The sociology of World History standards

Dialog from World-L, November 1994

I have followed the discussion of standards in world history with interest, but felt the lack of a sociological perspective. I mean that in the discussion of standards, ideas and values floated freely and without anchor because they lacked an explicit connection with social facts. I won't presume to offer a sociology of the question of standards here, but only offer a few suggestions for the directions such a discussion might possibly take.

To discuss the relation of ideas and society, it seems that we must first have in mind a conception of society that is sociologically operative (ie, does not reduce society to a shapeless continuum of empirical qualities). The usual way to do this is to represent society in terms of social classes. I believe it is a conventional sociological approach to define social classes and then the world views or ideologies related to them. Without some definition of social class, ideas have no determinant relation to social facts and therefore appear to be indeterminant and beyond explanation. If this happens, the only way to assess values such as historiographic standards is in terms of their intrinsic qualities. This necessarily embraces subjectivism and brings constructive debate to an end.

It is old fashioned, perhaps even quaint, to suggest that university academics belong to the petit bourgeoisie. It was assumed that this put them in a contradictory position between the bourgeosie on one hand and the working class on the other. While this might strike us today as a bit simplistic, it certainly helps explain some petit bourgeois behavior. I would here like to see if it helps us understand the dialog on world history standards.

One theme of the petit bourgeoisie is its idealism, its insistence it is a class superior to the working class despite mediocre income and social power. For example, it readily adopted the positivist notion that the scientific observer is supposed to be detached from the object of his or her study. This odd assertion, which would appeal to neither the partisan capitalist nor the partisan working class, persists among petit bourgeois academics long after it has died in the natural sciences. Lefton Stavrionis recommended that we adopt a lunar vantage point in order to view world history objectively. Today those who write national standards for the study of world history also represent themselves as value-free and non-partisan experts. They are in fact, consciously or not, spokesmen for the petit bourgeoisie, despite the fig leave of scientific objectivity.

It is easy to see the pull of contradictory social interests in the debate over standards. The aims of history, I think it is safe to say, are to perpetuate a culture and to develop critical powers. I get the feeling that many people assume that the former applies to K-12 and the latter to the university, but a radical distinction seems unrealistic and probably unwise: if critical thinking is not developed in K-12, it won't come to life in college; if college students know nothing, they won't be able to develop critical powers. I assume that many historians would be inclined to agree with this, but the crux of the matter is that these two aims appear to be contradictory for the petit bourgeoisie. One one hand, critical powers reflect a market model, in which the individual makes free choices that are optimal in that they yield an increase in knowledge and understanding; on the other hand, the person's social existence is primary, in which the received values that distinguish one's nation, or the received wealth that empowers a nation in relation to others, are perpetuated. If, indeed, there is a contradiction between individuality and social existence in petit-bourgeois ideology, then we can see that the bitter, sometimes hostile, arguments will never be resolved, leaving each side doomed to see the other as Philistine.

But a sociological perspective reminds us that world history is created almost entirely by the petit bourgeosie to be consumed for the most part by the working class. This is itself should alert us to hidden agendas and brings to mind such terms as cultural imperialism. The working class is less persuaded by claims of pure objectivity, for stuggle to make a living or improve one's lot is central to life. But, lacking personal resources, the working class has no choice but to unite in solidarity with other workers, through unions, grass-roots neighborhood organizations, or political formations to achieve anything at all. Therefore, the social bond is the only and the necessary means to achieve individual development, while the social resources needed to achive that strength is a function of individual development. No contradiction here.

Of course, the writers of the standards are experts, and as such their views are of value. What seems to be missing is a dialog between the writers and the people at large who should be holding historians accountable. And for world history in particular, should not the writing of standards engage the participation of working people the world over? Without that, any standards must be a travesty, for not only are they bourgeois in ideology, but nationalistic in effect. How can a handful of US petit bourgeois academics create the history of the world's working masses without consulting with them? After World War II, the United Nations began an enormous project in world history that was supposed to be cosmopolitan in terms of nations. The history of this project is instructive. But today, we can go further. With inexpensive and reliable computer-mediated communications just around the corner, some express the hope that distance learning based on universal dialogue will replace the unilateral metropolitan petit-bourgeois hegemony over acculturation that now prevails. This new model of learning and acculturation is not academic utopianism, but now the prevailing view in the business world (see for example, William Horton, Designing and Writing Online Documentation; Hypermedia for Self-Supporting Products. 2nd edition. New York: John Wiley, 1994).

I applaud Haines Brown's introduction of a sociological perspective on the National Standards debate. I must admit that my own earlier musings on this matter were seeded by my grad school grapplings with the likes of Marx and Weber over a decade ago. (Discerning readers: which of these two seminal thinkers stands out more clearly in our earlier discussion of the ideal and the real?)

I am somewhat at a loss, however, to account for my own thought (let alone anyone else's - and certainly not the entire history profession's!) in simple terms of socioeconomic origins. Indeed, many of my middle class peers in Tacoma, Washington managed to grow up not thinking at all like I do. Not that middle class origins have had no effect. Having had access to public schooling provided opportunities that not all workers of the world have enjoyed. Still, could we perhaps not supplement the sociological model based on class with some additional dimensions, preserving even some role for us self-perceived Western individuals as historical actors?

But suppose, for the sake of argument, that we stay close to relations of production as the precondition for ideological production. What will be the prevailing relations of production in the emerging age of global computer networking? A recent Doonesbury cartoon (symbolically) suggests that new class lines may be formed around cognitive skills and performance. These, in turn being conditioned by access to electronic communications technology, do not seem at likely to be equally distributed across either existing national or class boundaries. Will the brave new world of networking be a more democratic one? The topic deserves some attention.

