History is Not Boring discussion
Why do some people find history boring?
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History was always my best and favorite subject in school. I found it much more interesting then math which bored me to tears. I always get upset when people say history is boring, stupid and not an important subject.
1. If we forget our mistakes from the past we will repeat them.
2. Our ancestors struggled and sacrificed for us. We owe it to them to understand who they were and what they dealt with in their life. (I love working on my family tree).
It's sad to say, but people find history as boring or as exciting as the person they are learning it from makes it. A good teacher/writer can make history engaging and exciting, while a poor one can absolutely ruin it.
I think history is fundamentally about people. And, strange as it may seem, some of us are just not that interested in the "human story." Also, I think the closer a person gets to their own history (e.g. history that pertains to their family, ethnic group, etc.) the more interesting history gets.
From talking to a lot of people regarding history in general and family histories, my opinion is that many people don't like history because they don't see that it has anything to do with them today. I always get comments like "I make my own way in the world" or "All of that was a very long time ago, who cares?" People who don't care about history do not understand how the decision of uncle Joe to move off the farm in Kansas to bustling Los Angeles,California could possibly have effected their lives! My response is, "How could it not. You're not a farmer right now are you? You went surfing this morning before work, could you have done that on the farm in Kansas?" There is also ignorance about what came from such events as the World Wars. Do you think people today know that advertising was given great power during the war and since then has shaped modern-day life in ways unimaginable in the early 20th century? Let's face it, history education is woefully negligent in US schools (except for every once in a while you get a tremendous teacher who goes beyond the curriculum and brings passion into the class).
My own experience of history was the dry memorization of wars and Kings and Queens of Europe. There was never any attempt to connect anything in the past to what might be happening today.Boring!
I finally discovered inspiring history whan I borrowed a copy of Barbara Tuchman's "March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam" from my Dad's bookshelf. She made the humanity of the past walk right into the present like history textbooks never did.
Today's textbooks for k12 are much better written. But any controversy is minimized or eliminated. I hope today's young people will be more inspired to read further into the realm of the past and make the connections to the present, but history is not tested in the "No Child Left Behind" and what's not tested is not well taught.
I think the problem is, as some others here have said, the way it's too often taught. Up through junior high school, in my case, it was just names and dates, nothing about why people did what they did, nothing about how they lived. I think it's because that's easy to do, but it's lazy. Once I got to high school it changed; at my school they integrated history, English, and social studies into modules focused on periods of history. So for the civil war, we studied the issues, read Andersonville and The Red Badge of Courage, and watched a reenactment of a Civil War battle (they invited a Civil War reenactment group to our school.) Beyond the laziness of it, if they make history boring, people won't grow up capable of seeing the parallels and dangers that might present themselves in current events.
Then when I got to college I got a professor who taught history in a similar way; the school used a text that covered each era in a section of three chapters - one on politics and war, one on art and literature, and one on social issues and lifestyles. The theme was that people have always had to deal with the same challenges, and history is about the different ways they've done that.
I watched the way my kids were taught and tried to counteract the whitewash and laziness. I shared some of "Lies My Teacher Taught Me" with my daughter; when she went to school and talked to her teacher about some of the events that were left out of their version (i.e. the swearing-in of President Warren G. Harding into the KKK in a public ceremony in the White House) the teacher flat-out called her a liar.
I'm a psychotherapist because to me there's nothing more interesting than people, and history is about that just as much as psychology is. If I were to go back to college to study more fields, I'd probably go into sociology and/or anthropology for the same reasons.
The spew-data-and-test-memorization approach is part of the subversion of the educational system to train useful workers rather than rounded and competent citizens.
I agree with most people who say that the way we are taught history, geography, social studies has a lot to do with how and if we like history as a subject.I remember loving some of my history classes in highschool and really enjoying myself and at the same time noticing how some of my classmates didnt give a damn and chose to sleep in class.
