Japan has about 1600 years of teachable history, but unfortunately it’s taught even worse there. There is so much to teach that it becomes just dates and names.
And why not? One strategy for making history interesting is to tell it as stories, with good guys and bad guys. Human beings naturally respond to that kind of thing, especially if it can make us feel better about ourselves.
But there has been a backlash against this sort of thing, leading to an attempt to present kids with a “warts and all” approach to our history, sometimes with a focus on the warts, and the horrible things our country and its leaders have done. And then there’s been a backlash against this, leading to a deliberate attempt to teach our history in a way that makes America great again.
What makes a particular country’s history interesting or not?
Yes, this. History should be objective, we can go back and check the facts, but people and groups have their own self interests in how it’s presented to future generations which makes it subjective.
Whether Evan Drake is interested in it or not, naturally 
The “mythology” of history, as its taught, often seems to lead to two extremes: Those who stay dedicated to the version as taught and those who find out a couple counter-facts and then wildly swing to the other end, where they are the enlightened ones have broken through the lies of their 7th grade Social Studies class. Christopher Columbus is a good example, where you have people content to believe “In Fourteen Hundred-Ninety Two…” and those who are so invested in “Columbus was a brutal stupid monster” that there’s no room for accepting that he was actually a very accomplished sailor and, yes, opening the New World to European exploration (and exploitation) and forever changing the course of world history is about as noteworthy as it gets.
There was a lot less of it in my elementary and middle schools. If the historical figure wasn’t Catholic we didn’t hear much about him, so I was taught more about the French and Spanish missionaries in the New World than the Founding Fathers. And my textbook in fifth grade ('64-'65) was printed in 1948. :rolleyes:
Just to give you an idea of what a high school World History teacher is up against… Look, one could spend 6 months studying Confucian thought and still not grasp it fully, right? Well, last week, I had to try to explain the basics of Confucianism and Daoism in 10 minutes! NOT because the subject matter is unimportant or uninteresting, but because we just don’t have time to go into more deoth.
The result may be kids continuing to believe Confucius was a fortune cookie proverb writer, rather than the brilliant and extremely influential man he was.
I work hard to make information interesting and relevant, but many of my lessons are bound to be superfcial.
Agree with all of this.
I was once a teacher too and I’ll add this… Why should we expect any school experience below say, the masters degree level, to be anything close to comprehensive?
It’s all laying the groundwork in K-12, even at the best schools with the most gifted teachers. It takes personal interest by the learner to go beyond the basics of any subject. I think most people develop some sort of interest as they mature. A few don’t, and continue to be dullards. A subset of those become people who complain that their school experience was unsatisfactory.
This! History’s connectedness is what makes it fascinating. Putting the Napoleonic Wars together with the U.S. War of 1812 gives the U.S. story an incredible new dimension. My old school didn’t do that: they simply taught the War of 1812 as if it was the only thing going on at that time that mattered.
And, yes, just starting out with no bench-marks at all is frustrating. Once you have a skeleton of history, then it becomes much more fun to hang more details onto it.
Whether it is interesting to be taught about.
But a lot has happened in Japan, and not so much in America. So it is far tougher for small Americans to be enthused.
To quote Mark Rutherford, semi-anguished: "Happy is the country that has no history [ they say ], but I confess I should like a little more history here.
Sitting down in a room,* a la* Pascal, is it must be confessed excruciatingly dull in essence, so we need happening — having a bomb dropped on one takes it too far the other way. History gives life meaning.
I was unbelievably unlucky at school, expecting dates, and Kings, and Art, and artifacts, cultures, and battles and empires: Swords !— the glittering prizes of remembering — and I got Industrial History. Fucking Industrial History ! All the dreary engines of early technics. And then Social History, fucking **Social History **! “Describe the life of some uninteresting humble person in 13xx, 17xx, 19xx,” about whom one doesn’t give a toss ( even as one pitied them ).
Whereas, some of would say, “Who the hell cares when and where all those battles were fought,” but we might find it fascinating to find out how ordinary people actually lived on a day-to-day basis.
That’s another problem with teaching history: not everybody finds the same things interesting.
