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Bill Gates Wants To Remake the Way History Is Taught. Should We Let Him?
theodp (442580) writes With his Big History Project, the NY Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin reports that Bill Gates wants to remake the way history is taught (intro video). Last month, the Univ. of California system announced that a version of the Big History Project course could be counted in place of a more traditional World History class, paving the way for the state's 1,300 high schools to offer it. Still, not everyone's keen on the idea. "Is this Bill Gates's history?" asks NYU's Diane Ravitch. "And should it be labeled 'Bill Gates's History'? Because Bill Gates's history would be very different from somebody else's who wasn't worth $50-60 billion." Of the opposition to Gates, Scott L. Thomas of Claremont Graduate University explains, 'Frankly, in the eyes of the critics, he's really not an expert. He just happens to be a guy that watched a DVD and thought it was a good idea and had a bunch of money to fund it."
And three times in the same sentence!
(Legal, but annoying.)
Oligarchs make history
Every time he messes around with education he picks a real loser. FWIW it's the same with all his philanthropy. He's an utter moron. Just watch any talk with him on the same stage as Bill Clinton, and watch them answer the same question...it's painfully obvious what a self-absorbed moron Gates is...
I think his "common core" plan has largely backfired because it was rolled out on a federal level and states were pretty much strong armed into it.
I'd be more comfortable with these changes if they were OFFERED and not at gun point.
Our education system could be improved in a lot of ways. But those improvements should be optional to the education systems and not compelled.
Here some people will say "well we didn't force them to do the other thing." but that's often not true because they're often offered a lot of money to adopt new programs. the money they're offered comes from federal coffers. The money in federal coffers comes from everyone. So basically you lose money if you don't sign onto the program because the government will then take money from you and give it to someone else. The only way to get your money back is to adopt the program.
So that's an issue. These cash payouts to states and cities for adopting federal programs needs to stop unless states and cities that do not adopt programs get a relative tax decrease. Such that if a given state didn't sign onto these things they didn't pay for them.
Absent that they're being compelled and I do have a problem with that.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The first computers in the world were invented by Microsoft in 1981 to run the revolutionary MS-DOS operating system, before which humanity had no computers at all. In 1985 Microsoft invented the graphical user interface and the mouse. Microsoft Windows was the most secure operating system in the world, and also the easiest to use with the introduction of the revolutionary Microsoft Bob.
Microsoft would go on to invent the Internet, graciously allowing rival companies to establish a presence on Microsoft's new network. Microsoft created the most loved user interface in the world with the exciting new Windows 8 Aero.
You can purchase exciting new Microsoft products at the following participating retailers near you!
No, he's just somebody that at least occasionally tries to improve the world instead of just commenting on other people's efforts.
Most of the history is not true anyway, as it was written by those who were victorious, to glorify and gratify their actions.
Huh? Why? Is this the "there are two Americas" crap again? Why would "his" history of America be different from that of any of the rest of us?
Ok, so he did not even devise the course himself — he just liked what he saw. I don't particularly like the guy — and do remember his company's anti-competitive practices of the past. But none of these critics do. So why is his wealth being held against him?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The "intro video" is a slick, emotionally-appealing, and almost contentless advertising piece. Just about the only thing we're told about the Big History course is that "it uses the timeline", and that Bill Gates thinks "it's the best course ever"!
It's a typical corporate sales technique--you're not told any details that would allow you to independently evaluate the product, you're just made to feel that you need it.
My history classes were so boring that I learned little. After playing some Sid Meyers Civilization and watching shows (like the one called 'big history' on H2) I became much more interested. Now I have a good grasp on history and timelines not from formal school but from an interest in a video game and on interesting shows that wove the fabric of history together in a compelling way.
It's bad enough the world is still stuck microsoft products
nuff said
If not, then why would it matter that a rich guy decides to teach people history?
Looking at the website this seems more like a product Gates should be selling rather than something useful for the classroom.
That is how Gollum writes itssss, my precious.