I have also noticed that the same people who thought history was boring are the same people who cant locate Iraq or Afganistan or New York City on a map.
In my limited life experience, I have found that dull people often complain history (or many other subjects that require thought)is boring. Perhaps my perspective will change with age...
:)
I think it makes a difference whether you view history as just a collection of events (no matter how significant) in the past or as events that happened to real people. When you see it as real stories about real people it has much more meaning and therefore is more interesting. Memorising dates and events in high school history classes never did anything for me but when I examined how people lived, what they did and thought it made it much more real and exciting for me.Dianne Ascroft,
'Hitler and Mars Bars'
I like the cut of your jib, Diane. I humbly offer Will Durant's The Story of Civilization as THE example of how to write history.
I think its because people today are so media and tv and movie oriented that they dont think history has any bearing on there lives,And there pretty much just dont understand how much you can learn from the past!And its hard to put a face with a name and story because people have lost the ability to think and use there imagination because there so focused on a Reality based world that the real world isnt real enough!
I agree with the posters who mentioned poor teachers and bad writers. Many of the people who don't like history and think it is boring have been subjected to horrible teachers and boring books. I remember not having any particular feelings towards history in school, until I had one great teacher. He made history fun, interesting and meaningful. Suddenly, I realized how much I loved history, because a good teacher turned it from a boring, dusty-book subject to a living story of the past that resonates today. It impacted me so much that I ended up majoring in history in college, and though I ended up in journalism, I still love history of all kinds.
And then there are the people who will not care about history or think it is boring because they have no intellectual curiousity. These types probably don't read anyway.
I second Holly's comment which is illustrated successfully in the book ADAMS V JEFFERSON, THE ELECTION OF 1800 which was a great book about that election and Founding Fathers.The author showed Adams/Jefferson/the others were as human as all of us with their problems and foibles but they still got the Revolution together and kept at trying to present their views on what the Government/Country should be.
I lucked out and had good/great teachers from junior high on and have learned even more from reading on my own.
I don't know if anyone has to pay attention to history
but I think there are plenty of examples of leaders who have all the advisers in the world available to them that keep making the same policy/action mistakes (Kennedy/Johnson going into Vietnam, Bush going into Iraq, Hitler invading Russia, etc etc etc)and where those mistakes affect the history/life of almost every human being in a country or around the World.
So whether it's boring or not, History is important
how to get that across in an age of being SELF ABSORBED and a distraction-filled world of texting/Ipods/sound bytes is beyond me.
I think more people would begin to take an interest in history if TV and the film industry did a couple of things - first, they could do more of the programs where they put ordinary people from current society in situations where they are living the way people did in past eras, such as the one where a family lived in a Victorian home with no anachronistic conveniences for a long enough time (I think it was a year) to really have to adapt. Second, when they do shows or films based on historical events, they could do more to develop the characters, rather than making them shallow cutouts with one-dimensional personalities, cardboard heroes or villains. A lot of movies are just Saturday morning cartoons with live actors.
I just heard something Ursula K LeGuin said, about why people claimed not to like science fiction: look at all the people who say they don't like it and ask them if they've read any, and most of the time they haven't.
Mod
I have read science fiction some but just don't get it for some reasonI liked 20000 Leagues Under the Sea etc which was science fiction at one time
I guess I equate current science fiction to video games and have no desire to get into them as well
I think history is boring to some people because history isn't presented in a way that the reader comes to understand that the people who are historical are also real people with real lives
In Adams v Jefferson about the Election of 1800, I learned for the first time about Jefferson being so depressed about his wife's death that his friends were worried about him committing suicide
Thus it seems to me that history is taught in a way that doesn't allow for many people to relate to the human side of historical figures.
so it's just this great person did this great thing and so what else is new or what else would a great person do but do great things.
that's kind of boring
also great drama says there has to be some drama - a testing of the protagonist and his/her human frailties which just isn't taught or in introductory history books for some reason
I thought those shows were increadibly interesting.I dont believe I ever saw "Regency House"
You are right about the British productions. They did seem more focused on detail over personalities.
