I made history interesting!!!

[~*heket*~]

My daughter has sworn that history is BORING for some time now. But over the last few weeks of home learning I think I might slowly be changing her mind.

I've given her a few gory topics like the witch hunts and the tower of london (and the ghosts therin) and she's actually taking an interest in it! :eager

I could never understand why a menber of my family found history boring, but perhaps it was the way they teach it at school and the sanitised versions of it :blueroll

History is GORY ffs, and kids like gory! ;)

[dylan]

Definitly they way they teach it at school! Dry lists of dates and what happened... yawn. I never found out anything interesting from history at school, only my own reading.

[ThirdArmBabySlingProject]

You want gory and gruesome??? Check out the 'Horrible Histories' books & CDs (from your local library). My children love them...

And this series ~ about the gypsy hunts ~ is steeped in history, and is just delightful. We were gripped by it ~ both the books and the CDs ~ the CDs were beautifully presented:

http://www.chainofcharms.com.au/

I hate/d 'History' because it is just that: HIS Story ~ very white, very exclusive ~ with huge great gaps missing from everyday people...we're taught as fact about 'potato famines' that never actually happened (plenty of spuds to go around but the English nicked the lot!) and lands that were only 'discovered' when the white man 'found' them... ~ and women in particular...:-(

I'd be interested to hear how you (all) teach/share History ~ most of the 'facts' I was taught I subsequently discovered to be myths, lies and propaganda...I guess that's a bit OT and probably deserves a thread of its own...

[~*heket*~]

I don't think that't OT at all, I think it's spot on. I won't be doing the "first settlers" crap, I'll be doing "the invasion" here. And whilst school has done SOME stuff about it, I don't think they went far enough, they still make it prettier than I think I'd be able to.

She has a few horrible histories books, but thanx to school they've never interested her. I might start with one of the dvd's and see if we can progress to the books from there.

[ThirdArmBabySlingProject]

I kinda mean more like how do we access history that's closer to the truth than what's generally accessible?

And how do we know what we're sharing is even vaguely accurate?

I know a big part of sharing history for me is emphasizing that this is just one person's interpretation of an event ~ or a write up by one person (or a few people) based on a few interpretations etc, and that 'educated guesses' are just that: educated guesses.

I think one of the biggest values of exploring history is to impart the 'question all you are told', and to explore the social and political reasons for why the history (or even current day news: SIEVX comes to mind in Australia ~ it took Steve Biddulph at an ABA conference to tell me what should have been front page news worldwide!!) we inherit is so often very different from the experience of the majority, and often so far from the truth...

I guess the same applies to science in its ever-changing forms. We can share what is believed to be a truth at present, but it's fluid, and what will be taught in twenty years time will likely be different again: my biology teacher suggested this to me 27 years ago, her claim really struck me (at 11 I'm not sure I believed her), and I have certainly noticed it as my children have been checking out science themselves (especially when we buy the out-of-date library books) and during their schooled periods.

Hm, interesting to ponder...

You know, with regards to the invasion here, when my son was in year ten here (2 years ago), his then school did a whole term English (bearing in mind how many hours there are aside for English over ten weeks) project on 'Australian Culture'.

When Aboriginal people hadn't been mentioned in the first week he decided to keep quiet and see how long it took. Well, he learned about Kylie Minogue, Ned Kelly, VB bitter, vegemite (which is not even Aussie owned now), Chopper Reid and various other topics.

No mention of koalas, kangaroos, uluru, didgeridoos or boomerangs (which is what most people from overseas identify with Australia); and not a word about the indigenous population!!! (Apparently they get a mention in primary school and it is not considered necessary to mention them again!!!!!)

My son blew the teacher/head apart with his conclusion essay ~ all about Aboriginal people! And we walked out of that school, leaving them a parting gift of books from ANTaR and Reconcilliation Vic.

It will be interesting when we sit our Citizenship exam to see what questions we need to know the answers for. My guess, from what I've been told, is that it isn't dissimilar to the English project scenario, which is going to be hugely challenging...

