I welcome opposing opinions but this itself doesn't present both sides of the argument, nor any context to the one example given, and sounds to me purely like a bashing exercise.
For the record, I like the Khan Academy and they do a lot of good; but I still think that's really unfair to say that given that the article brings up a really important point (regardless of its style of writing): Khan Academy history lessons are so abbreviated, that key, important points and figures in history are skipped. Why is this not good? One of the major key reasons we study history is so that major mistakes of the past are not repeated in the present or future. Now this is an extreme example that no Khan like outlet actually does, but what if they skipped over Jim Crowe laws in their history of the US?
Going on somewhat of a tangent, reading this article reminds me of this TED talk about filter bubbles.
http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...
Essentially Khan Academy and other ventures like it, may be inadvertently creating dangerous filter bubbles.
And yet we learn nothing from history even when we know what is considered factual.
The things we learn from history that are important become implicit part of our culture, our DNA not our curriculum.
How does it become part of our culture if it's not part of our curriculum? Given my own personal tastes (when I was a child), I would have skipped everything in history except for WWI, and WWII. Even with WWI and WWII, I probably would have only focused on the battles and not the social issues if given the chance. I wouldn't have learned about things like the Trail of Tears, the Japanese Internment camps in Hawaii, and so on.
You will naturally learn your countries history albeit not to the point where you can become a history professor but it's not the end of the world.
History is perspective it can't be anything but perspective. There is no right or wrong teaching in history. Only survivors to tell the tales.
How? Through video game blockbusters like Call of Duty or summer movie hits like Saving Private Ryan?
How is Call of Duty different than a soldiers account of how a battlefield looked like? They are after all consulting soldiers.
I am not talking about learning historical facts but about growing up in a culture that has a memory of a past. Things that naturally flows between people.
I knew of 2nd world war before I had history, I knew of JFK before I had history. And I am Danish.
Between a WWII veteran's personal account of the battles and playing CoD, which one would you pick? If you pick the veteran's account, you know that Call of Duty trivializes war. There is a difference.
I don't think it trivializes war.
Simple. It throws out a lot of the context and details of how we got to the meat grinder in the first place. It's traded for eye candy and emotion. All an individual with little background in the subject would know is that - these are the good guys over here and the bad guys over there.
> I knew of 2nd world war before I had history,
That's no surprise. Almost every kid enjoys anything with guns and bullets.
Having superficial knowledge of something is very different from getting a decent understanding of it. It's like knowing that Martin Luther was some guy who nailed a piece of paper to a door because he was angry with Catholicism, without understanding the details and background to how he got to the point and its future implications on the world.
Also during dinners at family table, chit-chats, watching TV news, reading newspapers, magazines, visiting museums, etc.
How can you even write that? That statement is just so ridiculous as to befuddle belief. There are history books in existence written with deliberate lies mean to indoctrinate people in certain ways. Are you saying that these books are no different from other books that have no lies inserted? Are you saying that books that don't incorporate newly discovered evidence about the past aren't more complete than books which don't?
Yes, it's true that we have to account for the unreliable narrator, but to then say that we must abandon all attempt at objectivity with regard to history is absurd! There is so much one can do to mitigate the problems of an unreliable narrator and when we can't mitigate it entirely (most of the time,) we can always express our margin of error. True, there will always be some degree of uncertainty but the purpose of studying history is to decrease that degree of uncertainty.
No matter what history book you read it is excluding more things than it is including. That doesn't mean that you can't say factual wrong things. But the perspective of a history book can never be without an agenda nor without a perspective.
With that said, one of the things I still prefer about Khan's lectures, even abbreviated ones like these stated, is that I can pause them at any time, and look up the Japanese oil embargo. And start right back up where I left off in the video. With live lectures at best you can take a note of it, and look it up later, but then other facts that build upon this in the lecture are missed -- and you may not even know that you missed them.
I disagree with Josh that this thread demonstrates HN groupthink (I actually found the comments to be pretty well balanced). But your comment demonstrates a fallacy that is very prevalent on HN, which is that every bit of source material has to be judged in HN's context, and anything that isn't suitably lawyered up and deferential is automatically faulty. The world is a pretty boring place when it provides nothing to stimulate your thoughts and, yes, disagree vehemently with.
The OP's point is that hn is a discussion forum, which is most effective when the discussions are somewhat balanced. But since the Kahn Academy is a darling of this forum, this article is here just to be knocked down, and anyone not joining in is likely to be downvoted. That makes hn less valuable.
You can argue that covering WWII to Vietnam in 15 minutes is just mission impossible. But the way it's described in that article does raise concerns.