History class under communism?

[Skyhilist]

Sorry to post so many threads recently. I've got a lot on my mind.

Anyways, history it seems is always going to be a subjective field. There always has to be some choice as to what is omitted and what is included in textbooks as well as what positions it is acceptable for history teachers to take publicly while teaching history in class (for example, a history teacher condemning fascism should be no big deal, be many feel for other issues objectivity is required so that students can think critically. Where do we draw the line between what must and what must not be taught objectively/from a neutral position?). So how will society make these decisions, and who will make them? Other than the obvious lack of capitalist apologism, how might history classes be taught differently under communism?

[Huey Prashker]

I went to my school curriculum director asking her to start a Marxism class. Since he did pretty much invest modern social sciences, it's pretty important frankly, and its absence is a relic from McCarthyism. The question you ask is so interesting because of the weird role education played in previous communist movements - in China and Cambodia, communism was very much an attack on intellectuals as much as rich people.

It is also troubling to envision a future socialist country relying on education to quell opposition in an equivalent manner to how capitalist countries do now. I would hope that the education would always always be emancipatory not indoctrinating.

This is also I think a something cool. Go on wikipedia and search "People's history".

I didn't get a marxism class though

[CriticalJames]

The relevancy of Marxism in certain subjects in history always depends on how advance the level of study is. At a secondary/high school level, you could argue that the concept of Marxism might be too confusing or advanced. That said, I do think that an introduction to the history of socialism and the divide between left and right wing ideologies is an important aspect of modern world history.

At a university the ball-game changes, as Marx wasn't a historian, but an economist, anthropologist and sociologist. His works fed off of a variety of different subjects, and certainly influenced even more. Especially in disciplines such as economics, history and the social sciences, Marxism is very relevant. His critique of industrial capitalism highlights many areas which are really worth looking into.

[The Intransigent Faction]

Well for one thing, as my favourite history teacher in high school said, "History isn't just about dead white guys", or simply memorizing and echoing names and dates. He made a point of spending a fair amount of time on First Nations history and colonization from their perspective, for instance. I'd hope to see something like that in the form of a history of the colonized from the perspective of the colonized.

That, and while I would never say "Ignore Caesar", there would of course be more attention given to persons and perspectives largely sidelined or outright ignored in modern curricula as opposed to the Christopher Columbus's of the world.

Maybe it sounds a bit advanced, but I think that before students start learning history there should be a mandatory class on historiography. History is too often pretended to be objective by being presented as a task of memorizing dates and names of persons or battles, etc., but even how those are presented can be used to manipulate or distort history. To really understand the significance of why certain things are worth studying or why period X begins in a given year (i.e. maybe the Industrial Revolution) is not only important for studying history but lets one understand the importance of things or events and gets a dialogue started.

In short, I agree with the OP. History is largely based on perspective. I don't think there's any need to whitewash the history of the bourgeoisie to try to appear "neutral". As for things like national tragedies or disputed details of events, I would hope that in a society which has moved past bourgeois nation-states it will at least over time be possible to have healthy discussions without a nationalistic charge (i.e. to recognize that both sides have committed atrocities in wars and to discuss triggers for certain events without playing an emotionally-charged blame-game).

[Tolstoy]

Biased towards Socialism. History is determined by the victor

[Invader Zim]

History is, at the end of the day, the attempt to discover how and why things actually happened. The problem with the Marxist approach to the study of history is that it is a big picture, sweeping, paradigm. However, like all such paradigms when you get down to the nitty gritty you can always find anomalies which utterly fail to fit. That is more or less what 90% of professional historians spend the bulk of their lives doing - examining big sweeping paradigms and then apply them to very particular situations looking for the anomalies. After all, if it is anomalous its interesting. And historians are a pretty critical and irreverent breed. If someone has a big bright idea about how the past should be viewed, other historians will try to pull it to pieces. And human society is complex enough, and individuals and societies are contradictory enough, to usually oblige.

So, I don't think that history should be taught to any ideology. Rather it should be taught as historiography - which it rarely is (until university anyway). In other words, students and pupils should be taught the different ways that historians have approached a subject, how they saw it in the past and what they tend to think now. Then people can make up their own minds the direction they think the evidence points. If that squares with the Marxist line, all well and good, if not, tough. People shouldn't be so precious. If you can't recognise the limits of ideology, or how far your doctrine can take you in pursuit of truths, and know where to draw the line trying to make a square peg fit a round hole, then your ideology has become a dogma. Lots of people on this board suffer that problem, they take Marx's line as gospel and then spend their time trying to make whatever Marx had to say about a broad issue fit to everything. Human society is too complicated for that.

[Sky Hedgehogian Maestro]

Mostly rewriting rich white "philanthropists" as "corporate tyrants" and claiming that the World Wars were capitalist events. With the Internet awakened, it'll go any which way after a while.
Hopefully more of a focus away from strictly European history, though.