Our cable company gets European shows, I noticed that the German Deutche Welle station also had a period house set in the 1860's. Actually it was more like a mansion divided among the gentry and the servants.
So far, I think I've enjoyed the Edwardian House the most. I suppose because it was a micro version of British Society. The "family" lived upstairs in luxury, while the downstairs folk did all the back breaking, less glamourous work to run the household.
One thing these shows have in common, is how most of the hardest work falls on women. Something that I sort of knew was true, but hadnt really thought about it until viewed on these programs.
Speaking of not remembering history...remember way back in the late 1970's when gas prices soared and consumers demanded fuel efficient autos? History never repeats itself, does it? Oh, I guess it does. [sigh:]
I was lucky enough to have a teacher who had the students fill in what we didn't know about a historical figure in a creative writing class. But we had to research and find out what they did do first. the stories we came up with!It was fun and we learned at the same time.
Rote memorize-and-regurgitate is the easiest way for teachers to approach history, and with more focus on teaching math and English to a test, it's the safest too. It's too bad that it's the worst approach.We're working to get our grandsons (ages 5 and 7) interested, by looking at how people live in other places, how and why major events like the Civil War and the Depression took place, and about noteworthy people from those periods. Seems to be working, from the questions they ask at the time and later.
There were two teachers I had in high school who turned me on to history. We also had the advantage of reading "real" books like The Age of Jackson instead of dry history texts. Then I discovered Samuel Eliot Morison' History of US Naval Operations in WW II (devoured all 14 volumes) and Burke Davis and Allan Nevins and Barbara Tuchman and Shelby Foote and so many other really good narrative historians that I was hooked. I agree with the comment that textbooks have been so denuded of controversy as to make them uninteresting. For me it's the controversy and disagreement that makes history so alive. The Age of Jackson
When I was in school we did that, anything from little holiday one-act plays to debating different issues from the times studied; once we were divided into groups, given some info about our culture's norms and so on, and turning us loose with contradictory goals.
when did the genre start?my own childhood was pretty dry reading in the history subjects
i don't know if narrative fiction even existed
it certainly didn't in my neck of the woods
If we get the chance to take our grandsons on a vacation to the east coast, I want to take them to some of the battlefields of the Civil War and walk the ground, explain what happened and why, in the most human and accessible way I can. That's the kind of connection with history they'll remember.
Ive often wondered how history is taught in other countries. Especially our former foes in WWII.I understand the Germans are very pragmatic about their recent history and are finally coming to terms to what it means to be "German".
I remember German friends saying they felt a little odd at the euphoria during the World Cup, they seemed almost embarrassed to want to wave their flag in public.
From what I read, Japan is still struggling how to explain Japan's actions between the World Wars. Over the years, textbooks in Japan have began to represnt Japan as the victim due to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Recently after the movie "Pearl Harbor" was shown in Japan, the Japanese saw the war through American eyes with a linear progression from Pearl Harbor to Japan's defeat.
Of course, we in America often forget that the war had been going on since much earlier than Dec 7, 1941. The war "In Asia" had been going on since Japan's invaison of China in the early 30's
Why is history boring? I think the biggest obstacle to making history accessible is the commitment to factual detail and to a lessor extent accuracy contributes to a prose style that is unreadable. It is not the message that bores, but the medium. Many historians fall prey to polemics too, leading story-telling to give way to preachments so that the reader is prevented from forming his/her own conclusions. An author that avoids these pitfalls is Klingaman in his long-in-print tale The First Century.. pretty solid history plus great story-telling....
Mod
This is a perfectly deplorable attitude.
