The comments thus far show exactly what is wrong with HN. HN has become an echo chamber where we all love certain people/companies/ideas and immediately dismiss any counter viewpoint.
Instead of immediately discrediting the linked article because they're "haters" or "threatened", try reading it and understanding their point of view. I love Khan's work and what he's doing, but at the same time the article raises some valid points. You learn a lot more by examining both sides of a story than being a fanboi.
I read it and normally consider myself pretty open minded. But then you read things like this.
"Here Mr. Khan stands exposed as possessing a historical perspective steeped in academia’s standard issue, postmodern, left-leaning narrative of cultural relativism, multiculturalism, and moral equivalence. "
And in my mind the author is exposed.
I am hoping that my son grows up being taught by postmodernist that don't present history as fact but as I believe it is – a perspective.
I would rather that my son grasp a few things about history and don't get the exact dates or details right. That he understands what history is as much as he knows what went into it.
So in my mind the valid points you talk about are nothing but the authors own idea about mainly his own field which is history. In other words his own interpretation – how ironic.
I agree that Kahn probably shouldn't be teaching history and I am sure with time that will be changed. But to claim that he is dangerous is simply missing the grander scheme of things.
We're allowed to possess opinions and positions that are controversial. It's not illegal to have point of view that challenges the mainstream.
From my POV, the Khan Academy view of history described here is utter bunk and doesn't really give a good historical perspective. I'm shocked, shocked to hear that K-12 history is garbage!
K-12 history curriculum has always been garbage pushing somebody's agenda.
Until the 80's, high school history in the US was all about the "American Pageant", complete with a carefully crafted timeline of achievement and wonderfulness describing how wonderful the US was. You start out making pilgrim hats in second grade and learning about how the friendly indians taught the pilgrims to put dead fish around corn as a fertilizer, and wrapped up talking about how great WW2 was. (Usually we ran out of time for Korea and Vietnam when I was in school)
From the 70's onward, "revisionists" changed the curriculum a bit to demonstrate that people other than white folks existed. For me, that meant in the winter you spent less time covering the gilded age and watched "Shaka Zulu" or "Roots" instead and in the Spring you learned about the civil rights movement. I grew up in New York City, so we were also mandated to learn about the potato famine and the triangle shirtwaist fire.
AP History was an eye-opener to me. You actually had an opportunity to leave the drivel behind and learn about something in depth from primary and secondary sources. (In my case, the American Revolution)
All attempts to write about history is pushing someone's agenda.
I bear no illusions that history writing is agenda free. But the stories of the white where no less relevant or important, they just needed to be mixed with other perspectives.
And that is to me what history is. Perspective. There are no right or wrong perspectives. There are simply perspectives trying to describe to the best of their vantage point.
> And that is to me what history is. Perspective. There are no right or wrong perspectives. There are simply perspectives trying to describe to the best of their vantage point.
This sort of claim is vulnerable to a popular philosophical dilemma: the more plausibly you interpret it, the less interesting it is; the more interesting an interpretation you give it, the less plausible it seems. (The tl;dr version of this argument is "vacuous or false".)
Here's a plausible interpretation of what you might mean: everyone puts their own spin on things, and no view of history is completely unbiased. This is very likely to be true, but it's also not very interesting. Everyone is likely to agree with it.
Here's a radical and interesting interpretation of what you might mean: all historical statements are completely perspectival; no perspective is more valid or more likely to be true than another; there is no way to choose among perspectives; all perspectives are equally valid. Now that's a bold, interesting claim. It's also preposterous.
Consider: two people arguing blame about WWI. One person laying all the blame on Germany. The other laying quite a lot of the blame on France. Well and good. Now a third enters. He lays all the blame for WWI (and the Great Depression to boot) on the Alpha Centaurions who (secretly) invaded our planet in 1912. These are all perspectives. Are they really equally valid? Are we unable to choose between them? Be careful how you answer: if you say, "Well facts are facts, but when I say 'history' I mean interpretations of those facts only..." That will only push your problems one step back. Are even all interpretations equally valid? Do you really believe that?
If I had to guess, you're aiming for the radical end (based on how you defended your original post), but I'm not really sure. There's a lot of room between these two poles. Would you care to elaborate your view?
