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My public-school education (in the US) definitely never taught the subject. My history classes were divided into clearly-delineated "units" of study with no ove

My public-school education (in the US) definitely never taught the subject. My history classes were divided into clearly-delineated "units" of study with no overlap. "First let's learn about Mesopotamia. Agriculture, Hammurabi, etc. Now recite what you learned on a test. Good, now we're moving on. Greece. City-states, marble statues, Olympics. Another test. Moving on. Rome..." My "Earth Science" class was structured the same way. We learned about the formation of the solar system, then dinosaurs, then Cro-Magnon Man. Each unit of study was so completely separate from the others chronologically that it never occurred to me to ask "So did Greece and Rome ever have wars?" for the same reason it never did to ask "How did early homonids fight off dinosaurs?". It seemed so obvious at the time that there was no overlap. Anyway, if I have a point, it's this: never underestimate the inadequacy of the US primary education system.

existencebox 8y ago
I normally try not to make low effort comments but this resonated so strongly with me I had to chime in with a "ME TOO." I _LOVE_ history now. I collect antique history books, just to see how perceptions changed over time. Ken Burns tops hollywood in terms of "# of films watched" by many times over. However, this only started MUCH later in my life when I started to see history as a tool, a way of thinking, of reasoning about the world. History as it was taught in my early schooling was not only useless, it was utterly counterproductive; As you say: memorizing slabs of rote dates and events not only removed any utility or holistic understanding from the facts (and related time periods), but convinced me that I "hated history" and should avoid the subject like the plague. Arrogantly, I was one of the better students in my high-school, so I can only imagine what the less advantaged crowd felt about those courses, and it doesn't leave me surprised with the "lack of historical context and appreciation" I feel to be pervasive in the American population. To truncate this rant: History is _so fucking amazing_ when you start to consider it as an interplay of human pathologies, and as a tool for understanding our present. It's such a frustration that our education system doesn't do it justice.
- mwaitjmp 8y ago
  Of course, history is amazing, and I too have devoted much of my time to studying various periods the older I have got. Studying is perhaps too strong a word, it's more of a form of entertainment and as a way of understanding how we got to where we are now. I think it started with an obsession with the news, and to understand the news, you need background, history. I think though, it's difficult to covey all this to a child, or even perhaps a teen, and I doubt there is much interest, outside of the gory details. Looking back I found parts of history interesting, but I never felt like a had a holistic view of the past. As time has gone on, you piece it all together, bit by bit, place by place and see how it's relevant to today's world. There is a lot to take in, it takes time.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  Well... as a tenth-grader, say, I wasn't actually in a position to understand history the way I do now. Teaching me a bare-bones framework was perhaps the best they could do, which gave me a place to hang the detail that I learned later.
  - existencebox 8y ago
    That's the sad part for me, there was 0 "Framework" learning. It was 100% rote memorization, usually for a standardized test. (As I've said in other threads, it wasn't until college that I really "Learned how to learn.") A bare-bones framework, to my older eyes, would teach you to ask about incentives, to look at the zeitgeist of the times, to ask "what's the precedent," and might establish a motivation for this in showing the predictive power of history, or its utility in comprehending current situations. Unfortunately, all of those were long-post-primary-schooling revelations. While I may not have had the context or appreciation I do now, my schooling did almost nothing to move me in that direction.
    - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
      That would be a framework for thinking about history, which isn't what I meant. I'm not sure I was ready for that in tenth grade. (I suppose it might have opened the door to some new thoughts, but I don't think I would really have gotten it.) By "framework" I meant just the bare outlines of history: Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, then Greece, then Rome, then the Middle Ages, then the Renaissance, then the Industrial Revolution... Having that "outline" put me in a position, later, as I learned more, of seeing how the details fit into the (very coarse) outline, and thereby learning more outline. What you're asking for is also totally necessary if one wants to understand history as more than just a collection of facts. And I suppose that even in grade school, history would make more sense if you told them that things happened for reasons, they didn't just happen. You'd have to really simplify the reasons, though...
