Hacker News Reader

Comment by rhn_mk1 | Hacker News Reader

> history isn't "random trivia"

The discipline isn't, but the way at least I've been taught it unfortunately is... It didn't take me until I graduated to take an interest in history, when I could learn the cause and effect chains without getting distracted by rote memorization.

View on HN

Do you think what makes you interested in [topic] now would've been relevant when you were a child?

If I'm being honest with myself, my answer is probably no. "If only they taught _" for me, can be boiled down to "If only I was 30 in grade school"

When it comes to history... yes, there's a large overlap. The ancient times, the history of philosophy due to the development of ideas, the recent modern times due to their relevance to today's neighborhood politics, are three topics that I am constantly interested in. With the exception of ancient history (maybe due to the dearth of established dates), school had problems teaching me those.

There are huge problems with locking an age cohort with wildly different interests, talents, abilities, and personalities into a room and expecting them to go through puberty together while also learning... something.

Even if you select for ability along some axis, you still get different interests and learning styles - and personalities.

Learning is basically industrial, uselessly abstracted [1] and commodified, when it could be individualised. A lot of talent is wasted because high school stunts the really bright kids. And given how brutal it is, it seems to damage everyone emotionally.

[1] Virtually none of the math you learn at school really makes any sense unless you're one of the small number of people who go into STEM - which is where you finally discover what it's for. Things are a bit better than they used to be, but basic financial math as a specific competence is far more useful to most of the population than even the most basic algebra and trig.

Even so, I'm not sure it's useful for kids to memorize names and dates, as opposed to events and their impact.

The dates are important if the kids are to draw their own understanding of history. They can be told that X caused Y and just accept that the X came before Y, or they can learn the dates well enough to examine the situation themselves.

For instance: How long was WWII? How long was Vietnam? When exactly did WWII start, before or after US involvement? Knowing those sorts of dates allows students to put today's wars into context. Has the US been in Iraq longer than WWII? Longer than Vietnam? They can memorize the dates and answer those questions themselves. That makes them informed citizens, and some of them eventual informed soldiers, better able to participate in very relevant current events.

You know what would be useful? Take all those events and ask the children to put them in a time-line. Let them search any book they need in the process.

You know what is completely useless? Telling the date each happened on their respective classes, and that this knowledge will be tested.

I disagree that it is completely useless. You're basically arguing that time is only useful as a relative measure, not an absolute one. While that is true in some sense (the ordering of events and the space between them is what matters), because history is so vast and interconnected and a total ordering is desirable, it just makes more practical sense to learn the absolute date of an event, not just the "relative" date

That would have been nice, if students actually internalized the dates they've been taught.

Memorizing dates is as dull as it can be, without having motivation from knowing the context. Dull things get crammed for tests and then forgotten, with near zero retention when those people grow up and actually want to use the context.

Even if dates were more important than causes, they stick less, reducing the utility of teaching them.

In my history classes we were never quized directly on things as dates. However, you were expected to be able to use those in context. Example of a question: "Some historians consider the Cold War to be an ideological conflict that already started in 1917, argue why:"

This is so true for a lot of liberal arts. I just think the social sciences are better left until later in the child's life. Younger children are more adept at learning math and science than we give them credit for, but we spend quite a lot of time explaining dinosaurs really poorly only to never return to clear that up.

> spend quite a lot of time explaining dinosaurs really poorly only to never return to clear that up

I wonder about this type of thing a lot when I think of my experience in school. a lot of the material they taught me in lower and middle school was just wrong. not like subtly wrong, but blatantly incorrect in a way that would be obvious to any undergrad major in that subject (which schoolteachers often are). I'm sure the teachers must have realized too. why spend so much time teaching stuff that needs to be unlearned as early as high school?

the best example I can think of right now is the answer to "why is the sky blue?". my lower school science teacher told us it was reflecting the ocean. I'm sure she realized this answer didn't make any sense, but that's what she taught us. I don't expect teachers to try to explain raleigh scattering to a group of third graders, but wouldn't it be better just not to explain it at all?

