The problem with that system might be the appearance of more determinism than can really be sustained logically.

Time's arrow points in one direction, Becks.

I dunno, Memento was pretty confusing.

If you run the tape backwards, it looks like the cops are helping Rodney King up, and sending him on his way.

Repeatedly.

The Civil War was a reaction to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

by the time kids are in high school, they've already had a couple of U.S. history courses so they should have an idea of where they're eventually headed.

Your primary education was better than mine, Becks.

Interesting idea though, especially considering I never learned any history past WWII in any of my public schooling. (Viet-what??)

I've thought about doing this for a phd seminar. We understand the classics in our fields mostly through the lens of current debates. Once you read them, though, they often don't say what people generally attribute them.

I don't think that would acceptable to a lot of noisy parents and no-nothing types, because if my high school was any guide they'd only make it to about 1839 before the term was over. And the kids would learn about The! Founding! Fathers!

9: IME, 1839 s/b 1939. At best.

Plus the noisy parents would be noisier regarding how more contemporary events are being taught. Sounds like hell for a HS teacher.

I think it was in "Confederates in the Attic" where the author was at some school districts in Georgia where they didn't even have the Civil War on the curriculum, because the teachers got so much grief from parents on how it was taught that they just gave up.

I think JM's right. This system would paradoxically lead to more and less appearance of determinism in history.

There would seem like there's more determinism because every unit would be taught before its historical roots, so the teachers would be tempted to assume later teachings and treat the existant march of history as inevitable. As the current curriculum mirrors the actual path of causality, it allows past developments to be mentioned and in-depth reasons why they were not the total explanation. It allows for coincidence and dumb luck (essential parts of history).

At the same time, if kids without a good historical perspective don't automatically trust the teacher's handwave in the direction of causality from earlier events that have not yet been covered, everything will appear to happen in a historical vacuum in this curriculum, which is certainly undesirable.

Also, Memento totally was confusing.

I think the "backwards" approach works okay if it's premised on people who have some grasp of current events, but no idea where they came from.

(I'm actually okay with a bit of determinism in a high-school class -- it beats history as One Damn Thing After Another.)

However, I doubt many students have much clue about today's world any more than about the Middle Ages, so I doubt the backwards approach is really helping that much.

Sounds like the kind of teacher who thinks he's a brilliant pedagogue b/c he has the kids put their desks in a circle.

"If the cause be known only be the effect, we never ought to ascribe to it any qualities, beyond what are precisely requisite to produce the effect: Nor can we, by any rules of just reasoning, return back from the cause, and infer other effects from it, beyond those by which alone it is known to us."

I think an art history course in reverse, something that focused on formal developments, might explain a lot about art that people typically write off as old/boring/of Jesus. Look, everything gets prettier!

I should pitch this book.

Susan's point about parents being more nosy about current events would be a big problem. This very good book about how history is taught in US schools said that a lot of the "oops! we didn't get past WWI!" is intentional because teaching modern history is too controversial.

I'm going to agree with JM above: the dangers of Whig history in such a scenario would not only be difficult to avoid, they'd damn near be written into the script.

I'm not sure backwards make sense, but you could probably use a bit of "in medias res" to bring in current events, and if you do it chronogolically schools should damn well time their curricula so that you reach the present day.

I know the schools have been under assault for generations by the right, but I'm amazed to here about history not being taught beyond WWII even now.

I was in HS in the mid-to-late sixties, and a student teacher taught a section on Vietnam, in an "alternative history" style. Not some hippy, very clean-cut ordinary guy, and in a conservative suburban HS, too. Must have had regular teacher's approval, no repercussions that I heard about.

What I remember in retrospect was how right and obvious he was on the origins of the war; this was years before the Pentagon Papers came out. Just like now, the truth was fairly easy know.

oof. chronologically, I meant.

Not exactly hard to see why this is so outrageously controversial. Teaching history back-to-front avoids problems of bias in the same way that journalism does: We're not arguing disputed points abut causality, they can say. We're just saying what happened first, then what happened next, etc. If you teach it backwards, the lesson is a series of 'why's: This happened because this happened before, and that happened because of this other thing... It would be impossible to avoid offending everybody that way. So the alternative is to teach a constellation of facts without drawing any lines. How exciting.

