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I have always enjoyed history, and I distinctly remember being disappointed in history classes because history was taught as chunks that seemed almost unrelated from each other. It was difficult to get a feeling for how the chain of cause and effect happened, or get a narrative sense of history because each chapter would be its own miniature little topic. And if time was running thin in a school year, certain chapters were sped through at an even more breakneck pace than normal.
In high school the history class seemed to jump from just after the American Revolution, to westward expansion for like a chapter, to the start of the Civil War, to a dabble of Reconstruction, jump to WW2 (which covered basically just Pearl Harbor and the atomic bomb), and then to the Civil Rights era.
The context and connection between all of those things was completely flashed over in the name of supposedly covering all of that time. It would have been impossible to connect with any of what was happening because as a student you were too busy dealing with the firehouse of mandatory facts to get through the tests.
Talking to my mother and other older folk, there seems to be a gradual change in how history has been taught. Doubtlessly unevenly distributed, but public school history in many places has developed to emphasize the contours and details of the societies, rather than dates and places. I remember having an older History teacher in Middle School, and he gave us just the worst kind of shite, the kind of rote memorization that put even me to sleep. All the younger teachers, and all my teachers with ‘Dr.’ in their title, taught a much more engaging form of history.
I’ve been out of school for about 15 years and history was not just memorization, but it was still super boring, because often enough the angles were completely irrelevant.
For example, here in Germany the whole Weimar/Third Reich period is rather important, and we spent hours “analyzing” diagrams of the different constitutional institutions in the different systems and their relevance to the later outcome. Maybe super important for polsci, but for teenagers utterly useless.
And what I personally find the most disturbing: you’re so drowned in Nazi stuff that you mentally go “yeah Hitler bad, yada yada yada”. That’s actually not only useless, but dangerous.
Here in the US, we had a pretty ordinary-feeling size WW2 curriculum, but I remember our History teacher taking out three days just for playing contemporary reels of the aftermath of the death camps, in total silence. It was very striking, I hope he still does it. If there was anything that drilled in the sheer inhumanity of those camps, it was seeing it.
This is very true. Traditional archeology was very top down, all about who ruled where when. Modern archeology is lot more about finding out what everyday life was like for regular people. Experimental archeology has really taken off in the last 20 years, people living long stretches in strictly period lives.
These folks do a great job of creating accessible documentary series’ of their experiences living period lives for long periods. Here they visit an entire castle being made with medieval methods by archeologists living medieval lives: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL72jhKwankOiwI5zt6lC3eQtsQDxOaN_g&si=ZNevj_CuevNrMwNr
Effectively all my history education was names and places, and I remember almost nothing of it except… names and some places.
Yeah, we were very rarely questioned about names or places, except for a few big ones (presidents, mostly). We learned about the Silent Trade, or what Totalitarianism is, or what fiat currency is, or the difference between universalizing and ethnic religions, or what the Progressive Era heralded. Good stuff. I don’t know that the rest of my class each year were engaged as I was, but they certainly weren’t more inattentive than in any other class; and on group projects they demonstrated a good understanding of the material. I actually was in the “middle of the pack” classes because of my perpetually mediocre grades lmao, so it wasn’t like I was with honors students or anything.
I remember one of my classmates asking if I had a copy of the Art of War and if he could borrow it (yes on both accounts). Always felt good when I could share a little piece of my fascinations.
yeah my history classes were just strings of dates and names you had to memorise and that was it. I only enjoyed the first few chapters when the teacher could only go “probably ramses III sometime in 1234BC did a thing”
School has always been shit. It’s underfunded, mismanaged, and manages to fail a large portion of the population. It’s not useless, it’s just shit.
Education should be the biggest expense of any country, but it barely ever is.
True.
I am not too sure if this applies, or if ever:
History is written by the Victors.
Whoever owns the ‘press’ decides our history.