That is exactly and precisely why it is not a good idea to let billionaires run your country. Having had dealings with billionaires, I can also say that he left out one thing, that such a person is almost inevitably going to be surrounded by a bunch of people (including in the press) who think that any idea he has is worthy of adulation.
Big History is not really a branch of History, it's its own subject, which is interesting and rich and a worthwhile contribution to someone's education. Generally it studies trends, whether cosmological, evolutionary, economic, or political, that span times greater than a human lifespan. It's not the usual meaning of history, and it can't replace history.
It's actually a good way to teach science, because a lot of science gets put into a historical narrative and tied to the real world.
Does Bill Gates have any credentials to show he is an expert in the field of teaching history?
If you made computer science a mandatory subject, and then required that the students be taught to type in, line-by-line, the source code for libreoffice, then what was taught in the course would not be incorrect. It wouldn't be computer science either.
The counterargument here is that "Big HIstory" focuses on a grand narrative without approaching the methodologies used to construct such narratives. Historians try to teach methods, and specifically ways to approach texts and to construct arguments from them about the past; they try to get students to look at histories not as "correct" or "incorrect" (although they can also be that), but rather as someone's attempt at interpreting the data in a way relevant to us.
The fact that most High School history classes suck and feature some nutcase rattling on about pet theories and spewing lists of crap for students to memorize has nothing to do with what history teachers want, and everything to do with the fact that "Coach of a High School Sports Team" is not a full-time job, and most schools have more coaches than gym teachers. So they gotta teach something, and that education degree means they can teach whatever they want; a Ph.D. in history is not so flexible, and (thanks to union rules) costs cash-strapped schools more money to hire.
If that cunt actually cared about improving education he would give money to supporting teachers unions. Making sure teachers are well paid and have the resources they need is the way to improve education. Coming in on your fucking golden helicopter and dictating the syllabus and robotic standardized tests is nothing more than an act of sabotage. Fuck the 1%.
Anything is better than the way I was taught history. In high school it was nothing but names and dates. No context, no motivation, nothing.
About 30 years ago there was a show called Our World on TV. It gave context, explained motivations, and in general made history pretty damned interesting. Too bad the show only lasted 1 season.
Then I had a college history class. Yep, back to names and dates and not much else.
History can be interesting, the way it's taught in school is a sham.
Nowthatwould change the world for the better!
Make people a bit cranky though!
As I understand it, he's a fan of tying different disciplines together into one interconnected timeline (astronomy, geology, paleontology, anthropology, etc). It doesn't appear that he wants to bias the content so much as come up with a better/more interesting way of presenting it. Seems like a worthwhile goal to me.
Have you seen this https://www.youtube.com/playli... ?
And three times in the same sentence! (Legal, but annoying.)
That would be bigotry then.
I mean, heck, you even admit it's not wrong, and still say it's a bad thing.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
He who controls the past controls the future.
I don't want his version.
If it's taught in the style of Connections, I'm all for it. I absolutely loathed traditional history teaching methods until I saw that series.
If it's revisionist, then screw that noise.
And by "the 1%" I mean academics like Diane Ravitch. Not only are academics like that among the wealthy and powerful in this country, far removed from the concerns of the ordinary citizens, they still have a chip on their shoulder because they look at the top 0.001% and think that they are being treated unfairly.
As for Gates, he isn't in the 1%, he is in a class of its own. He has so much money and power that I doubt he is motivated by acquiring more. His history is unlikely going to be very good, but it's probably no worse than the ideologically motivated trash that is usually being used in schools.
A hundred years from now Bill Gates will be remembered as a great man. Even today no one gives a shit about you. Slashdot and its users are so sad and pathetic.
I bloody well don't think so.
i would not trust gates with a pet poodle let alone history.
I do. 'Big History', to begin with, is so ugly a term
Part of the problem, I think, is that this isn't really "history" in the traditional sense (at least not as the word was understood before the past few decades or so). I'm NOT saying it shouldn't be taught in schools, mind you, but this whole project is based somewhat on a false premise.