I would have loved Industrial History and the idea that the US and Peru have similar, boring, histories is merely pissing in the drink.
I wish this information had been conveyed to me back when I was in high school. I did not have the advantage of interested teachers and was completely bored with the lack of learning. At 16, I stopped attending classes since I didn’t feel I was learning anything and wasn’t getting any support from the public school system. I then enrolled at community college and it didn’t help. My first semester I took both semesters of US History. I mistakenly believed that now that I was at college I would be learning “everything”. I was on track to receive an A in both classes. I refused to take the finals because I didn’t think I deserved an A for each course. When my professor asked why I didn’t take the finals I told her that I didn’t deserve an A because I hadn’t learned everything about US history.
Now, after 40 years of taking university courses, I wish I had known this back then - my lifelong learning would have been more enjoyable.
My wife wrote a high school biology textbook, and the problems she ran into are probably the same for those who write history textbooks.
The various state standards mean that there is a huge chunk of material which must be included. The desire of the publishers to make the books only ridiculously expensive, not absurdly so, Plus, there has to be room for lots of pictures and graphs and cartoons, to break up the text. The result is that the writer who would love to add material connecting concepts or stuff that is just interesting doesn’t have room to do so.
My kid’s history text was awful in just this way. Before she took the AP test we went to the bookstore and bought a good narrative American history. She read it, it all made sense, and she did fine on the test.
When I was in high school we used Growth of the American Republic by Morrison and Commager, and the only problem I recall was that I had to restrain myself from getting too far ahead. Not a lot of pictures, just great writing.
Popular history (and indeed popular science) sections of bookshops are a rich source of history with a narrative that carries the reader along. They enrich the subject with vivid dramas, engaging personalities and curious characters. For those with a shorter attention span who like the shallower version, there is also TV.
Far more interesting than the dry stuff teachers have to peddle to get the kids through the course and obtain the grades that governments and parents think is an education.
Educational institutions are very conservative, they are based on a model that spoon feeds lessons in a disciplined environment to create the type of citizens a nation requires at that time in history. Curriculums change slowly and usually, they are a generation behind. Students are expected to be passive, taking it all in, do their homework and get the grades to get the jobs. It is easier if the subject matter is narrow.
It is much more interesting to teach yourself, though it does require a curious mind.
Too much content. To receive a more comprehensive education you will have to read by yourself outside class.
Striking a balance between “broad enough to be somewhat relevant/of use to most students” and “narrow enough to be rich and detailed” is a massive challenge.
Most of the general history courses in American public schools are already focused pretty firmly on a narrative story of America’s lineage drawn in a straight line from ancient Greece, through Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, Medieval France and England, the Italian Renaissance (and Shakespeare), Martin Luther, to America, where history remains focused, other than a brief detour to Europe in WWII.
There’s already been an intentional focus and triage-ing of history to fit into that well worn and straightforward story (not being critical, btw, just observing), and it’s still so much information that there’s only time to go over the basics in a typical 12-year run in public school.
A good history teacher/course is going to give enough bones to the story, and foster enough interest in their students that the students are going to want to flesh out the beast on their own time, or in more focused courses.
I was in 7th grade before I had a decent history teacher. He made it interesting, getting us inside the heads of American colonists in the era before the revolution, connecting things that were going on locally with other things going on elsewhere including trade competition that made Britain inclined to recoup some of their losses by raising taxes on the American colonists, the levy for an assortment of wars that folks in America didn’t regard as having anything to do with them, the effects of the enlightenment on intellectuals in America, limitations of the technology of the time and how new lands were cleared for settlement, and so on.
Most history teachers I had up through my graduation from high school were in no way shape fashion or form history majors or historians or trained to teach history. They just drew it as their assigned subject matter (or, in earlier grades, were expected to teach everything). I bet few of them had history teachers any better than they themselves were: “These are the dates and the generals and the important pieces of legislation to memorize for the test”
I heard on the internet that some schools require students to pass a Composition test before they are given access to the good history classes.
You thought you’d learn everything about US history in six credit hours by taking US History 101 & 102?
What did you think the 200-300 level classes were for?