Should History Be Taught Backwards?

THINKING IT THROUGH (AKA: THOMAS SPENCER) 4-29-03

Hey, people are talking about teaching history in the blogosphere -- and I was out of pocket to talk about it at the time. What a drag!

Anyway, both CalPundit and Atrios posted this weekend about teaching history backwards -- and a few college professors have actually posted on the comment boards over at Atrios and CalPundit!

I have toyed with this idea and one of my colleagues tried it a couple of semesters ago. She said it was difficult and didn't work. She only tried it once. That doesn't mean it can't work but explaining causation becomes quite a problem I'm told.

My approach is to constantly try to draw connections to the present -- especially when the past is teaching us lessons we've happily decided to ignore. I also try to spend a fair amount of time on Cold War and post-Cold War history as well. I got a bit behind this semester but I always try to get to the present. However, I must admit that the post-1996 part of my course is still primarily composed of wisecracks.

I think my students do find the last week of class the most useful. I'll be teaching an upper-level course in U.S. Since 1945 next fall and I'm really looking forward to it!

ATRIOS 4-27-03

I think I agree with Calpundit that students would like history much more if it were taught backwards. I honestly can't remember if I was ever formally taught any modern history past the Johnson administration, and even that was probably limited to the last few weeks of my senior year in high school. I think I learned about Rome and Greece, the Lynne Cheney version of Colonial/Revolutionary American history and the Civil War multiple times, a couple runs at WW1 and WW2, and then in my senior year a teensy bit on the 60s, but that's it. The required course in college was a grand Western Civ. overview, and I took a bit of Russian history voluntarily.

It isn't entirely clear why this is the case, though I bet that part of the reason is that one can't teach the recent past without being explicitly political. All teaching of history is to some degree political, but it's much more obvious - and controversial - when the subject is recent U.S. history.

I think we could extend this to the teaching of literature also. I really don't get why Milton, Chaucer, and Shakespeare seem to be taught in the earlier years of high school, followed by 19th century Brits and Americans (the latter, in particular, mostly horribly dull), and modern and contemporary literature seem to be relegated to that senior year honors English class. A reasonable guess is that it's partially for similar reasons - in the case of literature, the "naughty bits" of contemporary literature are somewhat more obvious than those in, say, Shakespeare and we wouldn't want little Jane to read a couple of bad words until she's ready to graduate.

But, in both cases the effect is the same. For your average 15 year old, even 20 years ago is the distant past. And, "stories" - history or fiction - from the distant past seem to have little relevance for your typical teen.

CALPUNDIT 4-27-03

THE MIRROR OF HISTORY....Yesterday I wrote a post about math education that attracted a lot of interesting comments, including a couple from a Fields Medal winner. (My new motto: "Calpundit — Home of Commentary from Fields Winners!") That was pretty cool, so today I think I'll try another pedagogical category: history.

This is a subject that I talk about frequently with my mother (an actual teacher, mind you), trying to figure out why it's such a disliked subject. After all, we like history, but surveys routinely show that it's the least liked subject, ranking even below obvious suspects like math and spelling.

Why is it so disliked? Who knows, really, but it's probably because it seems so remote from normal life. It's pretty hard, after all, for most teenagers to get very enthused about a long-ago debate over the Missouri Compromise that has only the most tenuous connection to the present day.

So in the true spirit of blogging (especially weekend blogging!), here's my dumb amateur idea about how to teach history: do it backward.

It's hard for kids to get interested in century old debates without knowing all the context around them, but they might very well be interested in current day events. So why not start now and explain the events that got us here? War on terrorism? Sure, let's teach it, and that leads us backward to a discussion of how the current state of affairs is the successor to the bipolar world that came apart in 1989. And that leads back to the Cold War, and that leads back to World War II, etc.

In other words, invert cause and effect. Try to get them wondering about the causes of things they already know about, and then use this curiosity to lead them inexorably backward through history.

This is for teenagers, of course, not grammar school kids, who are probably best off with pilgrims, ancient Egyptians, and other picturesque topics. But it might work in high school and junior high school.

All we need now is to get a brilliant historian together with the guy who directed Memento and we'll have it made. We can call it "The Mirror of History."

UPDATE: Over at Atrios, a commenter makes the point that recent history isn't really even taught at all in high school, let alone as part of a broader history curriculum. As Atrios suggests, this is probably because recent history is so overtly political that it's hard to teach it without offending a lot of parents, but even so, how ridiculous is this? Really, which is more important: understanding the American Revolution or understanding the Cold War? An entire year devoted to understanding the most recent few decades of history would probably be one of the most valuable classes a kid could have.