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History--it's All Frames
"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." --Abraham H. Maslow
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” --Abraham H. Maslow
In school, unless we had an alternative education, we were taught history through the eyes of the powerful and elite. We learned about Columbus’ voyage to discover the new world and what he encountered there. We learned all about the founding fathers and the Declaration of Independence. We learned that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.
This is clearly an overly simplified description of a narrow overview, but I use these examples just to make a point. If we’re viewing history from the perspective of those in power, we’re not really viewing history, are we.
The frame that education uses, the frame mandated for public educational institutions, (funded by public money and which curriculum is determined by the “powers that be“), is a positive one, for the most part. Revising history is a work of fiction, ‘1984’, and couldn’t possibly happen. But if you think about it, all history is revision.
Recently I cam across a book called “The People’s History of The United States”. This book has been around for more than thirty years and is updated as history continues to unfold.
This book is a classic reframe and whether or not we can agree that the perspective is valid, or “Marxist” or “socialist”, we have to agree that it is an entirely different frame from what we’re used to.
With Columbus’ discovery, the natives didn’t see him as a hero, but as a bringer of genocide and blankets which spread small pox.
There were pilgrims who on the record were escaping religious persecution, but to the natives they were colonizing them.
At the end of the most recent edition of “The People’s History” is an amazing reframe of the “war on terror”. For the most part, people have accepted what the media and powers that be have handed out as the reason Arab terrorists attacked us on 9/11—they hate our freedom. Hmmm. . . But maybe they hate our foreign policy and would leave us alone if we left them alone. Maybe they’re simply fed up because we have stationed “U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia… sanctions against Iraq which… had resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children; [and] the continued U.S. support of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land.”
But wait. . .That’s not what the TV or newspapers tell us. Why? Because it doesn’t fit with what they want to do or how they want us to be passive in their doing it.
Frames are complicated, just as reality is complicated, just as life is complicated, but if we can see the frames for what they are, then we can control them.