Of course, it's also possible that he was a genuinely crappy teacher, but it does look like something more is going on.

I'm with Susan. We never covered anything past WWII -- it was on the syllabus, we just always ran out of time.

Kriston, do you really think that a reverse ARTH course would work? It seems to me like a lot of modern artistic movements cast themselves as specifically breaking from the past. I would think that the chain of causality would be harder to draw.

I think a reverse art history course at the graduate level could work very well. As much as the modernists claim to break with the past, they're still stealing whatever good idea they can find, and that includes stuff from the past, be it color schemes, techniques, installation, whatever.

The fact of the matter, though, is that transmission narratives ("so-and-so read or saw X., which is why he or she created Y., which is directly in response") are flipping difficult to substantiate.

Interesting idea though, especially considering I never learned any history past WWII in any of my public schooling. (Viet-what??)

Yes, same here.

We got to WWII once. I think every other time we ended in either the Hayes Administration ("Wasn't that three-month-long unit on the Civil War interesting? Hopefully your next teacher will take it from there and continue up to the present day. JK, you're going to start again with the Articles of Confederacy, lawlz.") or the very moment at which the 1929 stock market crash occurred.

Maybe we should start at the edges, and work our way in. "Today's class: the Reagan administration, and the Jamestown colony. Tomorrow is Nixon and the Boston Tea Party."

IDP, didn't you go to HS in Canada? Commonwealth countries had a much better approach to teaching history, as far as I've been able to tell. The rise and fall of the British Empire made teaching economics and global geography and stupid adventurism inherent to the curriculum. And of course Canada knew better than to follow the US into Vietnam.

27: Teaching the Iraq War along with manifest destiny and the Indian wars does make some sense.

My required high school US History class (public school) got all the way to Clinton.

23: Sure. You just read the Barr graph backward.

31: "Negro sculpture"?

Science is taught backwards, but that's because of the math. Proper order is physics, chemistry, biology, earth science, but in NY at least it's the reverse, because physics needs the most math and people haven't learned it yet. So you just do earth science and try to do ecology without knowing evolution, then you do biology without biochemistry, then you do chemistry without E&M.

Today they call it "primitivist"—it hasn't gotten much better.

33 is interesting. I hadn't thought of it that way.

I dunno, I think backwards history is going to solve at least as many problems as it creates. People whose critical thinking skills aren't well developed are going to draw dumb conclusions no matter what order you teach history in.

I think the main question should be which approach keeps the interest of the students better. That's the main problem most kinds have with history classes. It's just not interesting.

I don't think we did Vietnam in h.s., but we did do ancient China, pre-colonization Africa, and pre-colonization Americas. All in all, I'd rather have done those than Vietnam.

The schools don't teach Vietnam because one set or other of parents would freak the fuck out, depending on how it was taught. And it's unfortunate, because lord knows this country needs to have the lessons of Vietnam driven through our thick skulls like railroad spikes.

We made it to Vietnam in my high school. The period that usually got shafted was between about 1870 and the outbreak of WWI. I really have no idea what happened anywhere on the planet at that time.

I think it would make history too fatalistic to teach it as everything that's happened lead up to us sitting here in this class. And I have a get-off-my-lawn moment when the complaint is that history is so boring because the labor movement isn't interesting to 16-year-olds.

38: I'd rather have done any of those than go over American History 1760-1930 over and over again, too.

I could have taken an AP European history class at my high school, but it was designed to be the most incredibly hard class they had so that taking it would be a big prestige thing, so only like 20 people took it every year. No non-AP class.

Isn't part of the problem that we as a country don't agree about why history is being taught? Some folks think it is so that we can Look Up to the Founding Fathers, some folks think we should Draw Lessons to Apply to the Present Day, and still others have different goals.

Kind of tough to figure out teaching strategies when one person wants to run hurdles and another is practicing the long jump.

I think going forward in time is more natural. How about biographies? I think some start at the end but then jump back to the start and go forward. I don't remember any going consistently backward and I don't think that would work very well.

Also none of my history courses got anywhere near the present and like others I suspect this was intentional to avoid controversy.