You can then choose to make it absurd by including Alpha Centaurions. And then sure it's vulnerable.
But then shouldn't you first find someone who would actually claim that and then perhaps even more importantly have people believe it to be true?
In my world facts are provincial and most things we can agree on. There could be someone who claimed like the third person but they would have very little to back that claim up.
That doesn't mean that they couldn't be right, just like claims of gods existence could be true. I am just not very likely to take them serious (but others might for whatever reason they have)
I would rather live in a world where some people believe in the third story than live in a world where everyone only believes in the first.
> I think the quote you refer to speaks for itself.
With all due respect, you're missing my point. My point is that the quote doesn't speak for itself. It leaves all the really hard questions unanswered.
Here are some of the hard questions that I have in mind:
1) Are any statements concerning history not perspectival? (If so, why and what kind or kinds? If not, wow: not even (putatively) factual statements like 'World War I broke out in the year 1914'?)
2) If historical statements are so deeply perspectival, how do we rank or otherwise evaluate competing statements about history? If we don't rank or evaluate them at all, how do we form coherent sets of beliefs about the past (which many people appear to do)? How do people manage to choose between conflicting claims? How should they choose?
3) Are all statements about history equally valid? If so, does this run the risk of meaning that all statements about history are equally 'invalid'? If not, why not?
4) Are historical statements especially perspectival or are all statements of belief (period) perspectival? If historical statements are especially perspectival, why? If not - if everything anyone states is completely perspectival - wow. Again, that's a big claim.
Yes, my argument used a reductio ad absurdum, but I wan't trying to make your claim absurd. That is, I truly meant to take it seriously: seriously enough to dispute, to ask questions about and to discuss. Saying that all historical claims are perspectival is a big claim. I was genuinely asking you to clarify what you meant.
1) To answer that fully we will need to dig into what is a factual statement. I would gladly discuss the nature of facts but don't find this to to be the forum.
But my basic believe is that facts are true in context. Relative not objective. Facts (reductional interpretations of reality) are described from the vantage point of the observer. We can experience what we call reality in a certain way but not in all possible ways.
And that is all fine and good. We don't need true, just useful.
2) We evaluate them within the different clusters we live in. There are people who believe that holocaust never happened. There are people who believe that 9/11 was orchestrated by the US. Most people though believe the same things. World War I broke out in the year 1914.
That does not by any metrics mean that that is a true statement. You could very well argue that it broke out way before that. Cause I take it you agree that people didn't wake up one day in the year 1914 and thought, let's have a war.
The coherent sets of beliefs used to be mainly cultural now they'r exposed on the internet. And people form around various perspectives. So you have clusters of perspectives. That is why you have what seem to be agreement on those perspectives.
That is why there aren't anyone claiming that the Alpha Centaurions secretly invaded the planet to initiate I or II WW. It could be true but there is nothing factual (and again I refer you to 1) ) to construct that belief.
There are however many other conflicting and competing view. Less about the factual parts (D-Day) more about the meaning of that day. The factual parts are not really that interesting and they are certainly not important. Only to the people who actually where around at that time.
As long as you know that it happened 6 June 1944 +- a couple of days or months (with time and as the people who lived at that time dies, the accepted +- span will grow ever bigger) you are ok.
3) Again you are confusing two things here. There are factual statements (that might or might not be true and again I refer you to 1) and then there is the interpretation of these facts. I am more concerned with the latter part than the first.
4) There is nothing big in that claim. I would be happy to discuss this further but not here. Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyrabend have all done a fairly good job at describing some of the problems with believing in objective truths. I have my own views. We can discuss but then we should find a place to take it. Hmm maybe there is even a small side project idea there.
1) Facts exist. Often we have an incomplete understanding of facts, and there is something like a working mental model of facts. An educated mind allows for the possibility that the facts are sometimes subject to new information which can sometimes change them. Without these facts, we couldn't make buildings stand up, and they do. They do because we have an understanding of how to make them do so based on facts. Homicide detectives and heart surgeons have a notion of facts based on evidence and very very often they get it right because there are knowable, searchable, demonstrable facts. If you doubt objective reality then imagine sleepwalking in front of a train: your perspective is irrelevant. The train is coming whether you know it or not.
