Who is teaching history, today?

[fuzzybuddy]

I'm 73. That's 73 years oF history , which I have lived through. A lot of things happened during that time. But it all may be forgotten. A workman was at my home, yesterday. I mentioned that my dad was in the Navy, in WWII, and his ship was almost sunk by a kamikaze. He shook his head, " I don't know history". YOU don't know about WWII? He wasn't kidding. Who is teaching history, today? The past is what shapes your present. I was totally blown away.

 

[Mike]

They stopped teaching history here for a short time
till somebody came to their senses when they heard
from a child that Winston Churchill was a terrorist who
raided the European mainland and also that the Holocaust
was just a rumour.

I used to do tour guide in Scotland when I was young and
if I didn't know any history, then I was in the wrong job.

Without history, the mistakes of the past are not known and
they will be repeated all over again.

Mike.

 

[Pepper]

Maybe the workman just wasn't paying attention when his classmates were learning.

 

[Warrigal]

I absorbed very little history when I was at school. It was poorly taught without much in the way of resources. In the end I dropped it to take up an additional foreign language.

However, since then I have absorbed a lot of history, not only of Australia but also of other countries. Movies stimulated my interest first, then television and now I have the internet that I can use to self educate. In most people ignorance is a choice we make. I choose not to learn much about sports but I do find the past quite interesting. I'm still learning things.

When I was teaching maths, science and computing studies I always included some history because it is hard to appreciate the present without some knowledge of the past.

 

[jerry old]

Peculiar that history, which can be made into a interesting, riveting(?) presentation was so dull...
I know the teachers had a desire to make their classes interesting, didn't they? Were they all dullards, or burnt out after a few years-which?
It had to be something we were not aware of, administration, what?

 

[Pecos]

My son teaches History in a small High School in Washington State. The text books they use these days are drastically different from what we had back in the 1950's. I found that the one he was using was excellent and that the way it was organized made things more "relatable." Grouping topics like agriculture (religion, weather, etc) and relating them to politics, commerce, the movement of peoples, as well as the historical timeline kept my attention.
The books I had to use were simple, boring timelines of political events and did not explore what was happening to the real things that were affecting people on a daily basis.