Why Most People Think Memorizing Historical Facts is Useless (and Why It Isn’t) | Hacker News Reader

Why Most People Think Memorizing Historical Facts is Useless (and Why It Isn’t)

historyatourhouse.com

58 pointsdwwoelfel21 comments

The article's argument seems to be semantical in nature. I don't think many people would argue that learning about history is useless. The author and I hold the exact same beliefs -- knowing that the Pilgrims landed in American in 1690 is useless, but knowing why they left, the rough state of colonization in America at the time, etc. is useful. But when people refer to "historical facts", they think of the former. It seems like he's just quibbling over the word "fact".

I would make a similar argument for geography. I don't really care where a particular country is and what borders it, unless it's in a broader context. Everyone should know that France borders Germany, if only because of WW2, or that India borders Pakistan. But I couldn't care less where Uganda is until something happens where its location is important. Then it stops being a fact and becomes important in context, so I'll look it up if I need to.

1690?

Knowing that it was half a century after the reformation but before the English civil war, yet after the establishment of other colonies is important. Knowing that it was 1620 rather than 1619/1621 isn't important - but that's all you are tested on. Treating it as maths where being 1year out is completely wrong is stupid.

There's two problems with this approach:

1) A practical one: suppose you would be lenient on a test and allowed the students to be 5 years off. How much would that change? How many students are actually only a few years off? Is 5 years reasonable or should they be allowed to be 7 years off? What about the situation where a set of events are closer in time than your deviation?

2) One from generalization: if you have to know it was half a century after the reformation, you still know nothing if you don't know the reformation started in 1540 (I'm making this year up; it depends much on the country). Which still doesn't mean a thing if you don't know Michaelangelo died in 1480 (still making stuff up), which is 400 years after the Dark Ages started (...). Do you think they should know whether Raphael and Thomas of Aquinas lived in the same times? Should they know whether the Austrian-Hungarian empire existed already when Newton invented gravitation? The more facts you start relating, the more important precision becomes. The more you want to describe detailed chains of events, in which the details matter, the more facts you need to relate.

That's what happens if you teach the facts devoid of the relations. The history classes where they taught relations I got something out of. The others are just useless footnotes in my education.

There's a great parody of this kind of teaching by Mark Steele (UK Broadcaster).

Teacher> What did the Vikings come in?

Student>Ships miss?

Teacher>Wrong

Student>Long boats?

Teacher>No they came in hoards, that's what it says in the book

I think that you've missed the point. Knowing that the Pilgrims landed in America in 1620 is very important! You have to memorize dates in order to place events in their proper context. I suggest you reread the article and then read his more detailed explanation here: http://www.secular-homeschooling.com/008/powell.html

There's a good reason for the former definition of "fact".

It's what you're tested on in school.

My personal favorite history book of all time is "Japanese Culture", because it's not a typical "school history textbook" that has just name, date, and event. It's not about who conquered whom, and on what day and time it happened. It's about why X was a successful conquerer, and what happened to the place afterwards, things that actually bear significance through history and have left their mark on the society.

isbn: 0824821521 if anyone is interested.

History helps shape our worldview and that in turn shapes our very thinking - how we see what is or is not important to our immediate society and to world developments.

The one thing I learned from my former life as a history major (wanting eventually to be a history professor) in my undergraduate days was the absolute primacy of original sources. We all make our mark as we go and we want to write about it. We know and understand the oral traditions of our own generation but what gets passed down from one generation to another is that which is put into writing (or that is otherwise preserved in some lasting form). And that is what is fascinating about history: seeing what the men and women living in a particular time and place had to say about what they were doing and why there were doing it. Such writings bring to life the world in which they found themselves - its problems and challenges, its hopes and fears, its expectations for the betterment of the society in which they lived. Thus, it is contemporaneous writings and chronologies, not necessarily written self-consciously as history, that make for a fascinating view of the human condition in any given age. And this in turn inspires or depresses, as the case may be, but inevitably offers lessons on how the world might be profitably viewed and shaped to those who are attuned to learning from those who have preceded them in facing life's challenges.