"History," as the term traditionally means, has to do with a "story" (it's in the word, and in fact "history" and "story" used to basically mean the same thing in early English). That is, it's a narrative based on human accounts of events. Read the intro to the first major "history" in Western civilization if you don't believe me, Herodotus's "Histories" (where the word acquired its meaning) describes exactly this -- history is recounting events based on what humans have said and done, and trying to sort of causes and effects within that narrative.
This sort of "history" is what actual historians are trained in -- evaluating written documents and sources, as well as the role of artifacts, in creating a narrative about history. The word "prehistoric" only has meaning based on that meaning of "history" -- i.e., before written records exist, we have "prehistory." From TFA, it's clear that 90% of this course is about prehistoric events. Therefore, it's NOT a history course at all. Gates does NOT want to "remake the way history is taught" -- he wants to substitute a traditional course on history with a course on scientific theories about prehistory.
That's great -- and I'm all for interdisciplinary approaches and perhaps devoting more time to this stuff in schools. Maybe this course could take the place of part of a history elective and part of a science elective, or maybe it could serve as a kind of "bridge" between the disciplines, with science teachers starting it off, and history teachers swapping in once we get to modern anthropology and archaeology.
But let's be honest about what this is. It wouldn't make sense to have a person with "history" degree teach this course -- since the kind of methodologies and understanding have little to do with what historians do. The kinds of questions raised by scientific theories about prehistory and how we evaluate them are very different from the ways we critique human history narratives based on human records of events. Historians have some overlap with archaeologists in their methods, but very little overlap with anthropologists (particularly those who work on early humans), evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, and cosmologists -- which are actually the main topics of this curriculum as it's advertised.
.. we'll stop repeating it so much.
FU Bill Gates! Donate to Wikipedia if you want to do some good!
Well, lets look back. "Feed the Poor in Africa," with corn you can only get from Monsanto." Hell of a lesson.
and, if you've seen any YouTube video of Common Core math, know it absolutely sucks. Recently, there was a study that showed that rote memorization of simple math starts the process of higher though processes. I think Slashdot had a post on it.
Common Core is such a big carp at such a basic level that anyone who was a part of promoting or creating it should never doing anything with education again.
Gates pretends to be very passionate about "Big History".
Gates pretends to care about the youth and the poor of the country.
With such passion, commitment and a $50 billion bankroll,
you might think he would buy the rights and offer free downloads.
Careful, don't hurt yourself laughing.
cant really comment, history is a hell of a bull, and it tends to throw people at times when they least expect it.
I watched the video and I learned:
1. Today we have roads
2. In 1995 we had electronics
3. in 1985 we had pedophiles
4. in 1975 we had the waffle house.
In short; the world hasn't improved much since 1975.
The powerful (winners) have been writing the mainstream history for a long time. In addition history is hardly even taught anymore; and the bit that is has been done poorly. They take great people like MLK and turn them into a phrase and an icon while it seems to be purposely removing the aspects that made them truly great. Summation is necessary, but it has been harmful either by accident or by intent - the academics seem to do a better job so one wonders how that gets lost on the mainstream education of the topics.
My public history education was quite poor. The only good aspect is we didn't have to memorize and recall dates; but we didn't do hardly any reading. Reading is the primary method (and best) for learning history... and any reading assignments are hacked around by technology for the simple homework (the homework/exam being the only modern means to force reading, it has been circumvented-- it's weaker than a 4 digit password.)
http://historyisaweapon.com/
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Judge the idea based on its merits. Whoever introduced or is pushing the idea is irrelevant.
Is it the current liberal "lets tell our different lies after claiming that the old (non leftist created) history lessons were lies" ??
Does it include embedded commercials for buying Microsoft products or whatever is Gates's personal philosophy (or his one tailored for proles)?
Will it be as shoddy a product as the 'good enuf they will HAVE to take what we give them' level of poor quality of Bill Gates companies' products ???
As long as the revised history includes the events with Gates dumpster diving to retrieve other students coding assignments from the college Computer Science department dumpster out back. After all, that set the stage for his future company and its finite morals in its climb to historical greatness. Can't let that story be lost to the history revisionists! Sure Bill, what else should we be forgetting?
