Why Learn History Quotes

“Just as math is more than a collection of theorems, history is more than a collection of facts. 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.”
― Sam Wineburg, Why Learn History

“The mind demands pattern and form, which build up slowly and require repeated passes, with each pass going deeper and probing further.”
― Sam Wineburg, Why Learn History

“curricula must be an exercise in triage, in making hard choices about what gets thrown out of the story, so that the essentials can survive. . . . We need to be willing to identify those things that every American student needs to know and insist upon them . . . while paring away vigorously at the rest.47”
― Sam Wineburg, Why Learn History

“Memory is most powerful when it is purposeful and selective. . . . [I]t requires that we possess stories and narratives that link facts in ways that are both meaningful and truthful, and provide a . . . way of knowing what facts are worth attending to. . . . We remember those things that fit a template of meaning, and point to a larger whole. We fail to retain the details that, like wandering orphans, have no connection to anything of abiding concern. . . . The design of our courses and”
― Sam Wineburg, Why Learn History

“A history of unalloyed certainties is dangerous because it invites a slide into intellectual torpor. History as truth, issued from the left or the right, abhors shades of gray. It seeks to stamp out the democratic insight that people of goodwill can see the same thing and come to different conclusions. it imputes the basest of motives to those who view the world from a different perch. It detests equivocation and extinguishes 'perhaps', 'maybe', 'might', and the most execrable of them all, 'on the other hand'. In a world devoid of doubt, the truth has no hands.”
― Sam Wineburg, Why Learn History

“The chief virtue of Bloom’s Taxonomy was its simplicity: six categories, not sixty.”
― Sam Wineburg, Why Learn History

“Mechanical testing tempts us with the false promise of efficiency. It whispers that there is an easier, less costly, more scientific way. But the truth is that blackening circles only prepares students to blacken more circles in the future. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we will be redeemed from our craziness.”
― Sam Wineburg, Why Learn History