When a knowledgeable and articulate historian tells a story in a way that brings it to life, including that historian's perspective, that makes it easier, for me at least, to be aware that - as Dianne said above - these were big events happening to real people, often turning their lives upside down. When a historian lets more of his or her own humanity come through, it helps illuminate the humanity of the people being discussed.Re science fiction, some of it is shallow and silly, but some is excellent. You might try Kim Stanley Robinson's work - he is outstanding. Very deep and thoughtful explorations of various "what-if" scenarios, either in our collective future or ways things could have gone differently in the past. Complex characterization, real issues, meticulously researched settings. His work is literature, regardless of genre.
I can pinpoint my dislike of "history" right down to the High School class that killed it for me. History was just a bunch of chalk scrawled notes on a "green" board and regurgitating that information on a test in essay format. No discussion, no history coming to life. It wasn't until I met my husband that it changed. Extremely well read on historical topics ranging from Ancient Greece to the Vietnam war, he could discuss people, places and events as if he'd been present at the events.
Late to the thread, but after skimming, I agree with James that the way history is taught is often at fault. Who cares that something happened on a specific date 1500 plus years ago? Too much focus is on specifics & not enough on general trends first. Once I began to understand how general idealogies & trends collided & moved through the ages, history became much more interesting. It took a REALLY long time for me to figure that out since I was concentrating on details that didn't blend together into a comprehensible pattern.
I made a 'D' in "American History Before 1865" and had to take it over to graduate. I memorize dates and names poorly, on which the tests were based. Oops! It took years for me to recover my interest in history, the 'whys' and 'hows' of peoples' actions and the outcomes. I think age, experience and maturity draw us to view history differently, inevitably. There is a lot of history; better to get an early start on enjoying learning about it.
Mod
I have always found memorizing dates easy. To me the dates are the skeleton on which to build the historic body. I do recognize that if dates are the only part taught in history, then most people will find the subject dull.I have always been able to remember Beethoven's birthday or the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar.........
unfortunately I cant remember the quadradic formula.
Fortunately I had a great high school history teacher where 1 semester was Americasn History and the other was Russian HistoryIn American we learned about the Haymarket Square incident for example and right wing groups where he had us go out and interview people like people at the American Legion post in town
this was in 1964.
He taught us to be critical thinkers and to do original research on various questions
apparently this type of teacher wasn't the rule
I believe the reason history is so often drained of meaning and reduced to 'trivial pursuit' with dates and names is a combination of laziness and butt-covering on the part of both some teachers and many curriculum publishers. I say that as an admirer of teachers - my mother and one of my grandmothers were teachers, and I planned on making teaching my second career after the military and did a degree in it before I decided to go the psychotherapist route instead.
A teacher can teach from a text that way almost in his or her sleep - no background knowledge or critical thinking needed, no concerns about students asking questions the teacher can't answer, or questions that are controversial and just don't have easy answers.
Tests based on regurgitating that kind of data are much easier to create and grade - by comparison, essay questions, for example, are a lot more work - also, you can use Scantron-type sheets and computers to grade the first type of test, but no one's come up with a computerized grading system for essay questions yet. Again, those kinds of questions are simple - the answer is right or wrong, no debates, so the teacher/publisher doesn't have to defend the way the test was written or graded - no debates. If you take a look at any widely used history textbook, you'll find it sold with a teacher's edition and canned tests.
Finally, the fixation of college admissions offices and the government on evaluating teachers and schools based on their students' test scores feeds into it. There has been a power struggle over the direction of public education in America since there has been public education, between big business, who want schools to train useful employees who don't argue with authority, and those of us who believe education should include preparation for competent citizenship, and therefore should emphasize critical thinking skills and understanding of social issues along with a rounding-out of sciences, math, literature, and other arts. Over the last few decades, business has won that fight, and today's graduates are well prepared to run a cash register or a deep fat fryer but not to vote intelligently or make sense of their finances.
History is Not Boring
Books mentioned in this topic
Frankenstein (other topics)The Age of Jackson (other topics)
Here are my thoughts on the question. First, name and locations are hard to find because the are often not familiar.
Second, they take longer to read because they stimulate your mind and make you think more when reading.