[Janet]

TABSP I think your overall view of the production of history is largely accurate, I'm a historian by virtue of qualification. I would like to add though that a lot of scholarship has moved on from producing histories of the famous, battles, dates, glorification of men's deeds and glossing over, or ignoring, realities like invasions, indigenous inhabitants and women. Even gay and lesbian histories are being produced now in greater numbers than ever before.


What is taught in schools is obviously going to be a carefully organised version of events designed to produce conformist thought. Universities, particularly Humanities depts, tend to be different from this which is why JHo's government slashed our budgets over and over and over while upping those of science depts. Humanities does teach people to think critically, there is little support for the kind of Great Man stuff you're describing nowadays. Even in Australian history you can find a wealth of stuff which is vastly superior to the crap that Keith Windshuttle produces, for example, and it's not too hard to see his right wing agenda is going to demonstrably affect his capacity to view sources and report with any kind of accuracy.


Search out work by historians like Prof.Marilyn Lake, Richard Broome and Inga Clendinnen to see Australian work which is thoughtful, exacting, properly referenced so you can go check the sources and see for yourself whether or not you agree, scholarly and also beautifully and enjoyably written. I'd hate to think we judge a subject area based on how it's mutilated and warped in the school system. ;)




I guess the same applies to science in its ever-changing forms. We can share what is believed to be a truth at present, but it's fluid, and what will be taught in twenty years time will likely be different again: my biology teacher suggested this to me 27 years ago, her claim really struck me (at 11 I'm not sure I believed her), and I have certainly noticed it as my children have been checking out science themselves (especially when we buy the out-of-date library books) and during their schooled periods.

This is true to a degree given that as time passes we discover new sources to mine for information and thus events are able to be viewed differently. What scholarship is based around however is theories of various kinds as well as sources and so for example, my own work on political identities and masculine identities in late 18th century Belfast was based on documents not previously examined much like the personal diary of a man of middling circumstances, Orange Order poetry and the Belfast Poor House records as well as new ways of reading old material previously much studied but not with a feminist perspective or with a view to gendering material produced by men - generally only women are treated as gendered beings so my PhD is about spotlighting how men produce and reflect the gendering of their time in their own ways. So new theories to scholarship (and new is relative but the 20th century was a beautiful time for the production of new ways of seeing from social history to socialist, feminist, post-colonial, postmodern, post-structuralist and beyond!) are always provoking scholars into rethinking old ways we have viewed history and trying to see what that reveals about us as a culture as well.

[ThirdArmBabySlingProject]

That's great to hear! Do you think this is general though, or just accessible to the few exceptional people who dig deep enough/look outside the box...?

[Janet]

In my life people who look outside the box are the norm. :lol We are all of us able to wander into university libraries, many accept borrowers from outside their immediate community, and access their materials. And yes from my experience of many years in history and related disciplines, scholarship is pretty politically radical overall. There's a reason the right wing is a minority in Humanities. Once you start to think critically right wing politics become even more ridiculous than on first contact. ;)

[Beatrice]

To my mind history is intrinsically interesting because it's about people. I'm not primarily interested in the history of nations but I am interested in the history of the people within those nations, how they lived, how they thought, what formed their world-views, how they interacted with other people, and how those interactions are what creates and maintains "nations" and can be separated into "periods" that we can look back and label and study. I find it instructive to think that "history" is what we're living now: what will future historians look back on and see as significant? Will that match what we, as individuals living in our constrained presents, see as being significant? Now extend that frame back to people who lived within their presents, which are now our pasts. What might it have looked like to them? Reading the sources is fascinating because it gives us a tiny glimpse into those lived realities; tying those glimpses into the broader frameworks we can construct with our historical distance is a fascinating puzzle.

(Steps off soapbox - being another history grad, although I don't have as many letters after my name as Janet :lol).

[Janet]

I see another history lover there. ;) It is a wonderful world!