Ignorence in history

[VoodooDali]

Originally posted by HighLordDave
Having read Non Campus Mentis, I am happy to report that Henriksson's examples are the absolute worst of what he collected, and for every person who claims that "John, Paul, George and Ringo" are the four gospels, there were probably a hundred students who could get it right. If you have $12.95 (USD) lying around and want a good laugh, I highly recommend this book.

I now proclaim the Gospel of John, Paul, George and Ringo.

[HighLordDave]

In the United States, the deck is stacked against history. One of the standardised tests commonly used for admission is the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) which measures math and english (reading comprehension, vocabulary, analogies, etc.) skills. The other major test, the ACT (American College Testing) measures math, english and analytical aptitude.

Neither takes into account the social sciences in their scores. Even the major graduate-level tests (GMAT, GRE, LSAT, etc.) emphasise math and english.*

Part of the problem over here is that many people grow up hating history. Often this is because they've had several bad history teachers (whose first names are often "Coach") who teaches history as a bunch of names and dates to be memorised. I had a professor in college who liked to quote R. G. Collingwook and say "Anything that can be memorised is not history".

While knowing names and dates is often helpful, anyone can look up the minutia; that's what textbooks are for. What's important about history is that students understand how different events lead to others and the relationships between individuals and groups over time.

*The GRE (Graduate Records Exam) has subject tests which measure aptitude in the various disciplines and are separate from the main test, but even these are not necessarily accurate. For instance, about 90% of the GRE History test is American and western European history. If someone has a specialisation in any other area of history, they will do poorly on the GRE subject test. I found this out my senior when a bunch of us were sitting around with some of the professors and many of them confessed that they had taken the history subject test sometime in the recent past and almost all of them scored in the 40th percentile or lower.

[fable]

It's odd, but I think the "historical sense" of the average American isn't much different from that of the average Western European during the latter Middle Ages. All things "foriegn" are automatically perceived in local cultural terms, and this is exploited by politicians and divisive religious leaders to use on their respective communities.

I have no reason for saying the above save my personal experiences, but they're pretty extensive. If you look at some of the biblical paintings of the Middle Ages, you'll see patriarchs and prophets dressed in then-modern clothes. The warriors accompanying Christ and his cross are modern pikemen; the cities shown in the background are Genoa, Dresden, etc.

Perhaps the most blatant example of a modern equivalent (and I know this isn't typical, but it's kind of amusing), was a post I saw once on the Simutronics bulletin board when I was working as a GM for 'em in their text-based multiplayer fantasy RPG, DragonRealms. A player was excoriating us for not being historically realistic. Why don't we put shopping malls with multiple blacksmiths, and department stores, he wrote, in our different cities?

We know better, but quite a lot of people out there truly don't. And rather scarily, they only way they amend their opinions of a very "present" seeming distant past, is through fictional films. Hardly a source of well-researched facts.