{"id":62392,"date":"2023-08-04T01:00:05","date_gmt":"2023-08-04T05:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=62392"},"modified":"2023-08-03T09:18:22","modified_gmt":"2023-08-03T13:18:22","slug":"qotd-the-knowledge-base-problem-in-teaching-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2023\/08\/04\/qotd-the-knowledge-base-problem-in-teaching-history\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The “knowledge base” problem in teaching history"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Knowledge base<\/strong>. This is both over- and under-supplied in the Biz [teaching history]. If one were inclined to make efforts to remain humble, History is a good place to start, because a) it’s accessible to all, which means b) a lot of your “students” know a LOT more, about a lot more things, than you do. […]<\/p>\n

The point is this: Even if I were an expert in that particular field (I’m not; as with Sovietology, I’m a gentleman amateur), there are zillions of people who know more of the details than I do. It seems like half the Internet can reel off, from memory, the entire command structure of the 6th Volksgrenadier<\/em> regiment. Teach a “Modern Europe” class, and you’re guaranteed to have at least one of them among the studentry. Knowledge, in that sense, is over-supplied.<\/p>\n

It’s over-supplied in another way, too. There have been tremendous recent advances in the study of, say, the Roman Empire. Computer modeling of seed-distribution patterns and asdzlsjdfjkha … sorry, my head hit the keyboard, I can’t stay awake for this stuff, but I’m sure glad someone<\/em> can, because it’s important. As I understand it, there have been revolutions even in older fields like numismatics and epigraphy \u2014 you can learn a lot from coins and inscriptions, and they’re changing our understanding of some fundamental stuff (see e.g. Roman coins in Japan<\/a>).<\/p>\n

But knowledge is also under-supplied, especially from the teachers’ side. Not just “knowledge of human nature”, above, though of course that’s a biggie. Here’s a far from exhaustive list of what I was NOT taught in graduate school:<\/p>\n