afarrell 8y ago
As an immigrant from the US to the UK, this isn't unique to the US. The reality is that there is so much history out there that it is very hard to get a solid overview of it which weaves together into a coherent narrative. There's just not enough time. Its why independent resources like youtube and video games which actually care about history are so important. (Its still reasonable to be annoyed by the way. My personal annoyance is that my school taught a lesson about George Washington Carver which didn't include a discussion of the nitrogen cycle or nitrogen-fixing bacteria.)
- jandrese 8y ago
  IMHO the biggest problem with the way history is taught in school is the need to test on it. This means making kids memorize names and dates and individual events so that they tend to lose the forest for the trees. It's hard to get a holistic view of the situation when you're focused on the smallest details.
  - kuraudo 8y ago
    I think you hit the nail on the head. The fact that you're also tested on useless tidbits like the kind of pottery some tribe used is soul crushing as a child.
  - toomanybeersies 8y ago
    It's not the testing, but how it's being tested. Grading people on how well they can remember dates is easy. Did they get the year something happened correct? One point. Actually requiring students to write something that requires critical analysis makes it a lot harder to grade tests.
ergothus 8y ago
Ironically, my US education was just as bad about modern events. 4th grade we covered the American revolution. 5th was American revolution and civil war. Each year covered the previous material with (a little) more depth, yet I had WW I twice and WW II and Korea once (12th grade). Vietnam wasn't covered at all, much less anything since then. And I went to a GOOD high school. I fear what poor ones teach. Not that Vietnam or the WW II aftermath is at all relevant to modern politics. /s
- Spooky23 8y ago
  It all depends on the State. New York mandates a certain number of hours to cover the Irish Potato Famine, but of course there is little/no context to it. I had some great high school history teachers who pushed the envelope on diverging from the standard crap. By the time my brother got to high school, those guys retired, and the Global Studies Africa unit consisted of a day about slave hunters and watching Shaka Zulu. A brief reference to Gandi sufficed as the history of India. One of my brothers' buddies gave a presentation about what they learned that year with a slide that said "Gandi thought that salt cost too much".
lvoudour 8y ago
Anyway, if I have a point, it's this: never underestimate the inadequacy of the US primary education system. That happens everywhere it's not an American thing ( btw, the article is from an Irish newspaper), there's too much to cover in so little time. But learning shouldn't stop when we graduate, I can't blame school for my adult-life shortcomings, I got the basics and that should be enough IMHO On the subject of the article, it's definitely not as popular as the punic wars or Caesar's conquest of Gaul, but then again what is?
- jimmy1 8y ago
  > there's too much to cover in so little time Then again, you look back at what students and school boys from earlier eras were able to learn and accomplish by the time they were considered men (which by the way was like 16-17 in antiquity), you wonder what the hell our modern education system is doing sometimes.
elorant 8y ago
It's not just the US educational system. I doubt any country's education teaches kids everything. For example in Greece history lessons are dominated by our history as you would expect. It's 50% Classical Greece, 30% Byzantium and 20% for the rest of the world which is pretty much European history and a bit of Mesopotamia. We learn nothing about Asian cultures or American ones. And this is to be expected. Every country teaches the history of those that affected them most.
mbrookes 8y ago
> > We learned about the formation of the solar system, then dinosaurs, then Cro-Magnon Man Consider yourself fortunate that they were covered at all. In some schools those are taboo subjects, as they conflict with the religious ethos.
Glyptodon 8y ago
"Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum."
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
toomanybeersies 8y ago
It's not just the USA that his this problem. It seems to be a global problem. I think that a large part of it is that we like to break up the curriculum into little compartments, rather than treating it as a series of interrelated components. There's history to be learned in science, and there's science to be learned in history, for example. But we treat science and history as two completely separate entities.