At school we did history in a combination of roughly forward moving progressions (primary school), and also in thematic blocks (high school). Although the thematic blocks were generally centred on a particular episode in history.

So, The Industrial Revolution was a block, the Agragrian Revolution was another, and so on. I remember particularly enjoying the block on the Russian Revolution. Lots of revolutions, come to think of it....

The assumption by a number of commenters that large numbers of people have views on the contingency or lack thereof of history, and that the education system needs to be careful in forming that belief, strikes me as false.

The assumption by a number of commenters that large numbers of people have views on the contingency or lack thereof of history, and that the education system needs to be careful in forming that belief, strikes me as false.

I'm not sure it's an explicit belief as much as an unarticulated assumption. At least, that's the impression I get when I try to talk to people about why Current Event A is exacerbated by Historical Policy B.

For a recent example, see this ObWi thread, in which people's assumptions about which policies cause which immigration results are all over the map.

Science is taught backwards, but that's because of the math. Proper order is physics, chemistry, biology, earth science, but in NY at least it's the reverse, because physics needs the most math and people haven't learned it yet. So you just do earth science and try to do ecology without knowing evolution, then you do biology without biochemistry, then you do chemistry without E&M.

I don't think it's just about math. Physical intuition, while often flawed, is a very useful tool in science. Our intuitions develop to deal with large systems (ie. earth science). Better to ground the young student in an understanding of familiar systems before exploring the regions where their intuitions break down. Also, scientific discovery largely followed the "backwards" path, so why not teach it that way.

As, to histoty, I graduated high school in 1996 and my U.S. history class got all the way to the end of the cold war. Interestingly, for all the post WWII stuff, we had PBS style documentaries to follow. One each for Vietnam, the civil rights movement and the cold war.

I'd just be happy if American high schools taught history (in the vaguest of 'what happened when') sense at all, really. My high school was all let's focus on original documents and do deep analysis and stuff like that, without first making us get a solid timeline of the events were were talking about under our belts. Yes, memorizing dates seems pointless and stupid, but talking about history in the absence of some grasp of them (which is what it felt like we were doing) is really really pointless.

36 gets it right. Teaching cause and effect well depends on how, not what order, you teach it. I can picture a few of my acquaintances (okay, realtives) teaching back to forward something like this: The economic downturn at the beginning of this century resulted from the irresponsible economic policies of the Clinton administration. The economic boom and record surpluses of the Clinton presidency are all thanks to the success of the trickle down economics of Reagan, and so on back. (I'd try to go back beyond that, but my own historical education didn't get much beyond George Washington and the cherry tree.)

My HS had the bizarre policy of teaching US History in 2 halves in 10th & 11th grades (splitting at the Civil War). No required World History, and the class they offered was, as I recall, scattershot in approach (I didn't take it). But what made this system - which theoretically offered the benefit of getting kids past WW2 - was that AP US History was all taught in 1 year, so we *still* had to go back and do 1607-1865 again in the first 9 weeks. My teacher had done his grad work on the Progressive Era, so Cala, if you have any questions, just ask....

This is something that had a little traction - not a lot, but it was being talked about as a cool idea - when I was studying to be a math/social studies teacher way back. The main idea was that it would be easier to engage students if classes started now and dealt with explaining how we got where we are by where we were ten years ago, and why we were there then, and so on, etc. I would be very surprised to find that it was a new idea even fifteen years ago; I seem to recall my AP US History teacher talking about it when I was in that class, as something she wished she'd have the time to try some day.

The main criticisms were just that question of determinism but I will say that an interesting take I heard on it was that it would avoid the problem of History classes always being War History classes because the process of creating situations in which the students are always asking "why?" would in some ways potentially preclude getting bogged down in whose troops went where; actual explanations of policies and personalities are a lot more complex than "and then someone [not us*] fired the first shot at Fort Sumter so next week we're going to discuss troop movements during the Civil War."

I don't know that I buy that take on it but it was for some people a bit of brain-play aimed at dealing with a pretty serious problem with history as we currently teach it; most curricula end up teaching that policies happen because of wars, or at least that it seems that way, because every unit is on a war and every project is to build a model of a battlefield or something. Anything learned is about the analysis of specific conflicts and there's little time spent on the policies and politics that lead to conflict, something that might be more useful to them later in life when they're the voters and deciders and commander guys.

