Among the possible threats to history that we discussed in Vilnius was an intriguing item classed as “the Canon”. The discussion centred around the fact that we tend to see history as a series of events or developments that together make us/our history what it is.
But the discussion we had made it clear that we found The Canon to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, an agreed Canon of History makes the teaching of history much easier and simpler. If The Canon is agreed we, the teachers of history, do not have to argue our case for the importance of the individual parts of our curriculum; but on the other hand, we also run the risk of having a far to prescriptive “set of knowledges” or a sort of checklist of historical knowledge that our masters can point to and say whether our “product” is good enough.
The idea of a Canon was very much part of the American literary scene when I studied in North America in the later eighties: two books in particular (Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, 1986 (dare I refer you to the Wikipedia-article about the book) ? and Harold The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, 1994 argued for a return to a traditional Canon of western literature of the kind that had been criticized as being composed mainly of the works “Dead White Males”.
17 February 2008 at 12:47 pm
The Danish government has set the political goal that half of any generation of the young should have, not only the opportunity to go to a university or another such institution of higher education, but actually go there. This will surely bring a lot of customers to the universities, but presents another problem, that of a lot of students not really being ‘university material’. As universities more and more live by their students actually passing exams, not just being enrolled there, standards shall invariably be lowered.
On the other hand, this is true, the interest in history in the media is increasing. But how many jobs are to be found here?
All in all, it seems that the future of history lies with serving history to the mature members of the community. Same thing as with the Church.
4 March 2008 at 7:15 am
I am all in favour of canons of all sorts, as long as they are not used as a pretext for fixing curricula for good. As instigators of debate, they are great. It is impossible to set up a canon that a majority would not disagree on, and try to replace with another one. For lots of very different reasons.
19 March 2008 at 4:52 pm
The major problem, as I see it, with any kind of official canon is that they tend to be fixed and authoritative. If an official canon is established it will be difficult to change it. After all, that’s the whole point with it. The examples that have been discussed (and even introduced) in Scandinavia tend to focus on names and (political) events, a fact that illustrates another problem with canons. Canons tend to emphasise traditional political history. Social history for example is much more difficult to fit into a canon. At least that is the obvious conclusion from the examples I have seen. In addition, a canon would always tend to be conservative. The whole idea with a canon is to keep it limited. Thus, I you want to ad something new to the canon (representing new fields of research) something else has to be removed.