existencebox 8y ago

I normally try not to make low effort comments but this resonated so strongly with me I had to chime in with a "ME TOO." I _LOVE_ history now. I collect antique history books, just to see how perceptions changed over time. Ken Burns tops hollywood in terms of "# of films watched" by many times over. However, this only started MUCH later in my life when I started to see history as a tool, a way of thinking, of reasoning about the world. History as it was taught in my early schooling was not only useless, it was utterly counterproductive; As you say: memorizing slabs of rote dates and events not only removed any utility or holistic understanding from the facts (and related time periods), but convinced me that I "hated history" and should avoid the subject like the plague. Arrogantly, I was one of the better students in my high-school, so I can only imagine what the less advantaged crowd felt about those courses, and it doesn't leave me surprised with the "lack of historical context and appreciation" I feel to be pervasive in the American population. To truncate this rant: History is _so fucking amazing_ when you start to consider it as an interplay of human pathologies, and as a tool for understanding our present. It's such a frustration that our education system doesn't do it justice.

mwaitjmp 8y ago
Of course, history is amazing, and I too have devoted much of my time to studying various periods the older I have got. Studying is perhaps too strong a word, it's more of a form of entertainment and as a way of understanding how we got to where we are now. I think it started with an obsession with the news, and to understand the news, you need background, history. I think though, it's difficult to covey all this to a child, or even perhaps a teen, and I doubt there is much interest, outside of the gory details. Looking back I found parts of history interesting, but I never felt like a had a holistic view of the past. As time has gone on, you piece it all together, bit by bit, place by place and see how it's relevant to today's world. There is a lot to take in, it takes time.
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
Well... as a tenth-grader, say, I wasn't actually in a position to understand history the way I do now. Teaching me a bare-bones framework was perhaps the best they could do, which gave me a place to hang the detail that I learned later.
- existencebox 8y ago
  That's the sad part for me, there was 0 "Framework" learning. It was 100% rote memorization, usually for a standardized test. (As I've said in other threads, it wasn't until college that I really "Learned how to learn.") A bare-bones framework, to my older eyes, would teach you to ask about incentives, to look at the zeitgeist of the times, to ask "what's the precedent," and might establish a motivation for this in showing the predictive power of history, or its utility in comprehending current situations. Unfortunately, all of those were long-post-primary-schooling revelations. While I may not have had the context or appreciation I do now, my schooling did almost nothing to move me in that direction.
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    That would be a framework for thinking about history, which isn't what I meant. I'm not sure I was ready for that in tenth grade. (I suppose it might have opened the door to some new thoughts, but I don't think I would really have gotten it.) By "framework" I meant just the bare outlines of history: Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, then Greece, then Rome, then the Middle Ages, then the Renaissance, then the Industrial Revolution... Having that "outline" put me in a position, later, as I learned more, of seeing how the details fit into the (very coarse) outline, and thereby learning more outline. What you're asking for is also totally necessary if one wants to understand history as more than just a collection of facts. And I suppose that even in grade school, history would make more sense if you told them that things happened for reasons, they didn't just happen. You'd have to really simplify the reasons, though...

afarrell 8y ago

As an immigrant from the US to the UK, this isn't unique to the US. The reality is that there is so much history out there that it is very hard to get a solid overview of it which weaves together into a coherent narrative. There's just not enough time. Its why independent resources like youtube and video games which actually care about history are so important. (Its still reasonable to be annoyed by the way. My personal annoyance is that my school taught a lesson about George Washington Carver which didn't include a discussion of the nitrogen cycle or nitrogen-fixing bacteria.)

jandrese 8y ago
IMHO the biggest problem with the way history is taught in school is the need to test on it. This means making kids memorize names and dates and individual events so that they tend to lose the forest for the trees. It's hard to get a holistic view of the situation when you're focused on the smallest details.
- kuraudo 8y ago
  I think you hit the nail on the head. The fact that you're also tested on useless tidbits like the kind of pottery some tribe used is soul crushing as a child.
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  It's not the testing, but how it's being tested. Grading people on how well they can remember dates is easy. Did they get the year something happened correct? One point. Actually requiring students to write something that requires critical analysis makes it a lot harder to grade tests.

ergothus 8y ago

Ironically, my US education was just as bad about modern events. 4th grade we covered the American revolution. 5th was American revolution and civil war. Each year covered the previous material with (a little) more depth, yet I had WW I twice and WW II and Korea once (12th grade). Vietnam wasn't covered at all, much less anything since then. And I went to a GOOD high school. I fear what poor ones teach. Not that Vietnam or the WW II aftermath is at all relevant to modern politics. /s

Spooky23 8y ago
It all depends on the State. New York mandates a certain number of hours to cover the Irish Potato Famine, but of course there is little/no context to it. I had some great high school history teachers who pushed the envelope on diverging from the standard crap. By the time my brother got to high school, those guys retired, and the Global Studies Africa unit consisted of a day about slave hunters and watching Shaka Zulu. A brief reference to Gandi sufficed as the history of India. One of my brothers' buddies gave a presentation about what they learned that year with a slide that said "Gandi thought that salt cost too much".

lvoudour 8y ago

Anyway, if I have a point, it's this: never underestimate the inadequacy of the US primary education system. That happens everywhere it's not an American thing ( btw, the article is from an Irish newspaper), there's too much to cover in so little time. But learning shouldn't stop when we graduate, I can't blame school for my adult-life shortcomings, I got the basics and that should be enough IMHO On the subject of the article, it's definitely not as popular as the punic wars or Caesar's conquest of Gaul, but then again what is?

jimmy1 8y ago
> there's too much to cover in so little time Then again, you look back at what students and school boys from earlier eras were able to learn and accomplish by the time they were considered men (which by the way was like 16-17 in antiquity), you wonder what the hell our modern education system is doing sometimes.

elorant 8y ago

It's not just the US educational system. I doubt any country's education teaches kids everything. For example in Greece history lessons are dominated by our history as you would expect. It's 50% Classical Greece, 30% Byzantium and 20% for the rest of the world which is pretty much European history and a bit of Mesopotamia. We learn nothing about Asian cultures or American ones. And this is to be expected. Every country teaches the history of those that affected them most.

mbrookes 8y ago

> > We learned about the formation of the solar system, then dinosaurs, then Cro-Magnon Man Consider yourself fortunate that they were covered at all. In some schools those are taboo subjects, as they conflict with the religious ethos.

Glyptodon 8y ago

"Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum."

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

toomanybeersies 8y ago

It's not just the USA that his this problem. It seems to be a global problem. I think that a large part of it is that we like to break up the curriculum into little compartments, rather than treating it as a series of interrelated components. There's history to be learned in science, and there's science to be learned in history, for example. But we treat science and history as two completely separate entities.