By an ad hominem from a 4-million pipsqueak who argues with himself in his mind and then drops fragments of those quarrels as if they are arguments.
LOL! Uuuuhhh... now you've "foed" me. Hilarious. Here you go then. Have fun being my "foe".
Judging from your line of thinking, you're probably one of those intellectual behemoths who believe that science is a matter of consensus.
So you can't even grasp the idea of proven scientific facts having a proven effect or direct influence on historic events.
Go on now. Run along.
It's probably your time to jerk off while reading Lacan or something.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Dissatisfaction with cross borders ethnic groups has the same root as dissatisfaction with voting district gerrymandering: the group that's been split is dissatisfied because they rightly perceive that their ability to influence their surroundings has been artificially reduced and the group that benefitted from the split is dissatisfied with the split group because they now view it's members as a 'minority' out-group.
As for getting a better understanding of history, there's a LOT more that's explainable by the sexual theory of history than the geographical one ... but try getting permission to present that in American high schools.
Betteridge's law of headlines: No!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
In this case, though, he's not wrong.
That depends. Having a holistic view of history is a good idea. Having a history teacher try to teach the Big Bang and Cosmology is a very, very bad idea.
Both in the Soviet Union and Germany we had/have an excellent, essentially free education system. Quality is indeed very high.
BUT, you know what ? Many if not most people who come from poor household might have a great education, but they still dont know how the world of business works. Plus, to finance all these socialist goodies, both the soviet and the German state will tax the hell out of everybody who has an average or above job. The middle class often cannot afford kids because of this.
What you suggest has been tried and it failed or fails badly.
It iS wrong.
And so is Gates, with or without his apostophes and lackeys, some of who stumble and fall.
Don't let his revisionist rotten core anywhere near 'history'.
the banners are animated GIF with accompanying audio at full volme.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Shouldn't that be ululation?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
The Civilized British brought Civilization to China ! They were so imensly civilized they sold dope in Shanghai and defended their drug traders with their military against those nasty, yellow, evil Policemen who tried to stop the British Merchants.
See how civilized we are ? (In this case German, we helped to shoot the Chinese, then)
The truth is, all over the world THUGS rule. To the present day.
Because some states were highly centralized and could leash out on their neighbours with impunity. That is essentially why Germany was founded 1871. We had enough of French raiders on horseback who raped and pillaged the small German states.
These days the Frenchies like to whine about the German threat - something they created by their own immoral behaviour until 1871.
The "state" has been a toxic thing. State-run schools obviously aim to make the young people docile so that the STATE can use them in whatever way it likes. For example, to use populace in a war that benefits General Dynamics and Haliburton. Trigger "patriotism" when your chummies need cannonfodder in order to sell guns to the state and then blow it up in a pointless war.
Of course many toxins are actually beneficial in small amounts or in infrequent use. USE BRAIN.
So long as my dick in planted in your ass I will shill out for anything Bill's precious desires..
Yea, in his alternative history of computing, Microsoft actually contributed original technology and didn't rip-off everybody else. See for example where Bill Gates personally 'welcomes` Netscape into the Industry?
1996: Bill Gates 'welcomes` Netscape into the Industry.
"As Netscape comes into the industry, we hope they adopt a PC mentality [of documenting changes to standards],. They've been making lots of changes to JavaScript. We think they should document that."
--
ref: by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 06, 2014 @08:44AM (#47840421)
The first computers in the world were invented by Microsoft in 1981 to run the revolutionary MS-DOS operating system, before which humanity had no computers at all. In 1985 Microsoft invented the graphical user interface and the mouse. Microsoft Windows was the most secure operating system in the world, and also the easiest to use with the introduction of the revolutionary Microsoft Bob.
Microsoft would go on to invent the Internet, graciously allowing rival companies to establish a presence on Microsoft's new network. Microsoft created the most loved user interface in the world with the exciting new Windows 8 Aero.
