| Welcome to The New Coffee Room. We hope you enjoy your visit. You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free. Join our community! If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features: |
- Pages:
- 1
- 2
| Will Google change education? Should it? Has it? | |
|---|---|
| Tweet Topic Started: Dec 7 2011, 05:23 PM (542 Views) | |
| Horace | Dec 12 2011, 06:29 PM Post #26 |
|
HOLY CARP!!!
|
Oh, and just to clarify, I think it's awesome to find history fascinating - out of intellectual curiosity if nothing else. Personally I've always been interested by "great people" of history - for instance, back in college calculus, the most interesting parts of the textbook to me were in the margins where they had little biographical blurbs about the guys who originally came up with that stuff. I only dispute the idea that it's difficult or impossible to adequately conceptualize the world around you unless you "study history". (Whatever that means.) |
| As a good person, I implore you to do as I, a good person, do. Be good. Do NOT be bad. If you see bad, end bad. End it in yourself, and end it in others. By any means necessary, the good must conquer the bad. Good people know this. Do you know this? Are you good? | |
![]() |
|
| KlavierBauer | Dec 13 2011, 09:35 AM Post #27 |
![]()
HOLY CARP!!!
|
I've never studied history, save a class in 5th grade on U.S. History. That would definitely explain my warped and faulty worldview. |
|
"I realize you want him to touch you all over and give you babies, but his handling of the PR side really did screw the pooch." - Ivory Thumper "He said sleepily: "Don't worry mom, my dick is like hot logs in the morning." - Apple | |
![]() |
|
| Horace | Dec 13 2011, 12:23 PM Post #28 |
|
HOLY CARP!!!
|
Seems to me that the academic definition of history is almost inevitably going to be of little usefulness beyond academic interest (not that there's anything wrong with that). I mean everything's history from a broad perspective. But we pick the information content of history clean, categorize the important or conceivably important bits and create new disciplines out of them. Anybody who's ever studied any high school or undergrad or even graduate level math is studying stuff that was created well before they were born. But they're not studying "history". They're studying math, because that's the category we've created for that particular historical information. The important political information one could draw from history we put into political science or civics classes. Study the history of dinosaurs, and you're an archaeologist. Study ancient cultures and now you're an anthropologist. Seems like what's left for "history" is a scrap heap of historical factoids. Which might be interesting to many and god bless them but I find it real hard to swallow that a large diet of it (again, whatever "it" is) is necessary to be a functionally intelligent human being. |
| As a good person, I implore you to do as I, a good person, do. Be good. Do NOT be bad. If you see bad, end bad. End it in yourself, and end it in others. By any means necessary, the good must conquer the bad. Good people know this. Do you know this? Are you good? | |
![]() |
|
| ivorythumper | Dec 13 2011, 02:32 PM Post #29 |
|
I am so adjective that I verb nouns!
|
I think that would make you a paleontologist. I think that would make you an archaeologist. Anthropology is the general study of the human community/ cultures/ including existing ones. Depends. As you noted, everything's history from a broad perspective. You know not to touch a hot iron because of what history teaches us -- the question of cause and effect. The classical sense of ἱστορία (history) is what is known through investigation of facts (it was an epistemological term). The modern sense of history is to provide a coherent narrative to understand our past, and therefore our present circumstances. These are not mere historical factoids, but contextualized within the consciousness of the era to give understanding of how people in the past acted, and to give insight into what continues in the human experience and what has changed. Without a reading of history, we are doomed to absolutizing our present condition and susceptible to causing massive problems through not learning from the past. |
| The dogma lives loudly within me. | |
![]() |
|
| Horace | Dec 13 2011, 07:17 PM Post #30 |
|
HOLY CARP!!!
|
We don't read history books to know not to touch a stove. My point is about the alleged indispensability of those history books to individuals in their daily lives. It sounds good and people nod prettily when they hear that they're necessary to be a well rounded intelligent human being, but lacking examples to the contrary I find that difficult to swallow. But I do know how impressed people tend to be by those who throw around historical references. It always makes me shake my head inside. It's a proxy for intelligence to many, and a ridiculous one. It takes as much intelligence as throwing around references to the lord of the rings or star wars. People's interests are their interests, and if they concentrate on it long enough, they'll think in those terms. Reminds me of George Costanza fantasizing about being a "civil war buff". It sounds so cool, and smart. But I don't think it comes out in the wash in any meaningful way. |
| As a good person, I implore you to do as I, a good person, do. Be good. Do NOT be bad. If you see bad, end bad. End it in yourself, and end it in others. By any means necessary, the good must conquer the bad. Good people know this. Do you know this? Are you good? | |
![]() |
|
| ivorythumper | Dec 14 2011, 04:17 AM Post #31 |
|
I am so adjective that I verb nouns!
|
You missed my point -- it is the same mental practice -- you are confusing "reading" history with "doing history". If you argument is about book knowledge, then I don't understand your concern. We read (and evaluate) the works of professional historians according to the same sort of criteria that we do for professional scientists or professional accountants : how well do they present a coherent and meaningful explanation of their data? We rely on historians to help us understand the cause and effects of ideas and events in the development of human society, contextualized in the contemporaneous cultural contingencies of their respective ages. It would be hard to consider someone "to be a well rounded intelligent human being" if they could not identify the basic outline of world history -- whether the Pharaohs were ancient or modern, who was Julius Caesar, when the Gothic cathedrals were built, what changes the Enlightenment brought, how the Industrial Revolution changed the way we live, the causes and geography of WW1 and WW2, etc. Similarly, it would be hard to consider someone "to be a well rounded intelligent human being" if they could not identity the periodic table of elements, did not know the difference between bone and cartilage, was unable to identify jazz from baroque music, did not know which continent Nepal was on, did not know how to multiple or divide, could not tell the difference between Hemingway and Shakespeare. These are all part of basic cultural literacy -- I don't get your particular animus to "history" -- folks throw around all sorts of knowledge that is meaningful to them -- is it a proxy for intelligence that you toss around mathematics or statistical thinking? In short, why denigrate the interest of others based on "alleged indispensability ... to individuals in their daily lives"? Your interests aren't necessarily any more dispensable or indispensable than anyone else's --- few of us really have matters of life and death in our professional work (doctors being a real exception). |
| The dogma lives loudly within me. | |
![]() |
|
|
|
| « Previous Topic · The New Coffee Room · Next Topic » |
- Pages:
- 1
- 2








4:47 PM Jul 10