Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone)

by Sam Wineburg

“the data omitted must not be essential to the understanding of the data included.”12

It’s an intellectual enterprise that requires piecing together a cogent and accurate story from partial scraps of faded words. And the process never ends. Its destination leads to a new beginning. True historical inquiry must end where it begins: with a question mark.

But knowledge possessed is not knowledge deployed, especially when such knowledge is deemed irrelevant.

Faced with an unfamiliar document, they framed questions to help them understand the fullness of the historical moment. They emerged puzzled and provoked. They ended their reading primed to seek new knowledge.

It is in this sense that the discipline of history teaches us to resist first-draft thinking and the flimsy conclusions that are its bitter fruits.

time and space. When did something happen? Where?

For students of history, the pyramid is upside down. Putting knowledge at the base implies that the world of ideas is fully known and that critical thinking means gathering accepted facts in order to render judgment.

nullius in verba: “take no one’s word for it.”

When students weren’t presenting, it was their job to listen carefully and ask questions. Our goal was to have students meet each other as intellectual partners rather than turning to the teacher as the judge of right and wrong.

One is first perplexed by a problem and then makes use of facts to achieve a solution.”

Projects like PATHS remind us that when we say “kids can’t,” what we’re often saying is “we can’t.”

“Intuitive. Uncluttered. Easy to use.

Although virtually unknown in American classrooms, the act of exposing one’s thinking is an instructional mainstay in many Asian

In Japan, for instance, a teacher calls a student to the board to solve a math problem and to explain the steps she has taken to get there.

“the familiar furniture of the mind.”43

Shulman’s comments set me brooding about a world in which no one vets the information we consume.

Whereas most of these academics read the Web vertically, their eyes moving up and down the screen as though it were a page of print, fact checkers read laterally, leaping from an

unfamiliar site almost immediately and opening up multiple search windows. This horizontal scan of other sites gave them a near-instantaneous fix on where they had originally landed.

“Faced with uncertainty, sometimes [people] need to ignore information to make good decisions,” noted psychologists who study decision-making at Germany’s Max Planck Institutes.32

We now carry devices in our back pockets that can access more information than the print collections of the New York Public Library and British Library

combined. Whether this surfeit of information will make us smarter and better informed or coarser and more stupid depends on one thing: our response as educators.

Native ads blur the line between editorial and commercial content,

Public schools have long reflected our national mood and fears. When

The Internet constitutes the greatest expansion of participation in the public sphere yet known to humankind.

“If we think [the people] not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.”55

Will had rediscovered Pedagogy’s First Law, credited to Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea: If you want to teach students to swim, get them wet.

Cicero wrote that we study the past because not to know what happened before one’s birth is to forever remain a child. Adams

The future of the past may be on our screens. But its fate rests in our hands.

The Latin root of inspiration is inspiritu, the act of emptying the ego to create a space for the spirit to enter.