If you’ve been to one of our in-person or online sessions on teaching history, you may have heard us talk about the value of knowing the past for understanding and making informed judgments about the present. While this prerequisite is not new, and our articulation of it is not original, it is a prerequisite that is worth emphasizing—and doing so often.
In college I had a history teacher who didn’t teach us history. Instead he gave us two texts—A Patriot’s History by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, and A People’s History by Howard Zinn—and assigned us to read excerpts on overlapping time periods from both. That was our education in the “content” side of American history, or the “who, what, where, when, and how” of the story.
History is a good place to learn how to be skeptical in a good way. The distinction between “good” skepticism and other kinds of skepticism comes out in the following lines from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Ancient Skepticism”: Suspension is a core element of skepticism: the skeptic suspends judgment. However, if this […]
*NB: Access the student guide using the link after the article. In George Orwell’s 1984, the hero, Winston Smith, gets tortured and indoctrinated by a member of the Inner Party. Here’s an excerpt from that scene (name of Inner Party member replaced with “IPM” to avoid spoilers!): “There is a party slogan dealing with the […]
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