In his final writings on the practical past he returns to this imperative via literature, in particular modernist novels that are able to:
extend the literary (or poetic) imagination to the examination of the present social world and to view it sub specie historiae, to view it as a drama of human beings trying to come to grips with the changes historical in kind that seemed to wash over them, beset them at every turn in ‘modernity.’ (White, 2010, p. 15)
Self-consciously standing in the lineage of Nietzsche, then, White is making the case that not all information about the past is useful, pitting himself against those he calls ‘professional historians’ with their insistence ‘that the past be studied, as it was said, “for itself alone” or as “a thing in itself”, without any ulterior motive other than a desire for the truth (of fact, to be sure, rather than doctrine) about the past’ (White, 2010, p. 14). What they produce is a ‘historical past’ that teaches ‘no lessons of any interest to the present, a version of the past as an object of strictly impersonal, neutral, and in the best cases, objective interest’ (White, 2010, p. 16). A practical past, by contrast, is self-consciously elaborated in the service of the present and is related to this present in a practical way, especially because from it:
[W]e can draw lessons and apply them to the present, to anticipate the future (or at least the proximate future) and provide reasons, if not justification, for actions to be taken in the present on behalf of a future better than the current dispensation. (White, 2010, p. 17)
As such, for the sake of serving life in the present, White suggests historical researchers (as opposed to ‘professional historians’) avail themselves of the rhetorical tools that make for compelling narratives, those more commonly associated with ‘creative’ and ‘poetic’ writing (White, 2010, p. 14). So while professional historians may turn their noses at such renditions of the past, preferring to represent the past ‘in the genres of writing which, by convention, are called “histories” and are recognized to be such by the professional scholars licensed to decide what is “properly” historical and what is not’, purveyors of practical pasts, while still drawing on the real past as their ultimate referent, are ‘amenable to a literary – which is to say, an artistic or poetic – treatment that is anything but “fictional” in the sense of being purely imaginary or fantastic in kind’ (White, 2014, pp. xiii, xiv). And while White refers to the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott in making his distinction between the historical versus practical past, the rambunctious ghost of Nietzsche (1874) is unmistakeably present: ‘only when history takes it upon itself to turn itself into an artwork and thus to become a purely artistic picture can it perhaps maintain the instincts or even arouse them’.
I have neither space here to tease out the tenability of White’s distinction between the historical versus practical pasts, nor am I inclined to tell professional historians how to do their jobs. In what remains of this chapter, I want to show how teaching in higher education is a context where practical pasts are regularly conjured. For a less noticed thread that runs through both Nietzsche’s and White’s exhortations about history is its pedagogical purchase. Writing his untimely meditation on history between October 1873 and January 1874 while holding down a teaching job at the University of Basel (Large, 2012, p. 93), the former spends a sizeable part of it lambasting conventional historians of his time for sapping the youth of their vitality by overwhelming them with superfluous detail. He had prefigured some of these themes in a searing set of lectures on the topic at the Basel city museum in 1872 (Nietzsche, 2016). In his lecture from 6 February 1872, for instance, he complained about how the ‘scholarly historical approach’ to the teaching of German culture and language made it seem dead, thus showing those teachers to have ‘no sense of obligation toward its present and its future’. ‘But education’, he professes,
begins precisely when we understand that a living thing is alive; the task of the educator is precisely to suppress the ‘historical interest’ that presses in on all sides, especially where it is a question of proper action, not merely understanding something.
Nietzsche’s firm line on history’s educative purpose—that ‘the understanding of the past is desired at all times to serve the future and the present’ (Nietzsche, 1874)—also chimes with White. For the latter, it is instructiveness that serves as a pivot between the two types of history. We can note this by his repeated use of the phrases ‘draw lessons’ and ‘teach lessons’ in association with the practical past (White, 2010, pp. 12, 14; 2014, pp. 6, 9, 10, 82, 90) versus the historical past that ‘taught no lessons of any interest to the present’ (White, 2010, p. 16) and, as such, has limited itself to ‘establishing what really happened in discrete domains of the past and resisting any impulse to draw lessons for the present or, God forbid, daring to predict what lies in store for us in the future’ (White, 2014, p. 20).
So, in what follows, I offer a brief account how teaching obliges us to treat the past in a practical manner. I specifically reflect on my experiences preparing a guest lecture for students enrolled in an educational leadership programme that my colleague (and responder to this chapter) Christine Grice capably helms.
