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COUNTERING PRIVILEGE: TOWARD A CRITICAL PEDAGOGY OF COMPASSION IN THE TEACHING OF UNITED STATES HISTORY BY VICKI ANSERMET DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Educational Policy Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Antonia Darder, Chair Professor James D. Anderson Associate Professor Ann Bishop Associate Professor Yoon Pak Associate Professor Christopher Span Abstract It is the thesis of this paper that privileged students can develop compassion for their peers who are given minority status in our society by having United States history teachers teach history in such a way that the affluent come to have a greater understanding for the “other.” The study begins with a discussion of concepts of privilege, compassion and empathy, and the poor. This is followed by an historical overview of traditions of teaching United States history and the textbooks used over the years, beginning in the late 19th century up until the 1980’s and 1990’s. This is not intended to be an exhaustive study but one which gives the main ideas of different eras and to show how they shifted from generation to generation and according to the political/social climate in the United States. In the third chapter I address issues of power, ideology, and education in the teaching of U.S. history. The consciousness of teachers and its importance in teaching for compassion is crucial to this process. In Chapter Five I do a textual analysis of three commonly used American history books in public high schools, and I also look at the texts used by American history teachers in the Champaign-Urbana community, in terms of their propensity to teach compassion to the privileged. The study ends by looking at compassion, how it can be understood, taught, and learned. This includes a conclusion and recommendations, as well as important questions to be asked at this point about compassion and teaching United States history. The critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire is very relevant here, as is critical theory and, in addition, critical race theory. We must find a way through public education to reach privileged children and help them understand their history and that of our country. To understand is to be empowered and that is true for everyone. The affuent must be brought to a place where they can understand, at a deep level of meaning, what has brought them to where they are, an accident of birthplace and status, ii if we are to have them as part of the struggle for equality. The twelve years they spend in school is an invaluable time to reach them. If we do not use this time to do so, it is a wasteful tragedy. Keywords: compassion, empathy, U.S. history, privilege, teaching, critical pedagogy, critical theory, critical race theory. iii Table of Contents Chapter 1 Introduction: History Without Compassion ............................................................1 Chapter 2 Teaching U.S. History: A Historical Overview of the Tradition ...........................20 Chapter 3 Power, Ideology and Education in the Teaching of History ..................................47 Chapter 4 Compassion and Education ......................................................................................65 Chapter 5 The Hidden Curriculum of History Books: A Textual Analysis ...........................83 Chapter 6 History and Compassion: Conclusions and Recommendations ............................94 References ...................................................................................................................................145 iv Chapter 1 Introduction: History Without Compassion? Thomas Ross, Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh Law School, in his book, Just Stories: How the Law Embodies Racism and Bias (1996), begins his account of the historical pathology of the law and the process of its construction in the United States by recounting his own lived experience growing up in the l950’s and 1960’s in Maryland: I do not see myself as responsible for the racially separated school systems that I inhabited, or for the racism that accounted for them. I do not think it is a matter of guilt for me. On the other hand, like my father, I am complicit. I can never give back the advantages I enjoyed by growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s in a society that stacked the educational, social, and employment deck in my favor by virtue of my race. And complicity doesn’t stop with the inequalities of the past. As I cannot give back the advantages of my childhood or erase the disadvantages experienced by my black contemporaries, I also cannot avoid the continuing advantages I experience while living in a culture still gripped with prejudices that accord to me an assumption of worthiness that it denies to blacks, women, and others deemed different by the dominant class. This is the terrible and unwanted gift I receive every day of my life (my emphasis). And the fact that I receive it, wanted or not, keeps me in a state of complicity…Even those who reject stereotypes cannot escape the correlative advantages which our culture accords to them. We are all tangled up in it (pp. xiii-xiv). For too long the disenfranchised and marginalized have struggled for their rights, for their survival, against the biases and barriers of the dominant class in our society. The privileged, in the meantime, have found it easy to look the other way, living in a separate world with no connection to those who help to create this world for them with their labor and sacrifice. This study has as its purpose to demonstrate that if we are to create a world of true equality across all groups, we will need the involvement of the minority of people in our country who hold the majority of wealth and political power and who exercise their privilege, at the expense of the majority. 1 It is the assumption of this study that for change to occur at a fundamental level, at a level that is solidly grounded in democratic ideals of equal opportunity and equal access to resources, then we will need an awareness and commitment to these changes on the part of the privileged group who control the majority of natural resources and are responsible for carrying out the majority of political decisions in the United States. Many say that change happens from the bottom up and this has often been true. In fact, except for a few token instances in our history, there has been little real and sustained change that has originated from the top to the bottom. The point of this study, however, is to demonstrate that the privileged are capable of recognizing not only their part in maintaining the marginalized oppressed, but the structural policies and practices that function to obstruct their freedom. In an effort to address the practical issues related to challenging privilege, this study seeks to show that using critical pedagogical methods of teaching American history in our high schools can encourage activism and, thus, seems most appropriate for addressing questions of asymetrical relations. Students who are at the adolescent stage are often ripe for discussing issues of truth, conflict, and contradiction that exist in American history, generally overlooked in almost all textbooks. As such, students are not asked to question nor taught to think critically about what they read and what they are taught. They are expected to accept facts at face value and accept these as if they have no meaning beyond the isolated events, themselves. If privileged students were taught history from the point of view of the “other”, that is, balanced by a diminution of the point of view of the dominant perspective, if they were taught that present events are always connected with past historical, ideological and political conditions, if they could acknowledge and understand the suffering that results from all discrimination, all degradation, all dominance. They might come to realize that to understand American history 2 implies that they, consequently, utilize their empowerment and social agency to transform the society in which we live today. This is a paper about privilege, subordination, compassion (and lack thereof), and the understanding of these issues in our society by privileged students by a new approach to teaching American history. To begin, a working definition of these terms is necessary. Diane Goodman, in her 2001 book, Promoting Diversity and Social Justice: Educating People From Privileged Groups, explains privilege in this way: The term people from privileged groups implies that there are people from non-privileged groups. Systems of oppression are characterized by dominant-subordinate relations. There are unequal power relationships that allow one group to benefit at the expense of another group. The various ways people name the two sides of this dynamic reflect these qualities: oppressor and oppressed, advantaged and disadvantaged, dominant and subordinate, agent and target, privileged and marginalized, dominator and dominated, majority and minority (p. 6). Goodman prefers the term “privileged” because it is the term most people are familiar with. Yet the term “dominant group” also is useful because it suggests that the privileged group not only gets privileges and has greater social power but also “sets the norms” (p. 6). “Its values, images, and experiences are most pervasive in and representative in the culture—in other words, dominant”(p. 6). Goodman makes it clear that she in no way looks at the privileged group as deserving of these qualities, but that they are socially constructed and reproduced. We generate stereotypes, as in the idea of “human progress” being a product of Western “civilization” while ignoring the exploitation and misery that has occurred. These stereotypes get constantly reiterated and reinforced in a multitude of everyday acts of mistreatment of minorities by whites, in “incidents that range from the subtle and hard to observe to the blatant and easy to notice” (Feagin, 2001, p.

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