Unlocking history

History ranks right up there with economics on the list of subjects most people are happiest to have permanently dispensed with upon graduating college. History classes seem like nothing more than a dismal cataloguing. I sure felt that way in school. Santayana’s maxim was a bad joke. What historical mistakes were there to learn from? All we had were names and dates.

It’s a shame so many people believe history ends with what gets taught in school. Students aren’t exactly wrong for thinking history boring. School history is boring. I doubt there’s any way they can make it interesting.

I became enthusiastic about history accidentally. My dad knew I like Russian novels, so he suggested I read Robert Massie’s biography of Peter the Great. When I finally picked it up, it fascinated me and led to all sorts of questions. The books I picked up to answer those questions led to other questions. And so forth.

Now the school subject that bored me more than any other is all I want to read about. I’ve been at it for a while, and there’s no end in sight. My reading list is long, and I can’t imagine ever being without new questions that I need answered.

So how is it that my interests should change so dramatically in so little time? If history went from a pain to a passion in only five months after graduation, that suggests the fault lay with the school rather than the student.

The problem is that schools take history and try to enforce too much of a structure on it. You sign up for a class that’s going to cover European history from 1750 to 1900. They cut the subject into discrete (and arbitrary) units, then give them to you piece by piece. I doubt this is the best way to learn anything, and I’m certain it’s not the best way to learn history.

Proper history isn’t a cataloguing of events, but rather a pulling of threads. Interesting details are tugged at until some relevant truth is discovered. To do this, you need time and freedom—two things school rarely allows you. 

You need time to find interesting details and the freedom to follow them wherever you see them leading. The broad scope of events is usually too abstract to be of much interest. In school you learn that Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg and began modernizing Russia. Big deal. But did you know that after the Streltsy revolt he personally oversaw the torture and execution of thousands of men formerly loyal to the tsar and even got up in their faces screaming “Confess!” ?

Suddenly 17th-century Russia seems like a place worth reading about. The details bring it to life. But schools can’t allow the time for learning details about one ruler in one country. In the interest of being balanced and unbiased, they try to present everything. The result is that they teach almost nothing. Piquant details are what excite us and stick with us, and we get very few of them in classrooms.

The freedom to follow your own interests is an even more important part of learning history. In a history class, the instructor has already decided what will be taught—has decided, in short, what you need to know. But in most cases it’s the curious student who knows best what he needs next.

The Russian Revolution and the Weimar Republic may have followed World War I, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily need to read about those things directly following your study of the War. Maybe what you really need to read is a biography of Jack Fisher. Or maybe what would really strike your fancy is learning about Japan’s post-war acquisitions in the Central Pacific. It may well be that something totally outside the scope of your class is what would best help you personally understand the things you just studied.

Trying to conform historical study to linear structures of geography and chronology is silly and unnatural. No one sits around remembering things in chronological order. I think about the trip I made to DC when I was 13, then I remember my high-school friend’s story about riding the DC subway when he was five, then I remember my first plane ride when I was six. Memory isn’t a line, but a web.

So too is a web the only sensible model for learning history. Say you just finished reading something interesting about the Russian Revolution. Maybe you’re less interested in learning what happens next in Russia than you are in learning about revolutions in general. You now read about the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Revolutions of 1848, the Indian independence movement. By not following a carefully prescribed chronological path, you’re certainly skipping over things. But by following your genuine enthusiasm, you’re going to retain more of what you read and be the wiser for it.

I can’t imagine any school that would allow such truly independent study. In fact, with study that independent, the need for the school would cease to exist. A library would be better. If instead of saying to kids, “Here’s what happened in 1776,” we said to them, “Find one history or biography that sounds interesting and then follow up on the questions it raises,” we’d probably end up with far more historically literate people. And that literacy would give us more perspective as a society. 

People learn the most when they teach themselves. I think all we need to do to get kids interested in history is help them find one historical work (from any time and any place) that truly excites them. If they have any intellectual curiosity, they’re bound to seek other good books to put the first one in context. Eventually the past will fall into place. The route they take may be circuitous, but the web they build should in the end be tight enough to catch the important stuff.