David Lowenthal, "Dilemmas and Delights of Learning History," in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives, ed. by Peter N Stearn, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg (New York: NYU Press, 2000).

The study of history, argues Lowenthal, helps us get a historical understanding of everyday affairs, enables us to realize that the past has ongoing consequences, and makes us see that the past is "uniquely unlike the present". The trope about the "strangeness" or "uniqueness" of the past can be traced in all the readings for this week. According to Lowenthal, seeing the past as different from the present will help Americans shed their present day lenses and "put themselves in others' shoes" (p 67). Thus, for Lowenthal, the study of history enables us to overcome the culture of ahistoricism.

According to Lowenthal, historical understanding is hindered by amateurish attempts to make sense of the past – attempts that are characterized by a lack of maturity and academic rigor. He also blames postmodernism for impeding historical understanding; postmodernists, he says, attack universal historical referents and deny claims to historical truths (p 71).

Russell H. Hvolbek, "History and Humanities: Teaching as Destructive of Certainty" in History Anew: Innovations in the Teaching of History Today, ed. by Robert Blackey (Long Beach, Calif. : University Press, California State University, 1993), 3-9.

Hvolbek is concerned by the inability of teachers to inspire students to learn and to appreciate "the value of our cultural, intellectual, and social past". He identifies the drive for "objective knowledge" and the desire to be "scientific" as the "deeper reason" why teachers cannot inspire students (p 1). Hvolbek wants historians to reconsider their purpose for teaching history. He argues that the goal of history and the humanities is to make students aware "how their lives connect to past human experience". (p 4)

To help students connect with the past, Hvolbek believes that history teachers must help them overcome their smugness: they must assist them to look beyond their sociocultural assumptions, prejudices and destroy their self-assured and commonsensical understanding of the past. Destruction, for him, is a metaphor for education.

Sam Wineburg. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), p 1-25.

Wineburg takes his cue from Lowenthal and continues the engagement with the malady of "presentism" – the act of seeing the past through the lens of the present. A psychologist by training, he sees presentism as a psychological condition, a way of thinking that comes naturally to us (p 19). Historical thinking, on the other hand, is an unnatural act. It challenges us to alter the mental structures we use to grasp the past (p 7). Like Lowenthal, Wineburg sees virtue in seeing the past as a strange place, but he does not want the study of history to be distinct from our concerns in the present (p 6). Thus, he believes, historical thinking not only helps us perceive how people in the past experienced the world, but also how people in the present live in it.

Rita Culross, "Why I Teach", College Teaching, Spring 2004 v 52 i2 p 63 (1)

Culross goes through the laundry list of reasons that inspire her to teach. She thinks of teaching as a mission to educate students and believes that students learn best under the watchful eyes of their professor. The second reason she lists is her love for the profession and the energy she derives from interacting with students in a classroom and by facilitating their transformation from being knowledge gatherers to engaged scholars. The third reason is her sense of personal integrity. Teaching also enables her to stay up-to-date with her knowledge and skills. Culross says that teaching enables her to achieve the ‘loop' researchers aspire towards: where teaching spurs scholarship and scholarship spurs teaching.