From: "Tomasz Wegrzanowski"
On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 04:59:59PM -0700, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
NPOV is not impossible for textbooks. Why should it be? It's the easiest thing in the world. I don't agree with Alex's comments on history being necessarily POV at all -- I think that his comment misunderstands the social evolution of consensus embodied in an NPOV policy.
OK, I guess NPOV is possible for *some* textbooks, namely the ones that couldn't have a POV (like programming languages) or ones with minimal disagreement (such as physics ....
I agree with that too, these subjects are based upon actual knowledge and information. There is little disagreeent on what a law of physics is or even those theories that are theoretical; generally physicists will explain and present theories they don't personally agree with..
or literature), ...
I a not so sure about literature. A textbook writer may have a theory of literature that they are pushing through their textbook; once again this is entering the area of intepretive knowledge that is often based upon a POV. It is not the simple NPOV dispute we often see on Wikipedia, X happened, not Y. Or X happened because A felt it meant B.
But the more complex "X happened because of facts A, B, C, ... resulting in Z. The reason this happened is because Prop(1), Prop(2), Prop(3) are true." Then the second POV is "X happened because of facts B, E, F, ... resulting in Z. The reason this happened is because Prop (11), Prop(12), Prop(13), Prop(1) are true." With further POVs that can reach a large number of POVs. My understandin of NPOV is to include all of them, but if there are hundreds of such theories the article is no longer about X but about the various interpretations of X, a different subject, really but about the history of interpretations of what people believe about X happening. This is called historiography, and because of this the study of history is never simple and based upon an evolvling social consensus. History is all about the point of view of the historian that is constructing the historical model.
but for things like Israeli history ... there is widespread disagreement about basic underlying facts, not to mention people's motives, both of which are essential to creating a good textbook. ....
This is what I am talking about. Underlying facts are not necessarily known; certain high profile facts may be known, but the underlying facts are the sources of history that remain hidden from view. But even if they are known there is still the same problem.
History is exactly where good NPOV textbooks are needed most. In most countries history textbooks are little more than propaganda,
I would agree with the statement that many countries use grammer school and high school history textbooks as tools of propaganda, is, but what do historians do? They write their own textbooks and when students get to university then they begin to understand how the study of history is often captured by state controlled institutions for political reasons. Does this process occur in democracies where there is freedom of speech? Yes, but as most people do not understand how sophisticated propaganda can be in these lower schools so there is little political will to make the study of history more inclusive. Some would also argue that younger students would not really understand the levels of interpretation that go on in contstructing models of history and that often these political histories are not wrong in themselves, just generalizations that cannot be more sophisticated because they are for an audience that could not understand how relative history may be. The history of a country is often tied in with a sense of nationalism and the reason people are willing to serve their country. If one puts all that into question, the basic rationale for the nation-state may begin to fall apart so history serves some kind of state function and that is why it is often propaganda in some schools.
by both choice of material (ever noticed that they are mostly about
history of
the government of the country, with relatively little information about
other
areas like economy, culture etc. ?) and very strong bias in describing it.
This is the whole point, history is always written from the point of view of some theory, there is no inclusive theory of history. It may be written from a political point of view or from a economic point of view or from a cultural point of view. The proponents of these different views do not agree about the relevant facts (it would be impossible to have a history textbook that has all the facts of the past, just as it is impossible that Wikipedia have a page on every person who ever lived). Thus, each POV has to have an underlying methodology, the historians of each approach study different sets of primary sources (where history comes from) and analytically construct a theory based upon that set of sources. They may butrice those primary sources with secondary sources (these are already interpretations but may have some value). Are we talking about there being differences about basic facts? Sometimes yes, because the historical record may have been created out of secondary sources and a return to the primary sources may not verify what had been believed to be true. Sometimes the basic facts are not in dispute, but that does not make it any easier as those basic facts can be interpreted in a variety of ways, all possibly reasonable interpretations of those underlying "facts".
In particular, if people in Israel had good NPOV information instead of
being
fed by propaganda by both sides all the time, it would be much easier for
them
to solve their problems.
This is not really about history. First what is "NPOV information"? When it comes to history historians, I think, would say that there is no trivial answer to this question. Would they call their differing interpretations of history "propaganda? I don't think so. It is those who use the work of historians that make it propaganda. If you study the French Revolution from the point of view of one historian you may be looking at the evolution of economic forces in France, the effects of crop yields, migration patterns of peasant families, etc. you, as a historian, has certain perspectives on the forces of history; these forces were what caused the Revolution, not the rhetoric of certain revolutionary notables that happened to be in the right place at the right time. Another historian may see the French Revolution as being just the development of ideological forces at work in Paris and the activities of the metropolitan elites resulting in the breakdown of the ancien regime beaucratic infrastructure. What caused such a breakdown for this second historian? It may be the acts of a small number of revolutionaries that were given general support by the municipal population of Paris and the ripple effect that occurred throughout France was what caused the French Revolution.
So we have dozens, if not hundreds of theories about the French Revolution. How do you put them all into an NPOV textbook? That is my question. If the textbook is being used by a historian who has a political approach to history they want their students to understand the various models that historians from that point of view have presented (in other words, even within different schools of history there are disagreements about the causes of events). Will that historian want her/his textbook to mention other approaches from different schools of history, and not just differing opinions within one model? Yes, possibly, but to really put them all together in the same textbook? I doubt it, because doing so would make it very difficult (if not impossible) for the reader to understand the approach of the differing models within one particular school of historical analysis. A textbook looking at particular perspectives on a particular set of historical events or periods may not be able to cover all approaches and all histories.
Certainly a book can be written about the history of history (we call this historiography) and such a book should be written from a NPOV. This is the place for NPOV in history, but on the level of the approaches of individual historians? In a way, constantly injecting the approaches of other schools of history into a textbook written from a particular point of view would be very disruptive to that particular approach to history. When I have read or discussed history from historians one pays due regard for the historical approach before criticizing it or decontructing it. Of course one can always incorporate footnotes as references to the historiography literature that may be linked to a particular historical contraversy, but to put it all together in a single text? I have never seen a history textbook that did not have a particular point of view about history, propaganda or not. If one were to create such a textbook, first it would be a daunting task, that would require individuals who understood all the different approaches to a specific historical period (and remember that history is not a general subject, a book has to be written for each period of history, each geographical region, each political division and for each of these historians are only operating in specific areas, those studying French Revolutionary history are not the same historians who are studying modern French history, so each period of history and place that has a history will have different historians who take different points of view.
Alex756