2) Sometimes people are wrong. Sometimes people aren't interested in facts because it conflicts with their agenda. Some people don't want to work to find the truth. That's why proof and evidence are so important. "When did WWI start?" might require years of study to understand the complexities of what touched off that where and provide a nuanced "answer". Hearing different voices on this topic is part of an education, but being able to differentiate credible voices from those who attempt to instrumentalize the past, or worse yet, provide some kind of hard and fast sense of history by omitting important facts, is NOT a good way to educate the populace.
3) Interpretation is also based on what you can back up. I can interpret "There are no aliens in Roswell New Mexico" to mean "There are DEFINITELY aliens in Roswell New Mexico". However, without some kind of proof behind that interpretation see number 1. A bad working model of the territory makes a bad map. Also, the claim that facts are neither interesting nor important is false and dangerous.
You ar missing the point. Facts are not objective because interpretations are not. Man hit by train is not the only interpretation of two clusters of atoms hitting each other.
Death is not the only interpretation of the carbon based structure that is now smeared on to the front of the steel construction
Interpretations don't change conditions; conditions exist regardless of perception or interpretation. At the point where interpretation becomes so obtuse as to try to revise the immutable reality of death (and taxes?), something is wrong. When this kind of relativistic, obtuse, "subjective" argument is brought to bear it is usually driven by a political bias(I.E. "Our" history versus "Their" history.) Certainly interpretation can play a part in communication but more often misinterpreting reality leads to consequences of a nature not interpretable, such as the loss of a work situation. What I mean to say is, the limits of the subjective stretch only so far before playing with them leads to consequences in real life. Play semantic games with a spouse or boss and see how far it goes.
"All attempts to write about history is pushing someone's agenda."
On the other hand, if anyone is looking to read history written from a dispassionate, objective point of view, I heartily recommend "100 Decisive Battles from Ancient Times to the Present".
Having the words you write be dispassionate and objective doesn't mean you lack an agenda. Everything written ever picks a small set of facts to consider from an effectively infinite set of facts.
The choice of which facts to include, moreover, represents a fairly strong bias; it says that this set of facts is more interesting or important or whatever than most other sets, and enough so that you should ignore all the other sets for the moment and just look at this set.
Which, in the case of this particular book, presumably, along with the countless choices about which facts to include about each battle, also includes at least a) the choice of which 100 battles, and b) the choice that battles of any kind are important enough to talk about for a whole book.
So even if the author tries to stay away from expressing an agenda on the usual axes, I doubt he successfully avoids having one altogether.
True enough. I suppose the reason this book is so good is because it focuses on 100 distinct events which the author believes completely transformed the course of history --- and explains the reasons why they believe this to be true.
History is full of examples of a small force overwhelming a large force against all odds, and I love reading about the clever tricks and twists of fate that made it possible. The fact that the outcome of each battle completely shifted the course of history is an added source of awesomeness.
Sure, Sputnik 1 and Sputnik 2 were landmarks. But they would have happened eventually --- whether Russia or America did it first seems little more than a silly contest of the times.
But when you read the above book and realize that "Europe, as we know it today, would be completely and utterly different if, thousands of years ago, this one person had not made the monumentally stupid decision of keeping his army awake all night" .... well, that seems to me what makes history so interesting, no?
If I said that scientific theory was all perspective without right or wrong I'd get pilloried here, and with good reason.
Any interpretation of historical observations is analogous to a scientific theory like gravity. It may fit the observations or not, and we can use Occam's to winnow the likely from the unlikely. The only bummer is that observations are generally not reproducible as in the hard sciences.
apples and oranges. Sure that's true if you want to dwindle history down to just dates and events. The value of history(I assume for most) is in the meaning and lessons we extrapolate from it. You can argue it's an objective process when at its best but it isn't necessarily consistent across all perspectives.
That comment got me, too, but I don't think it invalidates the other arguments. History teachers need to teach students why history is important, and it's not so you won't be embarrassed when the press asks you about Pal Revere. History teaches us lessons that help us make better decisions today.
(In case its not clear, I'm mostly agreeing with you. :)
What caught my challenged attention was the juxtaposition of this:
“Mr. Khan stands exposed as possessing a historical perspective steeped in academia’s standard issue, postmodern, left-leaning narrative of cultural relativism, multiculturalism, and moral equivalence.”