Robert Bunge, Assistant Principal, Mount Vernon High School
school: Mount Vernon High School, 314 N 9th, Mount Vernon, WA 98273
home: 2811 Ontario, Bellingham, WA 98226
school: (206) 428-6100
home: (206) 671-8565
e-mail: rbunge@eagle.esd189.wednet.edu

Please excuse typos: I am typing with sticky keys from home.

I am willing to grant the validity of a sociological perspective in such discussions as the one we are having. But I refuse to accept a sociological determinism.

A terrible example is seen in the recent Harper's excerpt from Christopher Lasch's last book, *The Revolt of the Elites*. The phenomenon he is talking about is real enough, at least in some spheres, but his analysis manages to reduce everyone he is talking aboout. He begins with a recapitulation of Ortega's Revolt of the Masses from 1930 -- and goes on from there without acknowledging how ludicrous his selected quotations are as serious analysis. He later implies that those striving for gay and women's rights are either upper-middle class hypocrites or at least people who seek no basic change in society, but just a share in what already exists; that all feminists are potentially or actually the female half of marriages with total incomes of $120000+; that the whole working class has turned to fundamentalist religion in an effort to shore up its position in life; that the whole top 20%, economically, of US society lives an obscenly lavish lifestyle, etc.

I know I'm cartooning him right now, but I was more and more disturbed by the article as I thought it over. For it hearkens back to the good old days when the working class knew its place -- at the vanguard of socialist revolution,, and when simultaneously the middle class, if otherwise blameworthy, was at least patriotic (even tho that led to excesses). And the whole thing is basically a denunciation of "rootless cosmopolitans." Does this remind anyone of any past movements? As a personal reaction of disgust, one could sympathize somewhat with Lasch, but as analysis it stank, and it indulged in a great deal of class denunciation of the most reckless kind. It made me think that we have made very little progress from the sociology of the 1840s.

I'm not trying to put you, Haines, in the same category as Lasch, or imply that you hold any or all of the same opinions. But I don't think that trotting out class, by itself, solves the question of values.

Further, I do not think that dismissing the efforts of "petit bourgeois" historians to create a standard of world history teaching for the USA is all that appropriate--after all, if they didn't pay attention to the national framework they would be rootless cosmopolitans! Seriously, though, they have created a network by which they hope to influence American educators of good will to use their positions to push the next generation of US citizens to be just a little less lost in ignorant navel-gazing. A grassroots world history created by more than justt professional intellectuals (who as a group do indeed have certain obvious faults) in one country is a nice idea, desirable, and may actually come about some day. But I think that the standards writers would be abdicationg the responsiblilities that go with their position and power if they sat on their hands and did nothing while waiting for it to happen. Especially since most local school boards in NAm have few resources to do anything original or innovative. It may be a small step and an imperfect one, but it beats doing nothing while the "back to basics" crowd takes control and implements a reactionary curriculum reform in what is still economically and culturally the most powerful country around.

Steve Muhlberger

On Thu, 24 Nov 1994, Steve Muhlberger wrote:

Oh, I've decided that in the interests of sociological honesty, my last post ) should have been signed "Steve Muhlberger, Rootless cosmopolitan"

I've decided to follow Steve to the bar of sociological confession. Our recent sociological exchange has forced me to confront the fact that in my heart, I really do wish I were a Microsoft millionaire (the closest thing the Pacific NW has to a true aristocracy.)

But the great thing about being a member of the US middle class is: we are all equal in *thinking* we are somehow a cut above someone, somewhere. We are each nobility on our little 40 acres.

Land values being what they are, however, I am setting out to stake my claim in cyberspace and set up as a rugged individual on the virtual frontier. (Apologies to Frederick Jackson Turner.) Robert Bunge son of teacher and accountant.

I agree with Haines Brown that in the Nash-Cheney debate over National Stan- dards there is a danger that advocates of the Standards present themselves as ideology-free (in contrast with the champions of Western Civ) and that the whole idea of National Standards presents problems in a postmodernist age. But I have problems with his approach too. As someone with an original specializ- ation in Victorian England, I would have to say that theoretical division of industrial societies into a workingclass, etc., is just that, theoretical. And what clarity it once may have had is lost today in both rich and poor countries The term petit-bourgeois has some shock value bnt little else. This 19th-cent. term is an epithet today (like saying Negro for African American). And what in common does a two-income academic family with a six-figure income and nearly absolute job security and freedom of speech have in come with most of the other people that Marxist theory might categorize as petit-bourgeois. One comment on the profesoriat: it is becoming inbred, with daughters and sons of academics. I say that as the son of an elementary school teacher and a downwardly mobile railroad machinist. Most of my parents family were printers and railroaders, plus one cavalry sergeant (who despite serving in Custer's 7th spent his old age as a waiter). My wife, also a college teacher, has a butcher father, a clerk mother, and farmer forebears. What I am saying is that to extent that the social identity of the professoriat is interesting we should realize that it is changing. At a time when the military officer corps has become much more democratic in origins the professoriat has come to resemble the stereotype of the inbred officer corps. I expect that this will affect academic ideology.

David Fahey (Miami Univ., Oxford, OH 45056, USA) (dfahey@miamiu.acs.muohio.edu)

Some evidence in support of David Fahey's observation on the in-bred nature of the academic elite:

A local HS principal in my area stated that his school seemed to be most successful in educating the sons and daughters of teachers.

Now, combine this remark with David's observations and deduce some implications for an economy and society that are becoming ever more information-based. Will our future social structure be more aptly described as "class" or "caste"?

Robert Bunge