The more common approach to how history is taught is to wade through survey books done by academics who have tried to sum up ages long gone by while sitting in their remote seats of learning. This can work, depending on the imaginative strength of the historian, but it is inherently inferior (in my view) to a study of history based of immersing oneself in original materials from the era itself. The survey emphasizes "facts" as ends in themselves; the absorption of original materials, in contrast, gives one the sense of a living drama of life, where the "facts" are indeed important but only as woven into the desires and yearnings of the generation that lived out its challenges and then sat down to write about them.

History can be invaluable to our learning but, unless it is well taught, we can so easily miss its significance. The author of this piece emphasizes this point and is correct in it. But the "original source" idea adds an important dimension that is missing from his analysis, though it is, in my view, perhaps the most important piece of all.

I've become very hooked on contemporary sources, especially diaries. Roth's account of the great depression is illuminating because there's no hindsight or sweeping narrative, just one damn thing after another. His attempts at explanations and predictions are frequently contradicted by events, as opposed to later historians who have the luxury of drawing a bullseye around the final results.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d.html/ref=redir_mdp_mobile/185-...

The important thing in history isn't the who, the where, or the when, it's the what and in particular, the why. History classes almost never cover that, most important, part. Instead it's an exercise in rout memorization. If you focus on the why, everything else falls into place because it actually has meaning. If it doesn't have meaning, it's just a number that needs to be remembered for a few hours to be regurgitated on a piece of paper for a grade.

Why do you think that is? Do you realize how much pressure a textbook writer or school district would face for teaching, in so many words, that the Pilgrims tried setting up a theocracy, and the problems inherent in that led the Founding Fathers to build a secular government? How dare the schools suggest such a thing! Next they'll try and teach kids that evolution is true.

The reason is the same as in math, physics, chemistry, English. It's more important to cover a larger amount of material than it is to actually have students learn useful knowledge in a subject. There are lots of high school students who could tell you the dates of Napoleon's reign, the dates of Otto von Bismark's reign, the dates of WWI, WWII, and the cold war, but only a tiny fraction of those students could explain with clarity and insight how those disparate events are related and linked. Yet it's that knowledge, more than X significant event happened during year Y at location Z, which makes knowledge of history valuable.

I kind of agree.

I hated History all through school but I found a copy of Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" I all of a sudden found myself engrossed by it. It was a bit above my level when I first picked it up but I kept going back to it.

The two best books I've read, which provide the broad historical narrative more so than dates and trivia - Peter Watson's A History from Fire to Freud - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ideas-history-Freud-Peter-Watson/dp/... and John Keegan's A History of Warfare - http://www.amazon.com/History-Warfare-John-Keegan/dp/0679730...

I don't think either is necessarily the best on the subject, they're just two I've found and found much value from. In addition to allowing me to provide historical stories to make relevant business observations, they (and a History major I suppose) allowed me to write my favourite ever HN comment - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=812221

I, for one, could not agree with this article more. I was one of the kids who viewed the study of history as I knew it as completely superfluous to my life goals and have only recently (at the age of 22) started to appreciate the value of historical study as described by the author of this post.

I was almost proud to declare my contempt for the subject all the way through my high school years.

I enjoyed some history at high school but not history lessons in general they never really engaged me. But then I'm wondering if this is like someone saying "I enjoy blowing things up but chemistry lessons never really engaged me".

Basically are the type of historical facts, Plymouth harbour or whatever, that are taught in high school instead the basis on which to build later historical understanding. An 11 year old won't normally be able to combine the relevant facets of the events in James I court with the leaving of the Pilgrims, the situation in Europe and the differences in the main North American colonies to create wisdom. What they can do is learn facts about these situations to use later as the basis for such more complex understanding.

I definitely agree with the argument that historical perspective is important - but I think the author's pessimistic assessment of the American public school system, and its approach, is inaccurate.

For example, he references a poll by Strategic Vision LLC that purports to show the ignorance of students in Oklahoma - the poll in question was pretty thoroughly debunked here, three weeks before the blog post was published:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/11/real-oklahoma-student...

The same critique applies to all the disciplines that are currently taught at the undergraduate level in all universities and the part about smart students becoming cynical especially rings true.

Scott Powell, the guy who wrote this article, recorded a set of lectures covering the history of Western Civilization. They're available for purchase on his website here: http://www.powellhistory.com/1hfa.html. I'm too poor to purchase them, so I can't give a first-hand account, but I've heard good things.

Teller, from Penn & Teller, had good things to say: http://www.powellhistory.com/teller/

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