And then this:
“In a sense, that’s what Internet personalization filters are already doing, creating an echo chamber where we only hear what we already believe. We can’t think about what we’ve never heard of.”
And here I thought coherence was always a fashionable accessory.
You're going to have to explain why you think this is incoherent if you want people to argue against your position.
Right now, it looks like you're saying that the first quote's adjectives describe a meta-viewpoint that need not be examined as a viewpoint in and of itself.
Sure enough. I think it is incoherent to stand against a viewpoint of multicultural interpretations of historical events while condemning Facebook's tailoring of news because it hampers multicultural interpretations of current events.
I might have read too much and falsely concluded that the author is against Khan’s “historical perspective steeped in academia’s standard issue, postmodern, left-leaning narrative of cultural relativism, multiculturalism, and moral equivalence.” The OP might be neutral about that, and simply exposing the necessity of balancing Khan’s against a different narrative¹. If so, either his articulation was obfuscated by the choice of words or I need to practice my English a lot.
¹. Never mind the fact that this rarely occurs in real classrooms.
It may not invalidate, but it puts them into perspective. Most of his rant seems to be about how in Khan's quick summary of WW2, the UHmericans aren't portrayed as the morally superior righteous warriors / soldiers that defeated the evil Hitler and stopped his wrongdoings. And the Bolsheviks shouldn't have been mentioned without the required nuances that would teach present-day students that communism is evil. Or maybe I'm just speculating, but that's how it got to me.
I think it's more complex than that; in his point of view, History of WWII shouldn't be taught this way, in large (huge?) brush strokes. He argues (IMO successfully) that you must go deeper in details to get at least a basic grasp of these important events, and give them some meaning.
Said differently, a simple list of loosely related facts simply doesn't constitute history; and to make the narrative compelling, understandable and memorable, you have to give at least one (and preferably several) explanation for the facts, else it's only kindergarten stories, not college-level material.
Now I didn't see this particular video; maybe it's just a quick overview of what's to come in a long list of upcoming courses.
The history section is sketchy and just a beginning. Instead of latching onto the fringe of the Academy, History (perhaps because the math was beyond him), the author might have constructively suggested how to beef it up, present multiple views, talk about morals vs perspective.
Instead he chose to bash a popular figure. Probably because it gets hits on his blog, but who knows, I'm cynical.
There are multiple and various reasons for studying history, whether this is articulated clearly in everyone's mind or not. Establish a baseline cultural past, instill moral values (ex. glorifying Person X's accomplishments), predict future results of actions, and entertainment are reasons that also spring to mind just off the top of the mind.
If history is being taught simply to teach decision-making skills, then using a case study format would be one possible way to improve the current teaching methods.
Even if history is presented as a perspective, why choose Khans perspective? Why not choose another perspective?
You missed the bigger picture of the article, which is that a single entity never should control re-telling of events. There should not be one perspective. One person, one entity, can not provide different perspectives, due to echo chamber effects and such, it is almost impossible.
Isn't this kind of a straw man? Salman Khan is not a fascist dictator who prevents you from getting information anywhere else. He's just a teacher. I don't see how learning from him is more of a problem than learning from other teacher.
You could make your point even stronger: since the barriers to entry on the internet are so low, it has the potential to be a lot less intellectually constraining than an ordinary classroom, where typically there will be one teacher, with standardized lesson plans, teaching from a relentlessly bland textbook that passed through the censors in Texas and California.
But the Internet also has a significant winner-take-all character at the large end of the spectrum, due to network effects. See Facebook vs. MySpace and all the other social network carcasses in its wake. Mr. Khan's teaching videos might end up being the one-and-only source of education on the Internet. What then?
Then you can make your own better video and YouTube or Khan itself will host if for free and show that what you were afraid of is not actually possible and the social networking analogy does not hold up under cursory analysis.
The complaint is that he seems to be getting attention from a major donator and source of influence, which might get his "lessons" far more play than any random teacher. Which is a problem for the author since he feels the quality of the lessons is low.
I agree with him; these look like "make me look not stupid in casual conversation" lessons, they don't seem to impart a real understanding of history, of these major events and what impact they have on the present world.
