Class Struggles: Teaching History in the Postmodern Age

Abstract

IN THE LATE SIXTIES, when I started my career as a college history teacher, the community colleges were democratizing education, using open admissions to include the excluded, and attempting to make higher education affordable for all. The counter-culture was in full cry; young people questioned authority and embraced the new electronic sounds of rock music. At the same time, from the graduate schools came waves of curricular reform as the very foundations of the ivory tower were being shaken by theories of deconstruction and postmodernism. Now, thirty years later, the sense of mission and spirit of optimism are gone from community colleges which must battle for money and public support. The students of the nineties are labeled an unknowable Generation X, and deconstruction and the New History have become mired in the acrimonious debates between defenders of canon and proponents of change. I will here review some interesting commentary on the present situation and suggest what it means in the classroom. The teaching of history in two-year colleges has been challenged by the forces of social change which have come with such speed and are so unprecedented that they seem to portend a wholesale shift in our American culture. In fact, the last thirty years which have been called postmodern seem to herald a period of new thinking that some have