[OT] How much of history do we really know?

[EricNoah]

OK, I may be getting too political for ENworld.

Yay, self-awareness! Leads to self-moderation, which we love here at EN World. Don't we?



*ahem*

I said "don't we"??

-- Eric "Thought Police" Noah

 

[MerakSpielman]

I said "don't we"??

Of course! We love self moderation! Pretty soon we won't need actual moderators any more! Power to the people, man!

 

[EricNoah]

Power to the people, man!

That kind of anarchist talk is gonna get you banned, or maybe worse!

Ok, sorry, enough hijacking here. Back to the topic at hand.

 

[barsoomcore]

Of course we love self-moderation! We love self-performed lobotomies!

We love the Computer. The Computer wants us to be happy and to sever our prefontal lobes.

We are happy. The Computer says so.

 

[Victim]

Politics aside - you're absolutely right about the education being the tool of the government

Now, if the government would actually REMEMBER that and use it, maybe our children would be able to do better than some of these popular media shows are demonstrating:

1000 individuals of college across the country were asked were slovakia was.

3 pinpointed on an unlabeled map
~33% knew it was in europe.

The answers from the rest varied in detail, but were essentially wrong.



This is why my children will be home-schooled.

If only the Soviet Union and its satellite states hadn't broken up, then geography would be much easier.

I'd only care when people can't pick out most states, or identify major countries like Japan. Why bother learning trivia unless you want to get on a TV game show? If you know how to quickly and easily find an answer, then in many, that's as good as knowing it.

 

[Desdichado]

Because to many people it's not trivia, these are the things that matter. It's the attitude that "it's trivia" that they're railing against.

Me, I think you've got a darn good point too. Do I need to know the name of the head of state of Albania? Nope. Then again, I know pretty well where Albania is, and what relation it's languages have to historical languages in the region. I guess I'm not a good example of your point, because I do enjoy trivia about a lot of things.

 

[Kichwas]

We know jack, and what we do know is skewed by who wrote/translated what we've read.

True.

So much is skipped in what is recorded and what is taught. My education has told me nothing of what I might have found along the Rhine in say.... 500 BC.

Pre Rome, I was never taught anything about Europe north of the Mediterranian. What I know comes from my own post-school study - and it has severe gaps.

I can make the same statement about Pre-Columbian America.

And these two are directly relevant to the chain that in the end results in the modern western world I live in.

Step out of that chain, and even relatively modern history is missing from the education system. Do you know who ruled in Korea around 1000 AD? When the Inca came to power? How a group of people native to South Africa have the DNA of the Jewish priest class in their blood (one I got out of a PBS special...)? One can pull out whole sections of the world and whole periods upon which modern history does not even bother to glance.

Some of them have very interesting links that are highly relevant to how our world is currently shaped - such as the Aztec - Toltec conflicts and the nation (who's name I forgot) that allied with and married into Cortez's conquistadors - and others just make interesting footnotes.

The field of history is in sad shape.

 

[ledded]

True.

So much is skipped in what is recorded and what is taught. My education has told me nothing of what I might have found along the Rhine in say.... 500 BC.
<snip, some very good points>
The field of history is in sad shape.

I have to agree somewhat on what we are taught. Twenty-something years ago, the education I received in history was so entirely Anglo-Northern-European-centric that you would have thought that while the euro-revered Greeks were inventing philosophy, bureaucracy and all kinds of coolness, people in China, India, and pretty much everywhere else where still rolling about in their own feces and grunting while painting on cave walls with burned sticks. Of course, the arabians got props for later creating Algebra, but hey nobody really likes algebra and someone would have done that during the Renaissance anyway, right? But then there was the 'Dark Ages' where *everybody in the world worth knowing* was all goofy and mixed up on science and history and we'd really not like to go into detail about how silly those guys were. Silly buggers. And then that Columbus, what a nice guy going about exploring and sailing ocean blue and civilizing all of those cultureless savages along the way. /SARCASM OFF

I know we cant teach kids everything, and you really dont get a lot of the detail until much later in your education, however that seems to be the time when people (on average) start paying less attention to it. I've always been a bit of a history/science buff, and I've spent most of my adult life trying to untangle the old-school-anglo-government spin on history we were indoctrinated with. Thank God I had a few very good history teachers in college who weren't afraid to (literally) throw away the books and just teach you *history*.

I havent been in an EC or middle school classroom in a while (not since my wife was teaching) but I hope that we have gotten better, at least a little. I'm almost afraid to look.

It's funny... my wife of course thinks I'm nuts when I complain about how stupid a lot of people seem to be nowadays, especially when you see these Jay Leno segments where they ask the most simple questions and get the most idiotic answers. Once I was ranting about it, and my wife looked over and said "Wow. You must think you are really smart to be calling those people out as so stupid" and I replied "No, the reason I'm so pissed is that I *don't* think I'm very smart".

 

[reapersaurus]

hehe.
I can't believe an spin-off thread of an off-hand reply has this much legs. It's cool.

ledded, and Tilla the Hun, and angcuru - thanks for the replies. It's nice to hear people with a similar feeling to mine. I'm 33, by the way. Maybe it's a generational thing.

To throw something else out there and see how it sticks:
I think this ignorance/assumptions about the past is only going to increase, since the amount of information that one must learn just to survive (make a living, get a life-partner, keep up with entertainment) is growing at an astronomical rate.

People just simply DON'T HAVE TIME to invest in learning about the past (or trivial details like what the state capitals are anymore). They are more concerned with entertainment and pop culture - there is much more immediate pay-off for spending time on them, and acquiring that knowledge that can be applied in life.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I don't know, trends in human knowledge are pretty difficult to predict. CS Lewis did have a point about the disruption of an educational continuity in the middle of the 20th, but it isn't as though that knowledge dissapeared. It's just less prominent in the social system.

Personally, I think the general understanding of history is probably returning to its normal state given the vast skepticism about historical myths.

I do suspect that American will be uniquely bad at history for some time. Most of our intellectual capital just isn't constructed with an eye toward that sort of in-depth knowledge and understanding.

Though, I also suspect that American intellectual capital is on the verge of a collapse under a tremendous weight of boredom. Who knows what will happen when the boredom becomes too much and people begin to cast about for something to think about. Just wait till the baby boomers begin to retire.

So far I think sports and music have been the only things holding back the flood and music is getting so dull that Eminem looks brilliant when compared to the rest of the dull lights on MTV. Sports are still going strong thanks to increasing numbers of them and the depth of American sports culture. Still, I do not know that they will be enough or able to keep their own momentum.

Movies might pick up the slack as DVDs become something everyone owns vast libraries of.

If university got cheaper and easier that could go a long way to taking up the slack.