And does anyone with a high school level education in history even understand WHY the archduke of Austria was assassinated? Or WHY none of the powers at the time could pull out of the resulting domino effect? Or the onerous terms of the treaty after the first war? Or the discontent it sowed, leaving fertile ground for a dictator to emerge? Without this context, how could WW2 ever be understood? And even this is glossing over a lot of important stuff, such as the various nations' foreign policy, public sentiment, local politics, and how it affected pretty much every operation of the war.
Who even remembers operation Market Garden or why it was significant?
Does anyone even know why and how bombing of metropolitan centers even started? Of course not! Easier to say goodies vs baddies and forget the details.
History is already taught without any useful context in school. It's rendered so dry and boring and detached from humanity that I'm surprised ANY learning happens at all.
Khan is doing very high level, very loose connections at the moment which, I'll admit, contain even less information than the school system pulp. However, I'd be interested in seeing how deep he goes with subsequent videos before passing judgment.
Yup, he could very well address this with more in depth videos, this being the super-quick overview so people can form a loose structure in their head.
Archduke was incredibly disliked by the people he was governing. Why none pulled out is a mystery to me. The terms basically crippled Germany until they decided to call the allies' bluff.
I have yet to take a college level history course, so I probably have errors.
It is a 15-minute video. That leaves approximately 99.995% of a viewer's life free to dig a little deeper into the subject matter.
The quality contest is not Khan vs a Ph.D program in history, it is Khan vs Insane Clown Posse. Khan wins.
It's a matter of perspective and what is said and isn't said. Consider these 2 accounts of the same event:
- The US Forces battle terrorist extremists to bring peace to the country, remove lethal weapons and pave the way for the first western-style democratic election.
versus
- After decades of war, in which two world powers, Russia and America, secretly sent arms and weapons to the country to fight their proxy wars, and then America bringing their own troops in, the natives now use those same weapons to try and defeat the invader and preserve their traditions.
Interesting; can you elaborate? Surely it would be folly, say, to teach some children _wrong_ things simply for diversity. I doubt this is what you advocate, no?
In mathematics there is a well defined right and wrong, but in history there are often competing viewpoints of which none can be dismissed easily. I would say that to pick one as true and discard all the others is folly.
There are still many approaches to teaching mathematics, of varying and debating quality, so many of these concerns still apply. Math teaching is not a commodity we can simply stockpile using contributions from whoever tosses a bit in the kitty.
Why not choose as many perspectives as you possibly can? If human history (in the small-h sense, not the kind being argued about in TFA) is any kind of reliable guide, the truth will probably be somewhere betwixt all of them.
> I am hoping that my son grows up being taught by postmodernist that don't present history as fact
How else could it possibly be presented? Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say that history is "a perspective"? Can one change history simply by deciding to view it differently, somehow?
Our knowledge of the past is like memory - we don't actually remember what it was like when we were 3 - we remember remembering what it was like when we were 3.
It's filtered through secondary sources that are never completely reliable, and there is information lost because people die without telling anyone what they saw or did, or there's confusion, or, in war, the winner's perspective is presented as the only facts.
In the US, the obvious example is the history of the west, and the natives of North America. It was once viewed as the bringing of civilization to savages for their own good. Now its viewed as genocide. Because its being viewed from a different perspective.
Because pretty much all historical retellings are biased by the author/storyteller. There's both unintentional bias, and intentional bias in how historic events were portrayed.
History is not comprised of a set of value-neutral facts. History is a narrative constructed out of fact and interpretations, and every history has a viewpoint.
Without question, one changes history by deciding to view it differently. If it didn't work that way, we'd only need one history book and we'd be done.
Well actually, history does consist of value-neutral facts, but the sum total of all those facts is far too complicated for any one mind to comprehend. This atom moved there, that atom moved here, and so forth. Even if you scale up to the actions of individual people rather than atoms, we're still far beyond what we could comprehend... and in any case, most of it isn't recorded.
Having acknowledged the limitations of the historian's knowledge, though, the question is what do you do next? A good historian will use the fact that he can't divorce himself from his own viewpoint as a reminder to be extremely cautious. A bad one will use it as an excuse to indulge his particular biases.