You can purchase exciting new Microsoft products at the following participating retailers near you!
we're gonna have BG and AG. Or may be BM and AM.
Roughly a millennium later, in an alternative time line where Sauron won the war:
OMFG THAT'S'SSSS BOSSSSSS55S55555five555fifty-five
Could you give some specifics of things Bill Gates has been revisionist about? Just curious.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Thanks to people like Bill Gates and others who have made it so easy for the ever interconnected to trash the planet and coordinate aggression, build high tech arsonals, and so easily forget the lessons old school history has taught us as the world spins wildly out of control, no one will be around to read history, except those living deep underground in their multi-billion dollar fortresses. So what good gosh darn does it matter how or by who history will be written? He'll be able to write whatever he wants, and no one will care.
I don't like to put trust in people who write "Gates's"
And three times in the same sentence! (Legal, but annoying.)
Relax, you'll be in good hands soon. The wambulance has been called and should be arriving shortly.
Gates's is the clearest form of the possessive nominative.
What's he gonna do, put a left-leaningn spin on everything? Left-wing political scientist (NOT historian) Howard Zinn already did that with his outrageously innaccurate and propaganda-ridden "A People's History of the United States" which the leaft-leaning educational establishment has stuffed into most of America's K-12 schools. American kids already lack an understanding of history and therefore do not know how rapidly and how badly the nation is decaying, but with such a warped view of how we got here, those who DO realize we have "gone off the rails" will have no clue about how to fix things...and they are icreasingly being lied to and told that the country never was good (Even Obama has sprinkled that into a speech now)
No matter what Mr Bill does, it won't get worse that what has already been done.
Get some REAL history and teach it to your kids. Teach them the Declaration of Independece, the Constitution, The Federalist and Anti-Federalst papers, Books written by Jefferson, Madison, etc. Go through the letters and speeches of Lincoln. Read stuff about all the interesting bits of history written by people who were actually THERE rather than revisionist crap written by recent hardcore leftists in the past several decades who were trying to "re-interpret" things to justify the fundamental changes they wanted to make in society. This country was designed. Its designers wrote the design document (The Constitution) and many of their related design notes are available. When operated outside its design limits, it is doomed to fail just like any other designed system.
I expect that most of those poor famous artists and scientists were interested in amassing sufficient wealth, but were unsuccessful; very few people choose to be poor.
So please allow humble me to sum up his history:
Gates mommy was buds with the CEO of IBM who handed over the greatest licensing deal in human history, the DOS license, to her boy, BillG. BillG hires a dood named Tim who copies Gary Kildall's CP/M operating system, and calls it DOS (actually, the legal term for what Gates & company did was software piracy). Next, BillG gets his company Micro-something-or-other, financed through his uncle, who was VP of First Interstate at the time. Finally, BillG and company license everybody else's imaginative products and reengineers them into their operating system. (Do we still call that software piracy?)
The End.
Gates has made a life out of taking good ideas and making them universally known and available, but as OPTIONS. Fearing capability is stupid.
I'm with Einstein: "There are two infinite things, the Universe and Stupidity, and I am uncertain about the first". The hoi polloi are not infinite although their stupidity may well prove to be.
Afraid of Bill? Are you kidding?
Until then we are made to suffer his Gay frolicking and penis worship following the death of his Gay love interest Steven P. Jobs.
Dear Lord (and I am an Atheist), Please order Bill Gates to kill himself at the earliest possible convenience.
Ha ha
"...some of WHOM", if we're going to get picky.
The beauty is you'd never know until it's too late and his misinformation will have been accepted as fact.
Putting education into any single box is dangerous when you begin eliminating and checking against other sources for authenticity.
Somewhat related, it has been very difficult for me to find news articles touting Bill's pioneering involvement in gene sequencing and his comments on using genetics to create a better race of humans. This was reported on as bleeding edge progressive stuff until at some point I can't find his comments online any longer. It seems once people realize his ideas are not as sound as initially thought, he goes on to something else.
He has a habit of creating philanthropic endeavors that people can't understand or they backfire and he somehow manages to distance himself from them.
