Shifting Kaleidoscopes: How studying history taught me to find the beauty of multiple perspectives

On the first day of sophomore year, I walked into my advanced European history class feeling a mixture of excitement and apprehension. I knew I loved studying history, but my teacher was new to me, and I wondered if there would be different or more challenging expectations. What I didn’t know then was that this class would change how I thought about the discipline entirely. 

My teacher, Ms. Gerst, turned out to be a lively and caring woman who instantly drew me in with her infectious passion for the subject matter. She made it clear that history was not about learning content for a test or aimlessly memorizing dates that might be forgotten as soon as the class was over. Instead, she instilled in us that studying history is a framework for how to think, understand, and bring in voices that are so often left out. 

On day one, Ms. Gerst established a list of terms to guide our study. She introduced concatenation, the idea that every event in history is part of an interconnected web; contextualization, the notion that ideas should be evaluated within their respective time periods; and my personal favorite: shifting kaleidoscopes, or the skill of switching perspectives. She taught us that the truth can rarely be told through a single narrative. It is only by reconciling multiple perspectives that we can begin to understand an issue with nuance and humility. 

In every lesson, Ms. Gerst reinforced a need to examine opposing arguments. I saw it in the Reformation, with Martin Luther and the Catholic Church, and in the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) with traditional religious leaders and the Maskilim who sought to merge secularism with Jewish thought. I encountered it especially in the essay “On Liberty”, an exposition on free speech by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill. Mill argues that in debates, people usually assume one opinion must be true and the other, by extension, entirely false. But Mill counters that the truth typically combines elements of both. John Stuart Mill wasn't neutral and frequently held views that ran contrary to the mainstream. He campaigned for women's suffrage in the UK, supported abolitionism in the US, and created London’s Speaker’s Corner to promote the free exchange of ideas. His strong views were in no way diluted by his belief in thoughtful dialogue. After discussing John Stewart Mill’s ideas in-depth in class, I began to see “kaleidoscope shifting” as a powerful means of anchoring my perspective on contemporary political conflicts. The more I practiced it, the more at home I felt in this way of thinking. 

I am now in my second year as Ms. Gerst’s student, this time taking a comparative politics and international relations class. I can confidently say she has changed my life. Her teaching has given me not only an intellectual perspective on how to think critically about history and the social sciences, but a framework for viewing issues beyond the classroom. It’s helped me navigate personal situations too. My grandparents and many of my cousins live in Israel, and over the past few years it’s been extremely difficult to take in the news or digest some of the messages about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I’ve seen on social media. 

On social media, people, including me sometimes, rarely take the time to slow down and listen. “Picking a side” is understandably tempting. Uncertainty doesn’t feel good, and absolute clarity about the “right” story offers an easy comfort for anyone trying to make sense of an incredibly raw and painful conflict. It’s easy to tape up a sign on your locker or “like” a reel on Instagram. It’s harder to hear and empathize with people’s stories in real life. I also recognize that actually living in the region is another story, and I am speaking from a position where I don’t have to pick a side. 

For Jews in the diaspora, while the rest of the world demands that we explicitly “pick a side,” studying and writing about history offers something different. 

With the framework that I’ve been taught in Ms. Gerst’s class, I’m required to consider other perspectives. In every AP English exam, for instance, students are required to earn the “sophistication” point by including a rebuttal, a concession for another point of view. We’re graded on our ability to look beyond our argument and consider how another individual might approach the issue.

Indeed, Judaism itself takes contrasting opinions seriously too. In our tradition, we record the views of those whose opinions did not prevail. These dialogues are not only valued but also elevated. We call them “arguments for the sake of heaven.” By placing disagreement at the center of a religious text, the minority perspective is not only acknowledged, but it’s also made wholly transparent. 

Shifting kaleidoscopes should not be confused with an absence of views in the classroom, nor is it about advocating for a sort of moral relativism where every view is given equal weight. It’s a framework that advocates making room for diversity of thought, but not tolerating hate speech or violent language. However, even terrible and abhorrent views require interrogation to understand where and why they originate. 

I try to practice kaleidoscope shifting offline, where I think it counts the most. I am lucky enough to attend a school where I am surrounded daily by peers who think very differently from me. While this is difficult sometimes, I’ve had several fruitful, in-person conversations with classmates during which we realized that, at our core, we all simply want to understand each other better. Those face-to-face dialogues are far more powerful than anything played out on social media, which strips political issues, especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of all nuance, with parallel narratives that never engage. 

I don’t have a flag to wave or a sign to hold, but I do have Ms. Gerst’s lesson. A single viewpoint can never reveal the full picture. The most important intellectual and social skills are a sense of curiosity and a willingness to listen deeply, especially to views with which you don’t agree. Certainty only gives us a partial picture. True understanding lives in that complicated in-between, a space where, if we allow ourselves to linger, we might actually start to understand one another.