That’s a narrative. A narrative is what you have once you’ve trimmed down the moment-by-moment “stuff that happened” into something comprehensible, which necessarily has cause-and-effect chains because that’s how humans understand reality.
We can’t not make causal chains: If we see a movie with a shot of an explosion and then a shot of a man smiling, we immediately conclude that the man’s happy about the explosion. It’s the Kuleshov Effect and it’s been known since the birth of film. That basic idea, the narrativization of history to go from sequences of events to causal chains of events, is similarly universal and similarly inescapable.
I hit on this because some people use “narrative” as a dirty word. It isn’t. It’s an inevitable word, and the ones who want to dirty it up the most are the ones who can’t stand seeing their narratives challenged.
(I’ve long thought that the criticism of Postmodernism is largely due to the fact it gives away the game: If there’s one thing it’s good at, it’s emphasizing the fact all narratives can be challenged, so if you have a dogmatic narrative, one you cannot stand to see put under the microscope, Postmodernism is your born enemy, and a very dangerous nemesis.)
True, and I’ll only add that triaging and simplification never stops, even if you focus on a narrow period of time. I guarantee you that the sheer amount of documentation generated by any six-month period of WWII would drown any single person, contingent on how much of the primary source material has survived, of course. It’s impossible to internalize everything, moment-by-moment, and any decision to skim or throw anything out is, inevitably, driven by a narrative, unless it’s entirely random. And stochastic historiography is not a recognized method.
The teacher makes all the difference in the world. Unfortunately, sometimes history class is assigned as an extra course for the coach/gym teacher to teach to pad their schedule because it is “easy” and schools can get away with putting someone like that in front of a class to teach history, which is terrible.
I adore history and love nothing more than talking about it in a way that helps put us in the heads of historical figures. It is great fun trying to understand them, and it takes a special talent to make others feel that. I also truly believe it is entirely unfair and inaccurate to view historical people through 21st century eyes and sit in judgment of them. We should try to understand their world, and accept that we can never totally imagine it, but we should try to.
I also feel very strongly that proper and good history lessons can accomplish a great deal in healing divides and bringing understanding that all the different groups of people who have lived on this planet have much more in common than they have as differences. History teaches us that ALL humans have been doing wonderful and awful things to and for each other since forever. No group is any worse or any better than anyone else at that game.
If students can complete high school with at least that basic notion, then that is a good place to start.
I’m lucky to have had some awesome history teachers. It still wasn’t until High School that we stopped learning names and dates and focused more on why and how. There’s just a lot out there to learn.
I couldn’t agree with Manda Jo more. I am not a teacher, but I work with children alot and have taught classes on extra curricular topics to a wide variety of ages. Sometimes no matter how much fun or relevant you make the class some of the students are just incapable of catching on. Doesn’t matter how good you are as a teacher. And then, almost as if by magic, they suddenly get it - as if a switch has been flipped. It really is the most wonderful thing to see!
And AHunter3 I don’t know you, but I suspect it was a combination of you being ready and him being good. You may have had good history teachers before him but weren’t yet ready to be taught.
Naah. I remember History class quite vividly from 6th, 5th, 4th grades. I was lapping up other courses that were made interesting. But history, prior to 7th grade, was heavy on the memorization of dates. I don’t memorize numerical info worth a damn so this was not fun for me. Very little “why” information was presented at any point – just a lot of “what”. A lot of Great Men who did Great Things on those damn dates.
In contrast, I had English teachers who managed to make grammar interesting. “Health” class, which was human biology, was interesting. Mr. Prophet in 7th grade – thank you, wherever you are – made History interesting.
Because math - unless you are focusing on a very narrow time in history,.
High school is, on average, 4 years x 180 class days x 1 hour per day = 720 hours of class time to learn roughly 6,000 years of world history. Put another way, that’s the equivalent of just 30 days class time to teach 2.2 million days of history. High level it is!
College is much the same, though if you are a history major you may spend the equivalent of 120-150 class days to learn 2.2 million history days.
My mother used to snicker when I would come home and complain about learning US history.
“History?” [COLOR=Black]she would mock, “You’ve only got two centuries of it to learn. We had twenty! Americans think Japan didn’t exist until Commodore Perry discovered it! We learned the details of every battle ever waged and that ‘Ieyasu Tokunaga was the third great unifier of Japan’ and why the capital was moved. And, by the way, he wasn’t just the last Shogun to unify Japan, he was your great great great great grandfather!”[/COLOR]
…and I always assumed that last part mean he was this really super awesomely respectable guy in a we-respect-our-family-ancestors kind of way and it wasn’t until a decade later that someone showed me a family lineage chart that had him in it.
The high school students whom I taught English complained that, in addition to their regular history and Japanese (and English, for that matter) studies in school, they also had to learn Ancient Japanese both as language and history courses. I wasn’t fluent enough in modern Japanese to be able to distinguish the Ancient version, but I was told there’s vowel shifts and some changes in the endings (suffixes). Their examples of Ancient Japanese History seemed more like anthropological and semi-mythological material; a lot of stuff taught as ‘the evidence shows X happened and there are writings that suggest X was done to achieve Y’ and so on.
And it just boggled my mind that high schoolers were expected to memorize and be tested on such material. Pretty intense educational system!
