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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."
Oligarchs make history
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.
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No, he's just somebody that at least occasionally tries to improve the world instead of just commenting on other people's efforts.
If not, then why would it matter that a rich guy decides to teach people history?
So why is his wealth being held against him?
Because he chose to amass it, he chose the methods he used to amass it, he chose to keep much of it for himself, and he chooses how to invest the remainder.
A person can be judged by their actions, you know. And the judgment will affect the context in which further actions by that person should be judged. Why don't we let foxes into hen-houses?
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.
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.
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.
In this case, though, he's not wrong. History is too often taught as a series of snapshots of a given time. But you cannot understand the changes of borders in continental Europe without a deep understanding of geography -- you need to understand river systems as the "motorways", and the shift of river systems to being seen as "defensible borders". It's this whole system that leads to the dissatisfaction with cross-border ethnic groups like the Basques and the Catalans. The France-Spain border is now defined by mountains, but when travel by sea was quicker than travel by land, a mountain range was inconsequential to a people with good access to coastlines. And just try to consider Caesar's campaigns and the differences between transalpine and cisalpine Gaul without understanding the Alps and the Massif Central.
This is not Gates's history class, it's a university professor's history class.
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You are better off reading the Baroque Cycle. It's much more entertaining and even partially correct.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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
I don't think you can call someone who got a perfect score on their SAT an utter moron. Misguided, or confused perhaps, but he's surely got some intelligence.
That's beside the point though, if you had the money, how would you use it philanthropically to make the world a better place?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I don't think you can call someone who got a perfect score on their SAT an utter moron
Bill Gates did not get a perfect SAT score. He got a very good one, 1590 out of 1600, but not perfect. Being a billionaire does not entitle you to score inflation.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Gates has transferred billions from the coffers of large corporations, by way of IT products, to charitable programs that directly save lives, and improve the standard of living in the 3rd world. This is bad again why?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
How do you define wisdom?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
My personal point of view is that high school history was full of dates and names and difficult for me to memorize. I did not find it interesting, even though on paper my teacher was a published author and one might assume was doing a fine job teaching. Fast forward to my adult life and I have found many sources of interesting historical accounts and am more interested in history now than I ever was. The interplay of different events on different parts of the world is fascinating.
This.
What is important is that historical event A caused historical event B, which lead to historical event C. Not whether event A happened in 1674, 1675 or 1676.
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Because the economic damages caused by his actions are probably orders of magnitude greater than his philanthropic effort, which has been questioned regarding their efficacy, negative impact, and neutrality. Kind of mirrors Rockefeller.
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Up until students reach about 12 years of age the requirements for their teachers are pretty trivial; the supply of potential elementary school teachers far exceeds the demand. Hence fairly low pay,
Resources? Don't be funny. Keeping a schoolroom warm (or cool in Florida) costs more than a chalkboard and a couple of hundred public domain texts.
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Really? Evil? I don't buy it one bit. He sold a set of software products that companies wanted to buy. Products that were no fun to support, of course, or for geeks to use in many cases, but let's please not confuse "icky" with "evil".
Right now people are being beheaded in the middle east for the crime of minding their own business while having the wrong religion. That's Evil. Something like 1300 girls we're allowed to be used as sex slaves - raped over and over for years - in a developed nation because of misguided notions of political correctness. That's evil. Windows ME was merely icky.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
What economic damages? I don't get it. Are you complaining that MS bought a lot of small software companies the way every large tech firm does? Are you complaining that MS products weren't as good as you'd have liked (compared to what? IBMs offerings at the time? please).
I've never understood the burning MS hatred on Slashdot. Yes, MS had a lot of second-rate products, but so do most companies in the world!
People will complain about anything, but it pisses me off to see people who likely give nothing at all to charity complaining that someone who does isn't doing it the way they would.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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?
I actually found that quite good. They're kind of teaching Algebra in a way.
Really? Evil? I don't buy it one bit. He sold a set of software products that companies wanted to buy. Products that were no fun to support, of course, or for geeks to use in many cases, but let's please not confuse "icky" with "evil".
"Evil" is probably too strong, but Microsoft's misdeeds were considerably worse than merely making products that were less than ideal. Microsoft engaged in some pretty shady business practices which were clearly detrimental to the competitive landscape, harming consumers not just by providing inferior products but by actively preventing better products from being able to reach them.
The most serious of these actions was in the agreements they made OEMs sign in order to sell machines with Windows (and before that, DOS). Because the MS OSes were dominant, OEMs had to have access to their products, so Microsoft leveraged that by requiring OEMs to sign exclusivity agreements guaranteeing that the OEMs would not offer for sale PCs with any competing software. This is the abuse that the anti-trust trial really should have focused on, not the browser wars.
There were many other examples, though. Lots of cases in which Microsoft abused their OS dominance to prevent competitive apps from running well, stabbed business partners in the back, made moves to suppress useful new technologies until they could get around to making their own (generally inferior) version, etc. Largely, this was just business as usual for an aggressive and not particularly moral company, but given Microsoft's commanding position much of it really crossed the line.
And, of course, there's the fact that when Microsoft got hauled into court and ultimately signed a consent decree agreeing to limit certain anti-competitive behaviors, they just ignored the decree.
I could go on, but it doesn't matter. All of that is in the past, because Microsoft, while still very powerful, is no longer in a position to be as dangerous as they were, and the company does seem to have mellowed and become a somewhat better corporate citizen as well.
But they definitely were much worse than what you describe, though clearly not evil on the scale of ISIS.
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Had we not learned from history, would we have the nation that we have today? Had we not learned from history, would we not have the sciences, art, and great works of this day? All of our greatest accomplishments in time have been based on an event, person or persons in history. History, whether you like it or not, makes us the people we are today. Should we forget about the wars our nations fought? Should we forget about the civil advancements of our past generations?
That's beside the point though, if you had the money, how would you use it philanthropically to make the world a better place?
Grants to existing scholars, scientists and researchers in their fields who are making actual scientific progress, instead of making their lives more difficult by founding some hot shot idea you found interesting.
Someone as allegedly smart as Gates, who spent all his life in a company whose success is first and foremost based on marketing and manipulation of perception could be expected to understand that if you read, hear or watch someone telling his great idea and you're fascinated with it afterwards, you can be sure that you have seen a good sales man, but you have no clue whether or not you've seen a good idea.
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