Abstract
What are the goals of history education? What do we want students of history to be able to do? This project defends a normative theory of history education, that is, a theory of historical inquiry that is both adequate to actual historiographical and educational practice and that provides theoretical guidance for those practices.
I begin to construct that normative theory through a critique of a two influential paradigms, those of Carl Hempel and Hayden White. But each model is inadequate to actual historiographical practice. I then build on the phenomenological insights of David Carr, and employ the work of Karl Popper, Israel Scheffler, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, to develop an alternative that I call ‘soft disconfirmationism’: interpretive inquiry is asymmetrically oriented towards the disconfirmation of narratives; that disconfirmation takes place in subtle and nuanced ways, not in rigid ways; most importantly, any inquirer must be open or receptive to disconfirmatory experience. The process of soft disconfirmation is enabled by the narrative structure of interpretational knowledge, in which an historian's interpretation of the narrative trajectory of an event or a set of events incorporates a set of anticipations—e.g., about what events will transpire, and indeed about what kinds of evidence will yet emerge—that can go unfulfilled. On my account, therefore, interpreters of history are not merely responsible to their interpretive communities, but rather strive for objectivity by staking a wager about the future non-disconfirmation of their narratives.
Given this account of historical inquiry—especially the normative requirement of openness—I argue that the goals of history education are best understood in terms of interpretive virtues. I identify three of these: first, a basic kind of openness to disconfirmation on the level of meaning; second, an openness to disconfirmation at the level of genre (i.e., ‘sensitivity to genre’); and third, a self-reflective awareness of one's historical situation (i.e., ‘interpretive self-awareness’). I articulate some of the educational implications of this view, in terms of pedagogy and curriculum. At the most basic level, however, I argue that only through the exercise of the interpretive virtues do we ever learn anything at all.