I cannot agree. There are so many "facts" that the mere selection of which ones get recorded already puts an overwhelming bias on the stories they tell. History is obsessed with narratives, and there is an ineluctable requirement, when doing history, to create a story where earlier "facts" leads to later "facts" in a hypothesis of cause and effect. The requirement for a pseudo-logical story with internal consistency further cherry-picks the "facts", until you're left with a complete bowdlerization of reality. The truth is, there are enough "facts" that you can very probably tell a whole lot of different stories using the raw material, but people have a very strong disinclination to cognitive dissonance and won't do this. They'll pick one and stick with it, and argue it against other stories in ego-driven battles, until a consensus emerges as a sociological phenomenon, rather than a fact-driven one.
One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. Criminals often think they're justified in the actions they take; in fact, often they must self-justify their own actions in order to sleep at night at all, so they will have their own internally consistent narratives. It's extremely difficult to fight the dominant narrative once it has become accepted.
IMO, the highest value history has is in telling stories about a world which is different from our own, but for which we have somewhat believable evidence actually existed. The degrees to which it is different tell us what varies in human nature, and what stays the same, stays the same. It teaches us to not take the present moment too seriously as some kind of apex or nadir. But I don't think it actually tells us a whole lot about the past, per se.
A good historian will use the fact that he can't divorce himself from his own viewpoint as a reminder to be extremely cautious. A bad one will use it as an excuse to indulge his particular biases.
And a very bad one will pretend that he is being value-neutral and objective, and show no attentiveness to the interpretative nature of his work.
"A good historian will use the fact that he can't divorce himself from his own viewpoint as a reminder to be extremely cautious. A bad one will use it as an excuse to indulge his particular biases."
I'd say this is also true in the broader sense of how a person chooses to live in an inherently muddled world. You can take obstacles and confusion as a call to action and vigilant reflection, or you can use them as an excuse for giving up and accepting mediocrity.
Have you never heard the phrase "History is written by the victors"?
The problem is trying to determine what is objective fact - you often end up relying on witness statements, some of which will be lies or misremembered. And then you have to decide which facts are "most important", which events were the prime causes of a second event.
Unfortunately there is an unquestionably large amount of perspective and subjectiveness in history.
> The goal is not to determine what is objective fact. There is no such thing, not even in natural sciences such as physics. Dont forget that.
I'm not sure where you're going with that; follow that line of thought too far and you end up with solipsism.
Practically speaking, sure there are objective facts. The properties of mechanics and electromagnetism are facts, or close enough for everyday purposes. What happens when you throw a ball or turn on a light is not a cultural construct.
re: history, sure, no person has the Pure Truth, and any history reflects the viewpoint of its author(s). It's still useful to distinguish between things that happened and things that didn't happen.
For instance, World War II did not begin when Queen Mab, having been cast out of the Garden of Eden by Shiva, built a clone army in her underground fort in Antarctica then invaded Loompaland. That simply didn't happen.
It seems to me that there are objective facts; we just can't know them perfectly. Still, it's very useful to try to get an approximation.
The idea is that there are always too many facts and data, and it's a history textbook's job to present a curated set of information that forms an easy to understand narrative.
This often means that perspectives from less influential / marginalized groups are downplayed or even ignored.
Much of postmodernist history is about recognizing that this always happens and that there are always multiple perspectives to a historical event.
When the parent poster advocated having his children taught by a postmodernist, I think he more accurately wants teachers who can make students think for themselves. In the US you can be successful with a boring centrist mindset, you can go to graduate school and become part of the professional/political elite and not really think too much about things. Of course some elites are brilliant thinkers but DC is not exactly a hotbed of intellectual curiosity these days, and governance suffers.
Historical study can reveal a lot about the contradictions of ideology, the gap between political rhetoric/narrative vs reality. For this reason it can be a very politically charged topic. But even boring (to outsiders) topics are hotly contested—historical study is not ultimately the cataloging of facts, is it about the analysis of change in complex systems over time.
> Can one change history simply by deciding to view it differently, somehow?
It's often the case that history is not repeated as a mere sequence of events, but also as an interpretation as to _why_ those events occurred, and how factors at the time contributed to their occurrence.
Maybe we can admit that their is then also an element of conditioning to history as well as one of 'fact'?
