Students Need to Stop Trying to 'Catch' Experts

Do you remember when you were in school and wanted to aspire to a gold star on an assignment?  In my days that meant cutting pretty pictures out of NationalGeographic, tracing a map, or getting out the colored pencils to decorate the text.  Well, now there is a new twist.  If you are to do well, so students are being told, you must go out and find an “expert.”  You can send questions by email or, better still, record or videotape an interview.

The result is that I am now feeling like a hunted deer.  I am an historian, you see, and have written books on twentieth-century history.  Every week, so it seems, the plaintive emails come in, from California to New York, most from the students themselves, once memorably from a mother who told me that her son’s life would be ruined if I didn’t answer his questions.  At the moment the volume is particularly high because of National History Day and its competitions.  This year’s topic, so I have been told repeatedly, is Debate and Diplomacy, and unfortunately I am in the sights of the eager young because I have written both about the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Nixon’s trip to China in 1972.

My correspondents are usually polite and, no doubt, enterprising but their emails are nevertheless infuriating.  To begin with, they ask questions which even a cursory knowledge of the subject should make unnecessary.  Why should my time be taken up with telling students, as I have been asked, which countries were represented at the Paris Peace Conference, or whether Adolf Hitler disliked the Treaty of Versailles?  I do not mind answering thoughtful questions from people of any age with an interest in history but I don’t need to stand in for Wikipedia.  If I thought that the students had done some reading to acquaint themselves with a topic, puzzled over tricky issues and really wanted answers, I would not be so impatient.  But they haven’t and they don’t.  What they want are snippets of information to save them the trouble of searching for themselves and handy quotes from their “expert” to stick in their assignments.  I don’t want to be the icing on the cake for an assignment or the strange object brought back that wins the scavenger hunt—or in this case the National History Day competition.

It is not fair to blame the young for this.  They live in a networked culture where all human knowledge seems to be within reach and in easy form.  They have technology which encourages them to tweet and multitask, but it does not necessarily help them to concentrate for sustained periods of time.  Books and even articles are not so easy to read quickly and it is not always easy to find specific answers to specific questions in them.  Often the arguments contained within them are complex and take time to trace through and more time to absorb and understand.  The temptation is to look for shortcuts to answers without bothering with the arguments and evidence which lead up to conclusions.  It means, of course, that you don’t really understand the answer. Moreover, you do not have the capacity to tell whether it is a good or bad one. 

Although my inclination was to damn National History Day and all its competitions for encouraging students down the wrong paths, it is blameless.  Although one student assured me that, according to the rules, he had to have at least one interview with an expert, I went on to its website and could find no such demand.  Indeed, the instructions that the website gives for doing historical research were impeccable.  The National History Day people explain how to start developing a topic and how to conduct research and they lay out such matters as the differences between primary and secondary sources clearly.  (The point was missed by one of my student correspondents though who seemed to think that I was a primary source on the events of 1919.  There are times when I feel very old indeed but I am not yet over ninety.)  There is one phrase in the competition guidelines which could, I suppose, be misunderstood and it comes, interestingly enough, in the section for teachers. It is where they are told:  Encourage students to interrogate their sources.  Somehow, I suspect, this must have been read in many classrooms as interrogating the author of a work of history.  Track your expert down, bring out the bright lights, and extract the secrets of the past—what could be easier?

And so, reluctantly, I lay considerable blame on the teachers.  Not all by any means, but the steady drip-drip-drip of my emails make it clear that there are many teachers out there telling their students that they must interview an ‘expert’ for their projects.  Indeed, one teacher has gone even better and insists that two experts are essential.  This is all wrong, deeply silly and bad pedagogy.  What is the point of asking a few questions of someone who has already written at length on a topic?  It can only be to beef up the assignment or the entry, to somehow demonstrate extra diligence and initiative and to do so on the cheap.  Students are not being helped to understand how history involves formulating questions, the careful weighing of evidence and the building of arguments. 
And history demands reading, lots of it.  It is about accumulating knowledge so that you can understand context and change. Yet the message students are getting is rather that history is easy and painless.

Teachers who are pushing students to hunt the expert are doing the young a disservice by steering them away from trying to read and understand works of history.  (And if I take a selfish position for a moment, such teachers are also making my life more difficult and my temper shorter.)  Posing a few questions is no substitute for hard work and sustained researching and thinking and coming to your own conclusions.  It is a bad lesson to be conveying and not just for historical research. 

There is another bad lesson too that students are in danger of learning, and that is to be disingenuous and sycophantic.  Students, judging by my emails, are also being encouraged to claim that they have read and admired the expert’s work when the questions they ask demonstrate quite clearly that they have not.  Questions I have had about the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 include why the United States Senate did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles (a part of a chapter on that) or whether there was a debate in France about how to treat Germany (another chapter or two).  One email said, rather sweetly, that my book was full of insights and a great help and then asked me to explain why the peace settlements of 1919 led directly to the Second World War, when, as a matter of fact, I had argued precisely the opposite.

I used to answer my emails, I like to think politely, by telling students that I have pretty much said everything I want to say on a particular subject in my writings and that they should search for answers there.  I now simply hit the delete button; the number of requests I get are simply too many (and quite frankly too irritating).  And I write mainly about international history.  I hate to think how many American historians must get. If I were an expert on George Washington or Abraham Lincoln I would be inclined to abandon email altogether and head for an island in the Hebrides.