Teaching History In Schools With Video Games

Joe writes "There's a story about a Massachusetts company, Muzzy Lane Software, creating a Civ-style simulation computer game to teach history to high school and college students. 'Our view isn't that you take the right video game, stick it in a classroom and everything gets better,' Mr. McCool said. 'But with the right tools, this can significantly enhance learning.'"

Comments

Medieval Total War

[kahei]

I learned a lot about European history from that game -- not just facts, but also the understanding that there used to be so much in the eastern half of Europe until the mongols and turks flattened it -- what we tend to think of as Europe now is really just the western 2/5 or so.

Darn those turks, with their fiendishly juicy kebabs!

History is...

[PsiPsiStar]

"History is a selective interpretation of events intended to justify those currently in power.
Memory is the same thing on an individual scale. "

One of my favorite quotes.

What I'd like to see is better history simulation. Get a program that can take certain factors and use it to predict the outcome. After all, knowing math means we can predict the answers to math problems. Shouldn't knowing history mean the same thing? And isn't any school of thought's actual value as a study linked to the predictive value it creates? Or we could just be cynics and say that history is only useful for indoctrination and persuasion....

Re:I'm a bit skeptical

[srleffler]

You seem to be viewing history as just a collection of facts--what happened and when. Unfortunately, high school curricula tend to encourage this kind of thinking. What makes history interesting and useful however is the analysis of why things happened. Encouraging students to explore alternate possible sequences of events may help them to begin to think about history on this deeper level. Of course this depends on the software being well written, with some academic insight going into the alternate possibilities and some guidance provided to make sure the student does learn what really happened.

The interest in history must come first

[q2k]

From what I've seen homeschooling our kids, an interest or curiosity about history needs to come first if a kid (or anybody) is going to learn. The rote memorization of facts many of us suffered through doesn't work. In our case, my son was hooked on "The Magic Treehouse" books, in which a couple of kids transport through time in a treehouse and end up in the middle of important historical events. That, plus video games got him very interested in history, which made the teaching / learning bit very very easy.

It's no different than contuining education for adults. It's got to be relevant for somebody to be interested. "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" is not interesting to kids. Leaning more about westward expansion and what really happened with (Oregon) settlers is interesting to a kid if they have been enjoying the game (or books) already anyway.

Re:Difficult to say...

[lindsayt]

I agree with you, which you probably noticed from my final comment about school boards controlling K-12 history curricula and about college intro history having to essentially "unteach" what's been done before they get there.

There are exceptions of course, but grade school and high school history in America often have little to do with teaching students to think critically about history and to ask difficult questions. History for kids is one of the most politicized subjects, if not the very most. School districts and parents argue that their kids should learn the nice, happy stories they were taught, which have nice morals to them and make us better people.

Of course, much of what you're reciting above is the same thing - essentialized stories, this time designed to refute the old stories. Any time history is about neat little stories, whether positive or negative, it's not getting anywhere. History as a field explores questions and is meant to be argumentative, not narrative. There are no neat, tidy answers that don't essentialize the problem to such an extent as to lose meaning.

Let me give a quick (shabby) example: most grade schools teach that the Civil War was about southern slaveholders who wanted to have slaves. The North protested, and the Northerners fought a holy war to free the slaves. Separately, the traditional southern story of the War Between the States teaches that Southerners were upset that a Federal government was telling them what to do. The war was about states' rights, not slavery. The northerners forced unfair government on the South.

Well, I could say that both of these stories are false, and I would be fairly accurate. However, it's not useful simply to say they are false. The point is, both stories have some elements of truth to them, but the problem is far more complex. Was slavery a central issue? Sure. Was States' rights a central issue? Yes. It also had a bit to do with how people interpreted the founding documents of the United States, and how they viewed the struggle that had been the American Revolution. It was tied up in the fact that the United States were expanding rapidly, and the new states had no stake in the original compromises that had brought about the Constitution. It had a lot to do with the death of an old political party (the Whigs) and the birth of a new one (the Republicans). The reality is, the war came about thanks to a whole lot of factors, and every individual involved had a different way of interpreting what it was about.

