"The teacher of history's work should be, ideally, not simply a description of past cultures, but a performance of the culture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being"
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History teaching, Thompson insists, is less museum label than live theater: the point is not to curate dead civilizations but to stage the one that is actively making us. That pivot from "description" to "performance" is doing the heavy lifting. Description flatters the historian as a neutral observer; performance admits that the classroom is already inside the drama, that every syllabus and interpretive frame is a cultural act with consequences.
The sly, slightly unsettling phrase "taking our being" turns culture into something that forms us at the level of identity, not preference. Thompson is pushing back against the comforting fantasy that we can stand outside modernity and simply "learn" it. Instead, we are being authored by systems (media, technology, institutions, myths) that history teachers help render visible. In that sense, the historian becomes less a chronicler than a director: selecting scenes, pacing narratives, casting heroes and villains, deciding what counts as causation. The subtext: if you pretend you are merely reporting, you are smuggling in values unexamined.
The line also carries a 20th-century philosopher's anxiety about acceleration. "Increasingly" signals that whatever culture is now - late-industrial, mediated, global, technocratic - it is tightening its grip, making the old idea of detached scholarship feel quaint. Thompson's intent is not to abandon the past but to deny it the alibi of distance: teach Rome or the Maya, sure, but do it in a way that reveals the operating system of the present and our complicity in it.
The sly, slightly unsettling phrase "taking our being" turns culture into something that forms us at the level of identity, not preference. Thompson is pushing back against the comforting fantasy that we can stand outside modernity and simply "learn" it. Instead, we are being authored by systems (media, technology, institutions, myths) that history teachers help render visible. In that sense, the historian becomes less a chronicler than a director: selecting scenes, pacing narratives, casting heroes and villains, deciding what counts as causation. The subtext: if you pretend you are merely reporting, you are smuggling in values unexamined.
The line also carries a 20th-century philosopher's anxiety about acceleration. "Increasingly" signals that whatever culture is now - late-industrial, mediated, global, technocratic - it is tightening its grip, making the old idea of detached scholarship feel quaint. Thompson's intent is not to abandon the past but to deny it the alibi of distance: teach Rome or the Maya, sure, but do it in a way that reveals the operating system of the present and our complicity in it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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