Insight for us teachers
The historian who writes the blog, Jottings from the Granite Studio, wrote today about an important insight for teachers of comparative politics. In it he quotes another blogger, and if you want to read the original essay that inspired this, I've included the link.The stupidity of things past
"Interesting post on the academic blog, New Kid on the Hallway ("The Glory of Progress") about the tendency by students and even some scholars to assume that because people from the past didn't write what we would write or think the way we would think, that somehow this means they were...well, not as smart as we who live in the present day...
"I think that this is even more common when the subject is China...
"If today's students in a class on medieval Europe occasionally feel as if their forbears from the Middle Ages were just "modern Europeans in training," it is even more insidious when Americans view China's past (and frankly, the present) in the same unfortunate way...
"And so let's play our game. China lacks equivalency with the west because it lacks FILL in the BLANK_________: (human rights/a civil society/subway manners/hygiene/open government/environmental protections).
"We've seen it written a thousand times, I've probably done it myself. As with the New Kid's students, few of us would admit this assumption of inferiority so boldly--but we all know of conversations, articles, or comments that are harder to swallow because of a slightly acidic aftertaste of western/progressive/presentist superiority.
"That China is lacking in all of the above categories is hard to deny, but what shouldn't be assumed is that it's because the Chinese (past or present) didn't/don't somehow 'Get it yet.' That on the timeline of human progress, China is still stuck at an earlier point in the developmental chart and is thus implicitly inferior to the modern, developed west. It's a seductive trap and--quite frankly--a sentiment that is used as both a curse and a crutch. Witness the Chinese government brushing aside many of its social, political, industrial, and environmental problems as 'stages of development' with the not so-subtle subtext of 'we're just not there yet, give us time.'..."
Labels: change, China, history, pedagogy, political culture
posted by Ken Wedding @ 9:42 PM
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