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It investigates the learning question “Why didn’t I know this before?” and how encountering “difficult knowledge” can unsettle students, provoking a crisis of learning. Through discussion of historical narratives and crisis pedagogy, it outlines conditions that produce not-knowing as an essential aspect of learning rather than its absence.",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":40,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/why-didnt-i-know-this-before-psychoanalysis-social-studies-education-and-the-shock-doctrine/598563/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/why-didnt-i-know-this-before-psychoanalysis-social-studies-education-and-the-shock-doctrine/598563.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"A glass of water","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-30","2026-10-15",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":34},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"How does the essay use psychoanalytic inquiry in social studies education?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"It uses psychoanalytic inquiry to study relationships among pedagogy, trauma, and crisis, focusing on how learning can generate psychic consequences when “difficult knowledge” is encountered.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"What role does the question “Why didn’t I know this before?” play in the paper?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"The question serves as the hinge of the paper, pointing to conditions of knowing and not-knowing and helping the author theorize why such articulation arises in learning contexts.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"Why are crisis and trauma treated as inherent components of learning in the essay?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"The paper argues that crisis appears in confrontation with ignorance and with uncertainty about knowledge, especially knowledge involving social and/or historical trauma, making crisis part of learning itself.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},598563,1792170941,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":39,"category_name":40,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":34,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":139,"language":140,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":141,"faqs":142,"seo_title":143,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":144,"read_time":145},962090760832,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_155a257f0dc6eb9ab79c44ca47cae57d","Why Didn’t I Know This Before?  \nPsychoanalysis, Social Studies Education, and The Shock Doctrine  \nH. James Garrett  \nUniversity of Georgia  \nAbstract  \nIn this essay, the author employs psychoanalytic inquiry (Britzman, 1998; Felman, 1992; Lacan, 1988) to think about the relationships between pedagogy, trauma, and crisis in the contexts of social studies and teacher education. The paper explores a potential space in social studies education that can acknowledge the psychic consequences of encountering “difficult knowledge” where and when pedagogy and representations of trauma meet (Britzman, 1998) . To do so, the author examines a question posed by his students – Why didn’t I know this before?– describes the context that gave rise to it, and then demonstrates a way for social studies educators to think about the psychical demands inherent in learning about the world.  \nCurricular documents and scholarly work ask social studies educators to help students negotiate, among other priorities, multiple perspectives on historical events. Whether this encounter with competing accounts is actualized through the interpretation of primary documents to practice “historical thinking”(Wineburg, 2001), postmodern critique (Segall, 2006; Seixas, 2001) or critical pedagogy (Kincheloe, 2001), when done well social studies provides students opportunities to examine competing narratives offering differing readings of events and processes. (den Heyer & Abbott, 2011) . Such a stance is a necessity that becomes clear as we consider The Cold War, Vietnam, the post-Cold War nation building projects, genocides in Rwanda and Sudan, the War on Terror, recent NATO military intervention in Northern Africa, and the global economic crisis are all historical events that are part of the purview of social education and that can each be accounted for in a number of different ways. They are also issues that, because of their accounting of violence and injustice, beckon the student toward a confrontation with potentially unsettling knowledge. What happens when the alternative narrative disturbs and provokes in students a crisis of learning?  \nWhy didn’t I know this before? is the question that often arises across sections of a social studies methods course in which I serve as the instructor. While this question might have arisen in response to any number of texts, in this case it was articulated in response to Naomi Klein’s (2007) book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise and Fall of Disaster Capitalism. This specific text was selected to invite students into conversation with an alternative narrative of events about which most students seemed to have prior knowledge. But the alternative telling, narrating, and framing of those events provoked students to ask questions of those events and their narration: Why didn’t I know this before? is the hinge around which this paper moves.  \nThe interrogative in this question is multi-vocal. As I discuss below, the question speaks to the content in The Shock Doctrine as it troubles what many students have encountered in their education. It also speaks about the ways that learning about crisis has lead to its own crisis; the confrontation with a learner’s own ignorance (Felman, 1987), which in this sense is particular kind of relationship with knowledge rather than its lack. Further, the question speaks to and from an uncertainty about knowledge, particularly knowledge about social and/or historical trauma (Britzman, 1998; Farley, 2009; Matthews, 2009; Pitt & Britzman, 2003) . It indicates that the use value of knowledge in the present indicts a past time when the knowledge either was not present or was differently narrativized so as to have quite different meanings. And finally this question reveals a complicated relationship between time, knowing, and pedagogy.  \nIn this paper I use psychoanalytic inquiry to think about the relationships between pedagogy, trauma and crisis in the contexts of social studies and teacher education. ","cbCaig5Pe0URKkcU","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaig5Pe0URKkcU","pdf",475345,11,"English","# Abstract\n# Context(s) of Inquiry\n## What is it that students don’t know?","[{\"question\":\"How does the essay use psychoanalytic inquiry in social studies education?\",\"answer\":\"It uses psychoanalytic inquiry to study relationships among pedagogy, trauma, and crisis, focusing on how learning can generate psychic consequences when “difficult knowledge” is encountered.\"},{\"question\":\"What role does the question “Why didn’t I know this before?” play in the paper?\",\"answer\":\"The question serves as the hinge of the paper, pointing to conditions of knowing and not-knowing and helping the author theorize why such articulation arises in learning contexts.\"},{\"question\":\"Why are crisis and trauma treated as inherent components of learning in the essay?\",\"answer\":\"The paper argues that crisis appears in confrontation with ignorance and with uncertainty about knowledge, especially knowledge involving social and/or historical trauma, making crisis part of learning itself.\"}]","Why Didn’t I Know This Before? - Psychoanalysis, Social Studies Education, and The Shock Doctrine | PDF",1792087160,28]