What Japanese history lessons leave out - a BBC article

Originally Posted by Stealhead

I also heard that the dogs did not know what tank to attack of course so they where just as likely to run under a Soviet tank as a German tank.

I've read that it wasn't so much they didn't know what tanks to go under, but that they were trained with Russian tanks which ran on diesel rather then German tanks which ran on Gasoline, so following their training they went after the Russian tanks.

[keysersoze]

Originally Posted by Hottentot

Aye, that's another very important point which I failed to mention earlier. But now that you brought it up, it also leads us to another problem relating to the students. Seeing that an average person (at least in here) is between 11 - 18 years old when he or she studies history, it sets some limitations for this goal.

I don't want to underestimate young people, but when they have gazillions of other school subjects to study every day in addition to history, it puts a strain on them, even more so than on adults. I can imagine (and remember from my own days at school) how enticing it becomes for them too to just think of history as a linear progression. And it doesn't help that historiography itself aims to answer questions relevant to its own era, thus writing certain kind of history for each generation.

It's also problematic to "erase" the knowledge they already have in order to understand why something happened in the past. "Why did a caveman go fishing on a lake where there was no fish" is a dumb question unless they first realize that the caveman did not know there was no fish in there. Likewise "Why did Gavrilo Princip shoot Franz Ferdinand when it led to the First World War" is a silly question. But since we already know what happened and see history as a linear progression, these questions happen.

I could probably also rant about questions like "why did the First World War start" in the first place: yeah, and right after answering that we are going to solve the starvation problems in the world and cure AIDS.

Good points all. The issues you raised indicate just how difficult it can be to teach history in a way that is simultaneously non-linear, inclusive to different historiographical traditions, and, above all, interesting. The best history teachers I've ever had were great because they were storytellers. Their "lectures" were essentially passionately-told stories, and their enthusiasm and ability to transport an audience into someone else's circumstance restored uncertainty/contingency to the past and made their classes a joy to attend.

Understanding, or at least attempting to understand, causation is another important issue that points to the need for more emphasis on critical thinking. At its heart, it's the causation vs. correlation epistemological problem raised by David Hume. I think you're right about the strains of a middle school and high school education, so I'm not saying it would be realistic for every teacher to assign An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. But, in a simpler sense, I think it's important to "teach the controversy" when dealing with issues like causation. That is, to dive into interpretational problems rather than pretending they don't exist in hopes of creating a more comfortable and more comprehensible narrative. This approach—"erasing" knowledge, as you rightly put it—can certainly create confusion: I remember a student once asking me "Why won't you just tell us what happened?" At the same time, training students to think critically about the past at least equips them with the tools for continued learning. They might not remember the niceties of Bismarck's role in German unification, but they will at least have the skills to read and learn with a healthy dose of historical skepticism in the future.

[Hottentot]

Originally Posted by keysersoze

The best history teachers I've ever had were great because they were storytellers. Their "lectures" were essentially passionately-told stories, and their enthusiasm and ability to transport an audience into someone else's circumstance restored uncertainty/contingency to the past and made their classes a joy to attend.

I personally have loved teaching the junior high school students the most precisely because I try to be a teacher like that. They are still "child" enough to get into the story and work things out with their imagination. And they still know how to play. I know that when I'm planning classes for them, I can make exercises where we act, move around and somehow make abstract phenomena of history like the inflation more concrete by first demonstrating what it means in practise and everyday life and then seeing what kind of impact it had on the subject we are studying.

I can do this because I know they will play along. I can do this because I can hear them laughing when the exercise is going on. They still know how to learn and have fun at the same time. High school is different. Perhaps not worse, but certainly different.

But, in a simpler sense, I think it's important to "teach the controversy" when dealing with issues like causation. That is, to dive into interpretational problems rather than pretending they don't exist in hopes of creating a more comfortable and more comprehensible narrative.

Precisely, and I'm fairly sure that if we asked this from the other teachers, most would agree. But we again meet the problem of what we want and what the society wants. We who study history in university can dedicate years for doing only that. The students who do it at school dedicate less years for doing that and lots of other things at the same time. The society doesn't want historians: it wants people who have a common idea of where we come from, who we are and what's important in our past. In short, the common reality for its citizens to live in.

At the same time, training students to think critically about the past at least equips them with the tools for continued learning. They might not remember the niceties of Bismarck's role in German unification, but they will at least have the skills to read and learn with a healthy dose of historical skepticism in the future.

Aye, this is definitely something worth hoping for. This somehow reminds me of the saying: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, but teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."