Look at common core. Not the type of creative genius that instills a high level of successful results, and by it's very definition of being a standard, is counterintuitive to the individual needs and ways students learn.
Not intended to pick on common core solely, here, but when common fails soon, watch him closely, there WILL be something else, with a different name, same objective.
'Frankly, in the eyes of the critics, he's really not an expert. He just happens to be a guy that watched a DVD and thought it was a good idea and had a bunch of money to fund it."
Best summary, ever. The primary problem with american culture today is this attitude of "money makes right", which is simply a modern version of "might makes right". There is a deep-rooted, often unconscious, assumption that because someone was successful (in business), he is smarter or more correct than someone who is not so bright and public. This ignores the fundamental truth that skillsets do not always overlap, and that celebrities main skill is very often self-marketing.
Just like Athens won the Persian War, not Sparta as "300" wants us to believe, in real life the tale of the lone hero, or the bright, misunderstood inventor, is usually just that: A tale.
And history is full of rich people giving money to total bullshit ideas.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Will call for even more agencies, more officers, more guns, more taxation, more red tape, more subsidies and MORE SPARTA (so to speak). They get an orgasm when they think of the state and how it could "fix all problems". Here in Germany even pissing into roadside bushes can be fined.
Real conservatives, on the other hand, will try to preserve ancient rights, instead of "doing great novel things". Those ancient rights are actually the core of civilization, not the brain-fucked neo-spartan oppression by the state. Real conservatives also mistrust the banksters, because those are spartians at the core, too. They will fuck their own institution until "it must be rescued by the state".
...is nothing more than the average Mafia clan. They will lie through all bodily openings, force people to die for the elite in wars, snoop on everybody and set up arbitrary rules under which members of the clan can be incarcerated, tortured and killed. But sure as hell they will have first-rate propaganda keep people in line. These days we have audio-visual devices of keeping the plebs in line, they call it "television". It should be called "homo sapiens brain programmer device".
Grow some very cynical balls and focus on your little garden. That's the only way to get along with "the state".
..because you set it up as a government vs. business dichotomy. And surely "government" are lots of highly educated, excessively armed (with tanks, machine guns, gas and NSA-GCHQ-KGB-Total Awareness) folks. You BOW to these "experts".
You cannot imagine that YOU could be part of the government and have a rifle at your home. Like these "swiss" men. Who is to blame for this sheepishness ? My money is on New York International Bankstery.
It iS wrong.
No it's not. The traditional rule is not about euphony (look it up), but about grammar. Traditionally, S-apostrophe was used for plural possessive and plural possessive only, and names ending in S were considered singular, and took the full apostrophe-S ending. The modern variant on this that sees forms such as Gates' house permitted may be what's called a "hypercorrection" -- kids getting told off for saying or writing "the dogs's bones" overapply their teachers' corrections to situations where it is not applicable. But even this modern variant isn't even euphonic, because we still say "the fox's den", "the boss's temper", etc. for any common noun ending in an /s/ phoneme.
The alternative source of this change may be in confusion of the classifier noun with the possessive: in "Edinburgh Airport", Edinburgh functions as a classifier noun. The possessive would be "Edinburgh's airport" (note though that airport is no longer capitalised as it is not part of a compound proper noun here). If we apply that to Paris, we see "Paris Airport" vs "Paris's airport". If the former is heard as the latter, it's actually "Paris' airport" in the listener's head. How would this affect surnames? Simple. The current President of the USA is from "the Obama family", Bill Gates is from "the Gates family" -- surname as classifier noun.
So that's language change in action, but the thing with language change is that it's never immediate and it's never absolute. The old rule and the new rule coexist, and will do for quite some time.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
tldr: No, he can't or won't give any examples.
Has anybody actually read the article in full? It's not his history. It's the university professor who teaches it in Australia. Get a grip people.
This was supposed to be my point in my previous post which was called out as tldr. I fell asleep writing it so it was a terribly-written post.
