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| Nerd fest. Love it. |
The NYT published its education issue of the Magazine that
included an article entitled “So
Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class . . .” written by Andrew Ross Sorkin about Bill Gates and his
promotion of “Big History”. The article details the Big History project that grew from the inquisitive mind of David Christian, an
academic who started his teaching career as a Russian history specialist in
Australia. Christian decided to widen the scope of history, and he developed a
course that runs from the Big Bang to the present (and that even peers over the
edge into the future). Bill Gates, like me, came across the Teaching Company course and really liked it. (Bill watched on his treadmill. I listened in my
car.) Gates was taken with the concept and now actively promotes it. It’s
heartening (in a small, silly sort of way) that the world’s richest nerd shares
my enthusiasm.
The article describes the genesis of the project, beginning
with David Christian’s personal history, his initial course development, his “discovery” by the Teaching Company, and their release of the course
in 2008. Gates (a fellow Teaching Company aficionado) not only became
enthusiastic about the course, but he put his money where his mouth (and brain)
is and began to promote it through his Foundation. Now the course is taught in
more and more schools.
Some of the article includes comments from those who carp
about Gates and his involvement in education. Such comments are petty. He puts
ideas to the test and backs up his enthusiasm with money, testing, and
refinement. Business leaders who promote educational reform (even real change) aren’t
going to lead us to the educational mountaintop, but they can help. Gates seems
exemplary in this regard. At least he’s not out trying to buy elections for
right-wing causes. Besides, he’s a rather likeable nerd, and he channels his
nerdiness to good use. I’ll never share his income bracket, but I do share his
enthusiasm for this and other topics. (He posts lists of books that he’s read that’s
a treasure of serious, non-fiction reading.)
The other gripe in the article came from Stanford history
professor Sam Wineburg, who complained that the course left out too much history
(of the archives and texts variety) to focus on natural science. This misses
the point of the course, which is—contrary to the organization of colleges and
universities—truly multi-disciplinary. This should not be a turf war. We can
view history through a telescope looking back into vast areas of time, space,
or topic, or we can view it through a microscope, focusing on moment-to-moment
events documented by texts in archives. Each has its place and irreplaceable
value. No single perspective, large or small, distant or recent, can supplant
all of the others.
The best aspect of this article, however, is that it gives
us pause to think about history and to asses its nature and value. What is
history? History is the master discipline, the source of knowledge. Every thing
has a history: the universe, you and me, civilizations, disciplines (math,
science, literature, etc.). Every thing changes over time (although sometimes
too slowly for us to appreciate). All knowledge is from the past. This idea isn’t
my creation, but a gift that I received from John Lukacs. Lukacs calls on C.S.
Lewis to help explicate the insight:
The past in our minds is
memory. Human beings cannot create, or even imagine, anything that is entirely
new. (The Greek work for "truth, aletheia,
also means "not forgetting")"There is not a vestige of real
creativity de novo in
us," C.S. Lewis once wrote. No one can even imagine an entirely new color;
or an entirely new animal; or even a third sex. At best (or worst) one can
imagine a new combination of already existing—that is, known to us—colors, or
monsters, or sexes.
Lukacs, At the
End of an Age,
52.
Lukacs goes on:
In sum, the history of
anything amounts to that thing itself. History is not a social science but an
unavoidable form of thought. That "we live forward but we can only think
backward" is true not only of the present (which is always a fleeting
illusion) but of our entire view of the future: for even when we think of the
future we do this by remembering. But history cannot tell us anything about the
future with certainly. Intelligent research, together with a stab of psychological
understanding, may enable us to reconstruct something from the past; still, it
cannot help us predict the future. There are many reasons for this
unpredictability (for believing Christians let me say that Providence is one);
but another (God-ordained) element is that no two human beings have ever been
the same. History is real; but it cannot be made to "work", because
of its unpredictability.
Lukacs, At the End of an Age, 53-54
Strictly speaking, I would define history as the study of the recorded past
(again following Lukacs). That has meant mostly documents, but it now includes
a variety of other media as well. For more remote times, we get glimpses of
life from the world of signs, symbols, and non-perishable tools. But in a
larger sense, the “Big History” sense, we can understand history as the story
of change. Thus, we move beyond (but do not discard) the story of politics,
war, individuals (biography), social relations, or economics, among the more
traditional subjects of history. We now encompass the natural world as well. The
cutting edge of physics investigates the changing universe, while biology was
revolutionized by its incorporation of history, which we label “evolution”. This
appreciation of change is relatively new to the Western mind. It has a genesis
going back to Heraclitus, but ideas about static Being and an unchanging God
dominated for the greater part of Western history. With the likes of Hegel,
Whitehead, and Eastern thinking (Daoist and Buddhist), we now enjoy a conceptual
orientation that better appreciates the fundamental perspective of change and
process.
The other point to consider about the value of the Big History project
comes from its value for bridging the two cultures. Since everything has a
history, including every body of knowledge (as a field of study and in the “real
world”), each subject can be taught through its history. I first received this
idea from the late Neil Postman. (Sorry, I don’t have my library here to
provide you the title in which he makes this point.) But as usual, John Lukacs
has a pertinent quote, and from none other than the greatest American philosopher,
William James:
William James wrote:
"You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it
historically. Geology, economics, mechanics, are humanities when taught by
reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to whom these sciences
owe their being. Not taught thus, literature means grammar, art a catalog,
history as list of dates, and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights
and measures"
At the End of an Age, 53, quoting James, Memories and Studies (1911), 312-313.
So I say “three cheers!” for Bill Gates, David
Christian, and Big History.
