Howard Zinn and Teaching

Richard Kahn, Department of Educational Foundations and Research, University of North Dakota

This last January 27th saw the passing of the great critical historian and activist, Howard Zinn. Besides being the famed author of A People’s History of the United States (2003), he was importantly an outspoken anarchist intellectual over the last five decades who routinely sought to intervene into the pressing matters of the day. Zinn was also well known as a gifted and much beloved university teacher. Some of his noteworthy students include the writer Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund. But his work as an educator was hardly confined to the classroom on campus, and he is equally remembered for his service as an advisor to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during its heyday in the early 1960s, as well as a faculty member who often joined in support of students, colleagues, and staff whenever and wherever they faced institutional struggles.

His death, then, provides an opportunity to further reflect on the special qualities that he evoked as a teacher and which he brought to his craft. As someone who is trained in the philosophy and history of education, I would therefore like to offer a few brief comments on Zinn-the-educator here in this blog as a rejoinder to its ongoing conversation about the nature of what constitutes good and bad pedagogy in higher education today.

Zinn was a paradigmatic example for why great teachers should not be slavishly devoted to that which is marketed as pedagogical “best practice” in any given moment or situation. Rather he showed how, in a manner echoed by Parker Palmer, the author of The Courage to Teach (2007), great teachers should seek to enter with their students into a “community of truth” centered around the teacher’s passionate commitment to maintaining self-integrity. Here, the point is not to be (for reasons of either ideology or pragmatics) student-centered or teacher-centered, group inquiry-oriented or lecture-based, in favor of infusing technology or not, etc. None of these are ends in themselves for the educator who seeks to teach in and with a community of truth. Instead, from a perspective such as Zinn’s, our job as educators is to invite our classes into the rigorous pursuit and production of the living history of ideas—the truth of our unfolding human process in all of its registers. In this way, we thus also model for students how to begin naming and navigating the various socio-cultural forces coalescing around them, to articulate and argue for their own perspectives on society and its institutions, and so in good faith become democratic citizens capable of exerting their own civic leadership.

In other words, according to Zinn the last thing we should aim at in our pedagogy is to “objectively” deposit content knowledge into students’ minds—what the critical educator Paulo Freire termed “banking pedagogy” in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2001). To begin with, Zinn denied that such was even possible. For students, like all people, are actively constructing their reality and placing new experience in the contexts of how they have come to understand and identify with their world. Thus, to teach in this way is to deny the human agency that students bring to the pedagogical encounter. Further, the zone of university teaching does not take place in a void, but is the complex ecological space constructed out of the myriad histories of the people inhabiting the campus, the institution’s own policy and disciplinary histories, the regional history in which a college is situated, the political history of the nation, and the social history of the planet (i.e., globalization). Thus, there is no value-free perspective from which to impart objective knowledge, but only the dynamic landscape that is the actively evolving history of ideas as articulated by various groups occupying a highly diverse array of social locations. To Zinn, the role of the teacher was to be frank and open about how one’s pedagogy related to these groups—which side was it on? Not to indoctrinate or propagandize, but to celebrate the democratic nature of education and help students to recognize that the true object of teaching was not content knowledge but the birth of their own civic subjectivity.

For this reason, I include the following long quotation from Howard Zinn’s book Failure to Quit (2002) in every one of my syllabi under the “Format, Procedure, Requirements” section:

This is not an “objective” course. I will not lie to you, or conceal information from you because it is embarrassing to my beliefs. But I am not a “neutral” teacher. I have a point of view about war, about racial and sexual inequality, about economic injustice—and this point of view will affect my choice of subject, and the way I discuss it. I ask you to listen to my point of view, but I don’t expect you to adopt it. You have a right to argue with me about anything, because, on the truly important issues of human life there are no “experts.” I will express myself strongly, as honestly as I can, and I expect you to do the same. I am not your only source of information, of ideas. Points of view different from mine are all around, in the library, in the press. Read as much as you can. All I ask is that you examine my information, my ideas and make up your own mind.

Not being neutral means we serve the democratic nature of education and strengthen the community of the university and all it serves. To my mind, as to Zinn’s, this not being neutral hardly equates to an opinion free for all, however. Instead, it is a demand that we use our disciplinary teaching to foster communities of truth that are learning to read and intervene into the dehumanizing and anti-democratic aspects of our civic life.

In closing, I would like to give this blog’s readers a chance to reflect on how Zinn himself was reading our civic and educational challenge only a few days prior to his demise. In a letter to his friend, the critical educator Henry Giroux, Zinn wrote, “Henry, we are in a situation where mild rebuke, even critiques we consider ‘radical’ are not sufficient. (Frederick Douglass‘ speech on the Fourth of July in 1852, thunderously angry, comes close to what is needed). Raising the temperature of our language, our indignation, is…what is needed.”

If you are a teacher in higher education, are you raising your voice and being heard by your students (or potential students) in this way—using your knowledge and position to teach against the clear and present dangers of our present moment in history? If not, is this because you disagree with Zinn’s conclusion? Let me suggest, then, that his truth is not so easily dismissed. For, if I wanted to know the specifics of quantum mechanics, I would undoubtedly benefit from listening to a theoretical physicist specializing in quantum theory, no? Or, if I wanted to understand something of the human body, might I not give ear to someone more expert than I in general medicine? In this same way, Zinn was an expert in democratic pedagogy and if we are interested in a world that values the power of people, their freedom, their ideas, desires, and needs, then we do such a world a great disservice if we banish those voices and needs every time we enter our classroom.

But maybe you agree with Zinn and, all the same, still find your teacherly voice more silent than he would recommend on the crucial social and culture issues that serve as the broader context for your work? Of course, if education is always political (and it is) and if we teach in institutions in which power is not equally distributed (and we do), then we must always be tactical and strategic in our speech. I, for one, would never hastily criticize a colleague for failing to appear on the front line of any campus or community issue. To learn to articulate demands is powerful, but for this very reason it can entail serious resistance and significant consequences for those who chose to engage in democratizing the curriculum-at-large.

And yet, there was someone like Howard Zinn who engaged in this behavior through a storied academic career for the large majority of his 87 years on earth! Nor was he ever alone in his pursuits. Therefore, we must take care as teachers to talk back—at least occasionally—to the potential oppressor in our heads, the “conscience” who too often demands our quiet complacency and counsels an undercurrent of fear rather than valor in our faculty work. Are there campus concerns that you now have which you feel occupy too low an amplitude in the university’s common discourse? You need not take up a bullhorn (though you may) in order to better represent them. Instead, turn to them in your teaching. Bring your students into dialogue with them, and so strive to become the kind of great educator who is capable of organizing a community of truth founded upon a pedagogy of integrity.