Bill's funding enables others to pursue these philanthropic things, then controversy abounds, and he goes on to something else, sometimes wreaking havoc.
on an aside, and off-topic, as of late, it seems that one cannot criticise things like common core without the sense that it's somehow taboo, or unpatriotic to have a different opinion than what's being extorted down via the education/funding whore-de-jour.
than allowing conservative propagandist rewrite the history books being sold to schools and taught in class.
Remember CONNECTIONS on PBS? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)? James Burke did a good job of tying the flow of world into a unified story.
Say, why not get him and Will Smith together, new math and new history, who knew??
I think it;s a great idea. Context is essential to history. The parched, knothole view I got in high school was worthless. This big view is right on. Let's hope some revisionist scum do not try to make this into political ideology.
Except for the money, Gates seems to be staying out of the lesson planning.
He cannot do any worse than what these progressive professors are doing with their revisionist crap lesson plans.
It really doesn't matter. People who want to know history will seek it out; parents who want their children taught accurate history will do it themselves. Education in America has become a sick joke and an exercise in child abuse in grade school and a game of who can paint America in the worst light in the university setting.
I have not made up my mind about Bill Gates so, hey, its his money and he can spend it as he likes.
Bill Gates' monopolist practices, support for in utero infanticide, collaboration with Hollywood tyrants et al most assuredly IS EVIL! The smug, willful ignorance promoted by Windows is a mortal sin, which leads to the more overt, primitive behavior in Africa and SW Asia used to scare Good Little american paytriotards into line. The slaughter of ~53 million unborn human beings in this country , which Bill and Melinda Gate$ both support with the extortionate profits of Micro$atan should be quite a large enough "body count" for those who can't recognize evil until such gross effects manifest themselves. So much for the DIABOLIC "charity" of Bill Aspiring Antichrist Gate$.
Watch what Bill Gates watched and then make a decision and post a comment here. It is an amazing video and taught me a lot of things and came to the same conclusion as Bill Gates, that more people should watch this. Unfortunately for me it ended there, where Bill Gates has the resources to do exactly as he wished. History is not about dates and names, it is about relationships, stories and events.
I read the print version of this in the New York Times Magazine, from the Sunday print edition.
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: Hell No.
It's an overview systems course. Yes, it's boring memorizing dates, and change is better than the pablum that Texas approves for the US textbooks, but this is not better, just different.
You shall not pass!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Has anybody actually read the article in full? It's not his history. It's the university professor who teaches it in Australia. Get a grip people.
I read the full article in the New York Times Magazine insert in the Sunday print edition of the New York Times.
Does that count?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Let's get back to the topic - history. From what I've read, Gates is not writing history but supporting a legitimate history teacher who observed that "The Rise of the West" by William McNeall is an inspirational read - as well as a stellar work of scholarship. The idea here is that teaching history should inspire students so that they take the skills and tools they acquire in school and go out and make a difference in life, business and society. If we burden curriculum with committee-consensus baggage and politically-correct reticence regarding what makes great civilizations great, the student will turn to Anime and fantasy literature for inspiration.They will be inspired but have nothing to apply in real life. Three cheers for Gates. (BTW, I hate his software and try not to use it - although the new era at Apple may soon drive me back to the Microsoft fold. Gates earns this thumbs up by making the right call.)
http://bookzz.org/ free ebooks Arrrr matey!
I really hate how people, fantastically successful at one task/job, suddenly decide they're superior and all-knowing in all areas.
"Oh yes, I made billions making and selling on operating system. So naturally I'm a genius in history education"
"Oh yes, I was a big hit modelling naked and being on a talk show, so naturally I can pontificate on how immunizations cause autism"
"Oh yes, I'm a big star of screen and film, and they pay me millions to act. So naturally, my political views are unimpeachable"
chronozoom.org big history web visualization. UC Berkeley, Moscow State U, U Washington and Microsoft Research. Open source , but heavy Silverlight usage. (Supposed to be html 5, but they need help.) Voluneers, please help. If this has already been mentioned, sorry, I couldn't stand to read the comments.