The generation of people who want to cancel historical figures are the same ones who score the absolute lowest in historical literacy on every survey and national report card over the past twenty years. They’re floating out on an island with no idea there’s an entire continent not far away.

The problem, as I’ve written before, is multidimensional: social science (the main method of presenting historical content) is NOT history, which leads to a disjointed and non-contextual view of the past; Americans simply forget the past because we have been programmed culturally to always progress forward (unless evoking the past suits our social or political agenda); American individualism tends to result in a self-centered worldview, and, they believe whatever view of the past is interpreted by the media because they don’t have the knowledge base to decipher fact from bias.

There are several solutions, but the easiest one is to develop historical empathy.

What’s historical empathy? It’s the ability to put yourself in a position where (1) you have a personal understanding of what peoples’ lives were like in the times before your own, (2) you can look at the history from the past FORWARD rather than from the present BACKWARDS, and (3) you understand you can’t judge previous generations by currently acceptable beliefs and behaviors. Part of historical empathy also includes accepting that in 100 years, the people of the future will judge absolutely everything we value today…and we will be found wanting.

Historical empathy is crucial in understanding why people of the past allowed certain behaviors and believed certain things. The best ways to gain some historical empathy:

✔️ visit historical sites
✔️ visit living-history museums
✔️ attend re-enactments
✔️ read historical fiction (it humanizes the past)
✔️ read first-hand accounts (diaries, letters)
✔️ watch narrative-based movies
✔️ watch docu-dramas

(You won’t get this skill from textbooks.)

Having an empathic view of the past helps us to humanize people with whom we disagree—and to understand how and why they believed the way they did.

history #homeschool