More recently, in the early phases of a gen ed overhaul, I bargained away one of History’s two required courses in exchange for a linked, crossdisciplinary, question-oriented component. I would have gladly given both. The local champions of the liberal arts, convinced this could only be a deranged capitulation of sacred turf, tried to get my departmental colleagues to talk sense into me. But of course we’d been having that conversation for years, with varying degrees of consensus. I comically told the liberal artistes that History in particular did nothing at the survey level that couldn’t get done a bunch of other and maybe better ways. Inus conditions. Greater wisdom did prevail in the end and we got both our courses back, with no linking.

Some colleagues wondered if our students could handle the pressure of thinking more than one thought at once. Our school is fairly young, undistinguished and regionally challenged. We bootstrapped ourselves on the cheap as a liberal arts school and struggled, until we could pull together enough professional programs to sustain and grow the operation. This basic dynamic is not clear to all. Most students grin and bear the breadth requirements, or actively and vocally resent being forced to take any class that they will not need for their careers. In general they have had a ridiculously poor and counterproductive exposure to History, which to them has been a series of meaningless textbook coverage slogs through name and date trivia. A few of them liked that about it. Either way they know how to game that system, so they are also suspicious and quickly resentful of any curriculum and pedagogy that disrupts the pattern. Well, and that’s true of many of us.

What we should want for students is for them to study what engages them, because it’s the engagement that leads to real learning. The purpose of general education should be to make sure that students have a chance to try out the major approaches to problem solving, in the hopes that something will strike a spark, and not to provide featherbedding for faculty. I don’t want someone who is passionate about history to suffer through another tedious political science course just because the political science department (or the math department or the art department) is anxious about its enrollment. And I don’t want the reverse to happen either. I want students to study history, but I want them to choose it over other subjects, not to suffer through it under compulsion. If that means that I need to reconsider what I offer, then I have to do it.

I doubt that things here in Texas have changed very much in the intervening decades.
In those classes I never heard of Alexander Stephens’ “Cornerstone Speech.” If we and all who followed had been required to read and analyze this speech then the lies that the South went to war over tariffs and the like would have died away long ago. But those lies are still hard at work in many poorly cultivated minds here in the South.

History classes, American or World, should start with something like this:

Evolution by natural selection governs all life forms and has produced two living varieties of our species: tyranni, who are aggressive and selfish, and democrati, who are timid and altruistic.

Democrati naturally work for the common good—they act rationally. Tyranni naturally work against the common good—they act irrationally.

The Cycle of Human History:

• Tyranni naturally, aggressively push forward to take power.
• Democrati naturally, timidly step back to let them pass.
• Tyranni naturally use that power to indulge their selfish urges.
• Innocents (tyranni and democrati alike) suffer and die unnecessarily.
• A great commotion occurs—from elections to wars.
• Tyranni-outs seize power from tyranni-ins.
• And the cycle renews.

But because Nature has been so bountiful, because democrati greatly outnumber tyranni, and because humans are so resilient and so creative, this brutal process could not stop progress—very costly progress, often needlessly tragic and unevenly distributed, but progress nevertheless—of that there is no doubt. However, we are now dangerously near the end. Nature’s bounty is nearly exhausted. She can no longer heal our self-inflicted wounds, she cannot replenish what we take from her—she cannot forgive our greed.

Without the assistance of Nature, we humans are finally on our own. Our millennia of adolescence are over. It is time to grow up. We can no longer afford to indulge our selfish urges—we cannot afford to just do what comes naturally: act reflexively, act without thinking, play political games instead of doing the hard work of facing and solving the immense problems we have created for ourselves. If we continue to follow the instinctive natures given to us by evolution by natural selection we will go the way of countless other species—we will decline, even become extinct—and it will be sooner rather than later.

Throughout these classes teachers should constantly discuss and analyze historical events to see which were tyranno, and which were democrato. They should determine which historical figures were tyranni and which were democrati.

And in the second semester teachers should lead discussions aimed at how our systems of government and economics should be modified to serve the common good.
Students should be taught that evolution by intellection, a slightly less rigorous form of the scientific method, should be used in designing these new systems.

History is nasty business dominated, even today, by tyranni. History teachers should accept and teach this fact.