A revision of history

I never did continue with history at school, after the ninth grade. It bored me senseless. I remember mostly endless repetitions of the colonial history of South Africa, the Zulu Wars and the Great Trek. It was with some surprise that I found myself reading more and more history as I grew older, however. Why, then, the disinterest as a kid? Was it just because of the parochial scope of Apartheid education? Or was there some other reason history seemed dead and insignificant?

Sheryl Longin has a theory:

I wonder if we aren’t using a hopelessly irrelevant, archaic framework to teach a subject that is absolutely vital to our children if we care about the future of the modern world. How about basing primary school history education on the evolution of the material, of inventions, of progress? From the evolution of toilet paper will come a thousand other history lessons, touching on everything from economics to politics to religion. And those lessons will be remembered, because they will be answering questions that children (and adults) naturally have.

Nowadays, I enjoy picking a particular thread through history. I loved a book on the history of mathematics, because it touched on so many other philosophical developments, historical events, and related subjects. Recently, I’ve been reading a lot about naval history in the age of sail. As an adjunct, I could enjoy potted histories of slavery, piracy and the Caribbean, gunpowder and artillery, the British Raj, the origins of free trade, Krakatoa, the Napoleonic Wars, windmills, maritime and international law, the American Revolution, the Ottoman Empire, mechanical and civil engineering, British politics from Oliver Cromwell to the founding of the Fabian Society, the Barbary Pirates, the Crimean War, wrecking and salvage, insurance, timekeeping and navigational instruments, the theory of evolution, the early Industrial Revolution, polar exploration, lifeboats and sea rescue, and vitamin C.

So I agree with Longin: instead of making kids remember chains of events, dates, places and names that to them seem dull and lifeless, why not revise the history syllabus to focus instead on things they care about? The entire Cold War can be told from the perspective of the Space Race. World War II features a host of technological inventions — the jet engine, the computer, the aircraft carrier, the rocket. These are surely more interesting to children than places they can’t possibly relate to: Munich, Normandy, Yalta, Okinawa, Berlin and Potsdam, peopled with grainy soldiers or black-and-white old men. In the Far East, you find cool stuff like gunpowder and fireworks, silks and spices more valuable than gold, curious games and samurai swords. You can get from a koala bear to the internet via the weird animals of Australia, evolution, plate tectonics, the eruptions of Tambora and Krakatoa, the Reuter News Agency, and the undersea telegraph. In South and Central America, you could tell tales of chili, chocolate, astronomy and counting with a quipu, instead of holding dull anthropological discourse on dead foreign civilisations. The history of modern Britain and the Industrial Revolution is all contained in the stories of trains and magical clockwork gadgets and stately bridges and mad science experiments.

If history were more fun, by being told from the perspective of scientific discoveries and useful inventions, perhaps kids would retain some of it as they grow up. Perhaps they’d have some intelligent context for making an adult’s political and economic choices. Perhaps they will even leave school with an understanding of what the term “progressive” really means.