![]() (I literally had this conversation in class re: "Bushido" on Monday).Īs I read, I was applying it to my own classroom full of future social studies teachers. Again, nothing you don't know here, but I think it's worth pointing out because as frustrating as it can be to a specialist, it really is not that surprising that the term has been going strong in pre-college education. They then go off to teach at whatever level of secondary school, and "Feudalism" is used as convenient shorthand for "well they had knights and peasants and stuff," and if they're lucky they get the level of explanation provided in your illustration. While many secondary educators go get graduate degrees, many are in education rather than history, and so aren't reading Brown and discussing the uselessness of an ambiguous term. In my case, I read it in a seminar on medieval Japan, as we first had to untangle the general problems with the "F word" before we then untangled the problematic application of it to a non-European culture. You (and I) read Brown in graduate school, in (I presume) a graduate history seminar, possibly one focused on the medieval world. They're all headed towards careers as social studies or HS history teachers. Today, in 2023, a bunch of college Freshmen are now persuaded."įorgive me for jumping in here, but this sentence is key in understanding the disconnect between "Everyone agrees feudalism is a lie" and "19 of 20 students in my class learned about “the feudal system” in school." I won't claim to be telling you something you don't already know-more so thinking through on my own as I'm teaching an undergrad course with a majority of double-majors in history and secondary education for the first time this semester. I went to grad school in the late 90s and read her work and was persuaded. Update: Social media informs me that “there was no such thing as feudalism” is news and that’s something we’ll write up soon! Our biggest and most important publics, after all, are sometimes right there in the classroom with us. But we have to keep working to avoid taking the easy way out, which for me means avoiding the f-word, but also easy ideas like Dark Ages, Renaissance, Fall of the Roman Empire, and all the other constructs that distort more than they reveal. Today, in 2023, a bunch of college Freshmen are now persuaded. But they all were taught it was just a fact, as if that’s how the European Middle Ages just simply worked.īrown wrote in 1974. ![]() If you do, most won’t ever unlearn it.Īs a case in point, I’m pretty sure that Brown (and me!) persuaded our students that feudalism isn’t real, that historians don’t agree on it, that it’s not useful, that it’s arguably harmful.īut 19 of 20 students in my class learned about “the feudal system” in school - some as early as third grade, and some as late as ninth grade. This is powerful, right? It boils down to: don’t tell students things that aren’t true. In addition, as the amount of time between the learning and unlearning of a concept increases, it becomes nearly impossible totally to correct the misconceptions that a student may have." Experts who knowingly mislead their students appear to be- unsure of their own ability to present a simplified account of the conclusions concerning medieval society that historians have now reached. ![]() Furthermore, not only does such a procedure waste the time of teacher and student, but its supporters apparently disregard the difficulty of, as a student of mine puts it, "'erasing' an erroneous concept or fact from the mind of a child who has been taught it, mistakenly or intentionally, at a lower school level." This student, Marie Heinbach, who teaches social studies in a New York junior high school, goes on to point out that "the difficulty becomes almost insurmountable when the amazing retentive powers of a young and impressionable child are considered. To advocate teaching what is acknowledged to be deceptive and what must later be untaught reflects an unsettling attitude of condescension toward younger students.
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