At the end of 2021, Grice and I were finally able to meet together to share points of commonality in our respective areas of teaching and research. While we had for some years floated the idea of me teaching in the educational leadership programme, the COVID-19 pandemic had caused some pandemonium in our university (and lives, for that matter). So having regrouped in 2022, Grice graciously invited me to deliver two very important lectures to her students: one on how ethical leadership in education can be conceived and another on international perspectives on ethical leadership in education. While the first allowed me to introduce my approach to ethical leadership in education inspired by Michel Foucault’s (1985, 1986) retrieval of ethics as ‘care of the self’, the second posed a more considerable challenge. For apart from the sheer geographical scale of ‘international’—which I understood to be anything outside of Australia—I was also confronted with the amount of possible material that I could use. In almost every locale and tradition across the globe, there are complex philosophies and practices for the cultivation of ethical leaders (Khalifa et al., 2019). Indeed, so-called modern western education is unique in its lack of emphasis on the community-based ethical personhood of the educational leader beyond policy strictures and institutional codes of conduct, perhaps with some vague moral injunctions for ‘social justice’ included (Marshall & Ward, 2004).
As a historically inclined researcher, I was always going to reach into the past to demonstrate how ethical self-cultivation was core to leadership in education. But where and who and how? ‘International’ and ‘history’ hardly qualify as precise parameters for a lifelong research project, let alone a 50-minute lecture to a diverse class of students, many of whom would be listening after a long day at the chalkface. When I boiled it down, the challenge facing me was this: in under an hour, how do I best impress upon 30 unique and tired students the importance of ethical self-cultivation for them as emerging educational leaders?
This was my attempt.
I began with a brief refresher on the theoretical framework I brought to the question of ethical leadership in education, drawing on Niesche and Haase’s (2012) profiling of two school leaders in Australia using Foucault’s framework for ethics. The beauty of this article by Niesche and Haase, in the spirit of this book, is their ability to show how useful Foucault’s theorisations are to understanding the work that educators have to do on themselves in order to become socially just leaders who are responsive to the communities they serve. In other words, to be an ethical leader requires engaging in askēsis—‘self-forming activity or ethical work that one performs on oneself in order to transform oneself into an ethical subject’ (Davidson, 1994, p. 118). Having established the theoretical apparatus, I then broadened the geographical scope by focusing on two historical figures who, despite the weighty forces they lived under and the currents of their times, were able to exemplify educational leadership in ways that made them singularly unique, if not strange for their times. Yet we consider them worthy of admiration and emulation today precisely because of their strangeness—their unique ethos or ethical style—as manifested through their attitudes, behaviours, and deportment cultivated through work on themselves as a practice of freedom (Foucault, 1987).
My first exemplar was Anna Julia Haywood Cooper (1854–1964)—the philosopher, African American community activist, and educator. I offered a very brief summary of her remarkable 105 years of life, beginning with her birth into slavery in Raleigh, North Carolina, on 10 August 1858, through her stellar educational career at St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute (1868–1877), then at Oberlin College where she earned her BA in Mathematics (1884) and then her MA in Mathematics (1887), to her appointment as a mathematics and science teacher at the only high school for African Americans in Washington, DC—the highly regarded Washington (Colored) Preparatory High School, known customarily as the ‘M Street High School’ and later renamed Dunbar High School (Moody-Turner, 2017). What I focussed on was her refusal, after being elevated to principal of M Street in 1901, to relent to the pressure to pivot the school away from the liberal arts curriculum—which had seen graduates gain admissions to Harvard, Yale, Brown and Oberlin, amongst other prestigious higher education institutions—to an industrial training curriculum (Giles, 2006). At a time when the intellectual capacities of Black students were a matter of public debate (e.g., Mathews, 1889; Crummell, 1898), and where the influence of Booker T Washington’s ‘Tuskegee Machine’ within the Black community combined with the power of White bureaucrats to push the vocational curricular agenda (Keller, 1999), Cooper’s insistence on her vision of Black education ‘as being naturally on par with the full range of educational opportunities offered to white students’ led to a drawn out battle that saw highly publicised attacks on her reputation (both professional and personal) (May, 2012, p. 25). Her radical resolve for educational options for her students, that ‘Enlightened industrialism does not mean that the body who plows cotton must study nothing but cotton and that he who would drive a mule successfully should have contact only with mules’ (Cooper, in Bailey, 2004, p. 61), saw her dismissed as principal in 1906. Five years later, she would be reappointed as a Latin teacher at M Street, where she remained until her retirement in 1930.