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I agree completely; history is both what actually happened in the past, and the narrative that we construct for ourselves from those events.
What scares me about postmodernism is that many of its adherents seem to reject the idea of objective truth completely. That way madness lies.
History is replete with narrative fallacy. The only semi-accurate sources are from people who witnessed an event as it happened and wrote a blow-by-blow account of it as it was happening with little to no interpretation or explanation - a liveblogging/tweetstream of it, if you will.
Two meanings of "history" here: one is what has actually happened in the past, the other is what we claim (or teach) happened. The former is static and impossible to know perfectly. The latter is necessarily a perspective. Obviously the latter has no effect on the former.
"few things about history and don't get the exact dates or details right."
This is exactly what a person needs to get right - the Chronology. Otherwise things do not make any sense.
For instance these facts:
Fact: The U.S. dropped two Nuclear bombs on Japan.
Fact: Japan became the largest debt holder for the U.S.
..can be misconstrued to say something that did not occur, such as, "The U.S. dropped bombs on japan so they did not have to pay back their debt to them."
Now I know this is an extreme example, but the reasoning is the same. History is a study of facts that occurred; who, what, where - chronology provide the "why".
I welcome opposing opinions but this itself doesn't present both sides of the argument, nor any context to the one example given, and sounds to me purely like a bashing exercise.
For the record, I like the Khan Academy and they do a lot of good; but I still think that's really unfair to say that given that the article brings up a really important point (regardless of its style of writing): Khan Academy history lessons are so abbreviated, that key, important points and figures in history are skipped. Why is this not good? One of the major key reasons we study history is so that major mistakes of the past are not repeated in the present or future. Now this is an extreme example that no Khan like outlet actually does, but what if they skipped over Jim Crowe laws in their history of the US?
Going on somewhat of a tangent, reading this article reminds me of this TED talk about filter bubbles.
I seriously doubt a history lesson in 15 minutes that covered WWII to Vietnam is meant to be comprehensive. With that said, when I was in school we regularly covered a thousand years in a single page. And in many cases complete eras as pertained to geography were skipped altogether. To this day I don't think I could tell you the name of a single African King pre-1900.
With that said, one of the things I still prefer about Khan's lectures, even abbreviated ones like these stated, is that I can pause them at any time, and look up the Japanese oil embargo. And start right back up where I left off in the video. With live lectures at best you can take a note of it, and look it up later, but then other facts that build upon this in the lecture are missed -- and you may not even know that you missed them.
I agree with everything you just wrote, but I think you're missing the point of my post. I was just merely giving reasons as to why people shouldn't dismiss the article.
If they skip over something like Jim Crowe laws and someone notices, then that someone can mention it to Sal, explain why (s)he thinks it's important, and then Sal (or another instructor in the future) can make a video, and it can easily be incorporated into the curriculum. This process is much easier than it would be to incorporate it into a textbook, curriculum, etc.
> The things we learn from history that are important become part of our culture, not our curriculum.
How does it become part of our culture if it's not part of our curriculum? Given my own personal tastes (when I was a child), I would have skipped everything in history except for WWI, and WWII. Even with WWI and WWII, I probably would have only focused on the battles and not the social issues if given the chance. I wouldn't have learned about things like the Trail of Tears, the Japanese Internment camps in Hawaii, and so on.
And many people don't learn about those things because they are brought up in difference cultures. But to claim that some history books are better than others is just wrong. (I know you are not claiming that)
You will naturally learn your countries history albeit not to the point where you can become a history professor but it's not the end of the world.
History is perspective it can't be anything but perspective. There is no right or wrong teaching in history. Only survivors to tell the tales.
But to claim that some history books are better than others is just wrong.
How can you even write that? That statement is just so ridiculous as to befuddle belief. There are history books in existence written with deliberate lies mean to indoctrinate people in certain ways. Are you saying that these books are no different from other books that have no lies inserted? Are you saying that books that don't incorporate newly discovered evidence about the past aren't more complete than books which don't?
Yes, it's true that we have to account for the unreliable narrator, but to then say that we must abandon all attempt at objectivity with regard to history is absurd! There is so much one can do to mitigate the problems of an unreliable narrator and when we can't mitigate it entirely (most of the time,) we can always express our margin of error. True, there will always be some degree of uncertainty but the purpose of studying history is to decrease that degree of uncertainty.