One of the interesting questions that emerges from this is, what caused individuals to view the Civil War the way they viewed it? How could two brothers, living in the same city with the same upbringing, come to opposite conclusions about the war and fight on opposite sides? What was at stake for these people, and why did they view the struggle as something worth dying for? How were these many and varied views and opinions united into armies, and how did those in power (journalists, politicians, etc) appeal to people about the war? What does this tell us about Modernity and the emergence of print culture in the middle of the 19th Century?

These are the types of questions that professional historians ask (though I'm a European historian, so I may be ten years out of date on what questions are hot right now on the American Civil War). These questions cannot be addressed by a video game, and they're rarely addressed by grade schools, high schools, or popular history in general.

Re:Learned more history from books than class

[orthogonal]

I learned (and still remember) more about history from all the historical fiction books I've read than I ever will from history classes.

Funny, back when I was studying history, I made a point to avoid reading historical fiction.

The problem is that unless the author has a really good grasp of the history in question and the ability to understand and overcome the prejudices of his own time, those modern prejudices inevitably will distort the history being related in the author's fiction.

Or more concisely, as an English professor once put it to our class, all fiction, regardless of its setting, is about (the issues of) its own time.

Let me make this more concrete with a thought experiment involving not history, but science fiction. You're probably not a vegan, and you probably don't consider meat-eaters to be morally flawed.

Now imagine that, two hundred years from now, everyone is a vegan vegetarian -- and that they grew up the children and grandchildren of vegans, the result of a bloody war begun in 2161 to abolish meat eating. Imagine further that although the vegetarians did win that war, for decades after the war, the resentful losing meat-eaters did their best to surreptitiously continue meat eating, until the vegetarians responded by becoming strict vegans and changing the culture by teaching the moral wrongness of meat eating or any sort of animal exploitation in all the schools.

So two hundred years from now, every school child is taught in elementary school the horrors of the farm and slaughterhouse, and about the valiant war that put an end to the holocausts that supplied the meat aisles of the grocery stores, and the bottom line, that meat eating was not a choice, not just an inefficient allocation of scarce resources, but a disgusting moral wrong.

Now that school child, when he thinks about life in 2004, will find it puzzling, at best, how the vast majority of Americans of our time could go to McDonald's and casually enjoy the results of the abuse, murder, and consumption of an innocent animal. Only the thoughtful children will even get to "puzzled"; most will simply dismiss us as brutes and barbarians.

And the historical novelist of two hundred years from now, who will himself be a confirmed vegan, will write books that, consciously or not, incorporate his moral belief that exploiting animals is wrong, and will tend to cast his sympathetic characters as vegans, or at least as holding vegan attributes, or anachronistically treating their pets as co-equal "animal companions", all out of proportion to the actual number of strict vegans in the real america of 2004.

Just substitute "abolitionist" for "vegetarian" and "Civil Rights supporter" for vegan" in the above, and you'll have an understanding of how difficult it is to write honest historical novels about slavery and racism in America in 1804. In 1804, slavery was considered by some to be a moral wrong (just as some today are vegans), but the vast majority saw it as a political problem or even as a natural way of life endorsed by the Bible. Even of those who in 1804 were against slavery ("vegetarians"), only a very very few believed in racial equality ("vegans"); perhaps the closest they came were proposals to forcibly send ex-slaves back to Africa.

Even those who were ardent supporters of slavery were not necessarily judged to be immoral men for it, unless they seemed to take unnecessary pleasure in being cruel to their slaves; and many slave owners were -- and are -- considered to be great mean -- among them George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

But since the Civil War and the messy, inconclusive aftermath that was Reconstruction and the Jim Crow Era, Americans have made racism -- and by extension, slavery -- into a moral issue that transcends all others. Nowadays, nearly the worst thing you can accuse a public figure of is racism -- only sex crimes against children are more inflammatory.

The result is that mo