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> Mr. McCullough's eyebrows leap at his final point: "And they're so badly written. They're boring! Historians are never required to write for people other than
by amcintyre 15y ago
> Mr. McCullough's eyebrows leap at his final point: "And they're so badly written. They're boring! Historians are never required to write for people other than historians."
In my opinion, this is probably the biggest problem. History was almost always presented to me as a desiccated list of facts, dates, and sanitized "causes of events" that needed to be memorized so you could pass the test and move on. Few teachers seemed to be able to put any life into the subject, or present the subject as a large single picture instead of tiny disjoint sets of data.
I don't know what approach would have worked best to get a younger me more interested in history. Maybe something in the style of "The Island at the Center of the World" would have worked--I do find that readable and interesting now.
- hugh3 15y agoThe way I was taught history (in Australia), it could have used a whole lot more lists of facts and dates. Case in point: World War One. We spent weeks on that war. But we didn't learn how it started, or how it ended, or exactly who were the belligerents on both sides, or the key battles, or how it was eventually won. Instead we mostly sat around and read about how awful life was in the trenches for the soldiers -- surely important, but not at the expense of actually understanding the war. "It was a stalemate for years, and then we mysteriously won" sums up the picture of the war that we got.
- whatusername 15y agoBut we learned how WW1 started. It was when those arrogant/bumbling British generals sent in the brave ANZAC forces and despite the poor leadership - through the power of mateship and a donkey - they won the great military victory at Gallipoli.