I am saying that all there are no right way to tell a story.
No matter what history book you read it is excluding more things than it is including. That doesn't mean that you can't say factual wrong things. But the perspective of a history book can never be without an agenda nor without a perspective.
How is Saving Private Ryan different from the US schools interpretation of 2nd World War?
How is Call of Duty different than a soldiers account of how a battlefield looked like? They are after all consulting soldiers.
I am not talking about learning historical facts but about growing up in a culture that has a memory of a past. Things that naturally flows between people.
I knew of 2nd world war before I had history, I knew of JFK before I had history. And I am Danish.
> How is Saving Private Ryan different from the US schools interpretation of 2nd World War?
Simple. It throws out a lot of the context and details of how we got to the meat grinder in the first place. It's traded for eye candy and emotion. All an individual with little background in the subject would know is that - these are the good guys over here and the bad guys over there.
> I knew of 2nd world war before I had history,
That's no surprise. Almost every kid enjoys anything with guns and bullets.
Having superficial knowledge of something is very different from getting a decent understanding of it. It's like knowing that Martin Luther was some guy who nailed a piece of paper to a door because he was angry with Catholicism, without understanding the details and background to how he got to the point and its future implications on the world.
How is Call of Duty different than a soldiers account of how a battlefield looked like?
Between a WWII veteran's personal account of the battles and playing CoD, which one would you pick? If you pick the veteran's account, you know that Call of Duty trivializes war. There is a difference.
It is not the obligation of every article and every essay and every editorial to carefully present both sides of every argument. Sometimes, it's sufficient to carefully present your side of a new argument, just to stimulate discussion.
I disagree with Josh that this thread demonstrates HN groupthink (I actually found the comments to be pretty well balanced). But your comment demonstrates a fallacy that is very prevalent on HN, which is that every bit of source material has to be judged in HN's context, and anything that isn't suitably lawyered up and deferential is automatically faulty. The world is a pretty boring place when it provides nothing to stimulate your thoughts and, yes, disagree vehemently with.
I wouldn't expect an article named "The Dangerous Mr Kahn" to spend much type discussing the upside of the Kahn Academy. Going into it, it's obvious that it is an advocacy piece written by someone who's not thrilled with Mr Kahn's work.
The OP's point is that hn is a discussion forum, which is most effective when the discussions are somewhat balanced. But since the Kahn Academy is a darling of this forum, this article is here just to be knocked down, and anyone not joining in is likely to be downvoted. That makes hn less valuable.
Seeing how the comments on this thread were so divided, I read the article, and I support the view that it's a criticism that is worth considering, even though it's not highly convincing.
You can argue that covering WWII to Vietnam in 15 minutes is just mission impossible. But the way it's described in that article does raise concerns.
What I got from the article is that the author is blaming Khan for not explaining a few things in his history videos that may not be immediately obvious to a viewer.
I think this is a _much_ bigger issue in classrooms. I've had many instructors and professors at my university skip over the details. Because (1) they assume we know it already, (2) they are too lazy to discuss or write it, (3) there is not enough time.
Khan does an excellent job teaching in his math videos. Almost never have I felt like my questions weren't answered by him. He probably thinks as a beginner would and tries to make it as simplified as possible. He writes down everything. Even uses different colours for different concepts. Why? I don't know, maybe he wants to make sure his viewers benefit from his work. A classroom teacher couldn't care less, they still get paid at the end of the day.
Much of the practical value in history is found when you examine events in some depth. For example, taking a deeper look at the German encryption system or the code breaking infrastructure at Bletchley. Or examining how an entire nation managed to keep the D-Day invasion secret until the very last minute.
So, while this article might itself be a little breathless, I think it's valid criticism that glossing over History is unforgivable.
That is why SCOTUS allows dissenting opinions. Sometimes we just don't get it right the first time around and it is good to have a record of what we could have done better. But I'll be damned if I'm wrong on the internet!
Instead of immediately discrediting the linked article because they're "haters" or "threatened", try reading it and understanding their point of view. I love Khan's work and what he's doing, but at the same time the article raises some valid points. You learn a lot more by examining both sides of a story than being a fanboi.