How did Cooper maintain her poise amidst all this? Through her conviction in the inherent worth of all human beings and, notably in the context of the early-twentieth-century US, Black humanity (Bonnick, 2007). This conviction drew deeply from the wellsprings of her Christian faith ‘that God has not made us for naught and He has not ordained to wipe us out from the face of the earth’ (in Bonnick, 2007, p. 193), which was in turn sustained by spiritual exercises (i.e., askēsis). One notable way that she regularly undertook such work on herself was through a unique style of self-writing across different genres—philosophical writings, letters, and poetry—that opened up ‘a new space between the first-person confessional of the slave narrative or spiritual autobiography and the third-person imperative of political essays’ (Alexander, 1997, p. 62) and through which ‘she crafts a critically engaged, witty, and socially aware black feminist self’ (May, 2009, p. 17).
From the racialised educational debates of north-eastern US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the north-eastern face of the British-ruled Indian subcontinent, over 13,000 kilometres away, I turned to my second exemplar: Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Already a well-established and prolific poet in Bengali, in 1901 he unexpectedly established an eponymously named school in a rural West Bengal town called Santiniketan, about 150 kilometres from Kolkata (van Bijlert & Bangha, 2019). Yes, as with Cooper, I did also offer a brief biographical sketch of Tagore, who in contrast to his US counterpart, did not find much success in his schooling. Given his career trajectory and his own alienating experiences of schooling, why then did Tagore open a school? ‘I suppose this poet’s answer would be that… [I] started to write a poem in a medium not of words’ (Tagore, in Dutta & Robinson, 2002, p. 199). And it was the shape of this ‘poem’, his school, carved between the dam wall of British imperialism and the rising waters of anticolonial nationalism in India, that is remarkable. By design, it threaded a non-exclusionary path between what Nandy (1994, p. 1) calls the ‘three basic sets of contradictions or oppositions’ faced by Afro-Asian decolonial reformers: ‘that between the East and the West; that between tradition and modernity; and that between the past and the present’. At Santiniketan, Tagore promoted a curriculum of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ that emphasised ‘the role of living in harmony with the universe and the natural world around, rather than controlling the external environment and trying to create walls around’, as well as ‘hospitality and dialogue between cultures’ (Mukherjee, 2020, p. 55).
How did Tagore stay steady on his path despite the pulls of aggressive nationalism and reactionary traditionalism, even in the face of political pressure and widespread mockery at the time? His view of the unity of all peoples with one another and with the natural world was nourished, like Cooper’s, by a deep spiritual conviction. While for Cooper it was her Christian faith that supplied a ‘higher law’ about the value of peoples devalued by the racialised human laws of the nineteenth century US (Lloyd, 2016 pp. 32–57), for Tagore his sensibility that ‘in [each] individual spirit [is] a union with a Spirit that is everywhere’ was forged from a complex mix of influences from the Upanishads, the theistic-humanistic tradition as represented by the Vaishnava poets and the Bauls of Bengal, Sufi saints like Kabir Das and Dadu Dayal, Mahayana Buddhism, and Western romanticism and Christianity (Sharma, 1998, pp. 89, 96). And like Cooper, he was also sustained in this by persistent self-writing as askēsis: ‘His oeuvre is epochal. While he was a poet, lyricist and composer, he was also a novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, a prodigious letter writer, a sermon writer and an artist’ (Fraser, 2016, p. ix). Through these various forms, Tagore enacts an ‘alternative postcolonial self-fashioning’ to the nationalist and nativist self-fashioning that was ascendant in his milieu (Dasthakur, 2020, p. 260).
As any reader who knows a thing or two about Cooper and Tagore may have noticed, in what I covered in my lecture, I neglected to direct attention to what may be considered to be the highlights of their lives: I dwelt neither on Cooper’s immense philosophical prowess as demonstrated in A voice from the south (1892/1988) and her PhD awarded by the Sorbonne in 1925 when she was 66 nor on Tagore’s poetic heights as crystallised in Gītāñjali (1910/1997), for which he became the first non-White, non-European recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. By these omissions, I may even risk being seen as flirting with egregious Eurocentric intellectual habits, like reducing a formidable Black women thinkers to their biography (May, 2012, pp. 37–43), or treating sophisticated Asian thinkers as ‘mystical sage[s] of the East’ (van Bijlert & Bangha, 2019). Yet this was a 50-minute lecture to students of educational leadership, and pedagogical decisions had to be made. I cannot think of a more pressing context for articulating practical pasts than in lectures where time, titillation, tedium, and the need for meaningful takeaways are all key considerations.
Did I succeed in encouraging the students in that lecture to undertake the work of crafting an ethos so that they too can be educational leaders in the lineage of Cooper and Tagore, to become beacons in our own tempestuous times? In other words, did the past I presented become practical? That is for the students to decide, and for future historian-pedagogues to determine.
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Low, R.Y.S. (2024). The Historian as Pedagogue: On Hayden White’s Practical Past. In: Y.S. Low, R., Egan, S., Bell, A. (eds) Using Social Theory in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39817-9_18
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