Where was this FFS

this was at a very well-regarded private elementary school in the midatlantic US (I try not to be any more specific than this on HN, although you can probably figure out the city if you delve deep into my comment history).

I can understand teaching general rules upfront with the expectation that exceptions will be covered later (eg, teaching lower school students that water boils at 212F/100C is okay, they can learn about vapor pressure later). but why would you teach that columbus was the first european to discover north america? not only is it completely wrong, but it's not a practically useful fact, nor does it create a solid basis for deeper understanding.

Because it sounds right to a lot of people.

From experience, this must be true throughout the United States. I went to a very good public school and had similar experiences?

Blue light bounces around the sky a lot so we see it in all directions. At sunset, when we look at the horizon, we see light that traveled through a lot of sky without bouncing away, so it's less blue.

Who's Rayleigh?

You know, I think that many teachers honestly do believe the things that they teach that are totally wrong. My eighth grade science teacher said, with a straight face, that hydrogen bombs are so explosive because hydrogen is very reactive.

It's actually worse than that, because public schools typically teach the government-approved version of history. It's not until much later that, after digging into multiple alternative sources and triangulating what is likely a more accurate story, does one realize how much of the history you were taught was distorted or omitted.

It’s history abridged. Hard to cover 3000 years of civilization in depth across 6 contents from multiple perspectives. Someone has to choose what to cut

That's very true, yet what's often cut is the most recent, and also the history that paints the host in the least pleasant light. I had history classes for probably 10 years, and so much of it was ancient civilizations, and middle ages.

I always thought this was odd too. I started learning history in second or third grade, but we never got past the first world war until tenth or eleventh grade. even then, we devoted only a couple weeks to the entire 20th century. modern US history (ie, 1945 to present) was a senior elective, and there was no analogous course for world history. in a well-regarded private school, it was entirely possible to graduate without having the faintest idea of what has happened since world war II. to this day, I know more about what happened in cyrus's failed campaign against artaxerxes than I do about the vietnam war.

in a weird contrast, we spent tons of time on the civil war and slavery (and not just the sugar-coated version either). we learned about thomas jefferson and sally hemings, and we learned about andrew jackson and the trail of tears. so I don't think it was out of squeamishness that they declined to cover more recent history.

I suspect that anything in living memory of the people who approve the textbooks doesn’t look like “history” to them, and also runs the risk of being considered overly political— it can be hard to be objective about events you lived through, so any stance the curriculum writers take will be attacked by the parents and grandparents that were on the other side if the issues.

I think there's definitely some of that to it, similar to /r/askhistorians "twenty year" rule. older events/topics can still be very controversial though. I went to high school very close to the mason-dixon line. there were a lot of parents who believed the civil war was primarily about states' rights, and some were very upset at the school's coverage of the civil war and european colonialism/imperialism.

I get that schools (especially private schools) ultimately need to satisfy the parents, but it strikes me as a massive disservice that my peers and I were able to graduate high school without learning a single thing to contextualize the two defining current events of our childhood: 9/11 and the iraq war. the film charlie wilson's war was the best explanation I got until I was in college.

Envious. My memory of history class here in Australia was pretty much entirely about the history of Australia. We are not a very old country. And then half of that was about how we oppressed our native population.

I think it's actually worse that what's taught isn't even coherent.

Surely that is an indication that pedagogy should change, not that we should replace the discipline with something else. Especially when the "practical skills" people often point to are very much the sort of rote memorization things people complain about (budgeting, taxes, etc).

Somethings this is based on how a subject is taught, but other times I think this is simply maturity and focus. I have a much easier time reading through a dense book as an adult. As a kid, I couldn't sit still, I couldn't make myself care about the topic.

Although to be fair, history textbooks are often really terrible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com