Truth told, 36 gets it right; it would likely solve as many problems as it creates from a purely pedagogical standpoint. However, the rest get it right, too; there are a lot of history teachers who are perfectly happy to round out the year on, "And that's why the Nazis were bad and we beat them." It's ten flavors of better compared to starting the year on why the 2000 election was contested and contentious. You cannot imagine the letters that would get written to the school board.

* For any given value of "us."

As a side note, if I remember correctly my AP US History class got as far as the 1980 presidential election. This was in 1991, so we got darned close. No other US or World History class I had in K-12 got farther than WWII.

I think that discussion thus far has focused too much on practical considerations - parents will hate it! - and not enough on the pedagological merits. I think it's a fucking brilliant idea.

First, you have to stipulate basic familiarity with the outlines. But really, is any kid who could possibly handle backwards history going to be unfamiliar with the outline of US History? Pilgrims, Revolution, Jacksonian Era, Civil War, Gilded Age/Progressive Era, WW1, Depression, WW2, Summer Vacation. I had learned that much by 5th grade.

But by going backwards, you engage the kids on Day One with Current events. Who knows why we're in Iraq? (OK, it's a trick question). And it's not like you go backwards step-by-step, with Nixon resigning and *then* the Watergate break-in. You cover stories, told more-or-less conventionally, then you move back up the causal arrow: Why is Cheney an evil fuck? He didn't like his experience of the weakened exec in the Ford Admin.

I'm not saying it's easy, or universally applicable. I'm saying that it teaches kids 2 things at once - specific facts about how we got here, and to look for deeper causes.

As for controversy, looking at it now, I don't see how any US History is taught. Unions? Indian Wars? FDR? None of these are settled issues. Obvs, they're mostly taught briefly in order to minimize controversy, but I could certainly imagine a fairly anodyne backwards history as well.

I adore that the Barr graph, published the year before Fallingwater was completed, shows no American influence whatsoever on Modern Architecture.

The MOMA people were such shits.

The period that usually got shafted was between about 1870 and the outbreak of WWI.

It was closed for lunch.

Mostly importantly what happened in that period was that the British and French and to a lesser extent other European countries annexed virtually the whole of Africa in the space of about 25 years from scratch.

And that's an embarrassing and painful topic -- there's really no reason to dwell on it, right?

No, it's mostly just that we weren't involved, so who cares?

Yeah, I remember the US dominion over the Philippines (our main contribution to OFE's description of that period) was a really weird part of my history class. As you can imagine, most people who want to live in small-town USA and be history teachers want to do it to explain why America is a force for good, or describe great men in military history, or both. My teacher sort of led us to believe that Emilio Aguinaldo was a great and brave man and would have been a great leader if he could just get over his inexplicable and simple-minded distrust of the US.

53

"First, you have to stipulate basic familiarity with the outlines. But really, is any kid who could possibly handle backwards history going to be unfamiliar with the outline of US History? Pilgrims, Revolution, Jacksonian Era, Civil War, Gilded Age/Progressive Era, WW1, Depression, WW2, Summer Vacation. I had learned that much by 5th grade."

Well my memory of my public school history courses is that they started and ended with the pilgrams. This is probably not accurate but assuming basic knowledge of the gilded age for example seems quite optimistic.

Longworth employs an interesting device to recount the history of Eastern Europe: He tells the story backwards. Beginning with the post-Stalin period, he considers the growth, then the decline, then the fall of the system, concluding with a set of questions: How much of contemporary Eastern Europe, particularly its troubles, comes from the Soviet legacy? Did Stalin intend from the beginning to make the region over in his image? How much of what happened after 1944 depended on the war? This leads to an exploration of the 1944-53 period and more questions. Without the war, he argues, the Soviet Union could not have subjugated Eastern Europe, "and there may well have been no war had the situation in Eastern Europe in the 1930s not invited Nazi aggression." But why was this so? Why had the region become a "strategic vacuum?" Why had the promise of 1918 dissolved? Why had democracy failed? Why had nationalism gone bad? After the chapter dealing with 1918 to 1944 comes the next barrel of the reverse telescope, the nineteenth century and the "roots of the [interwar] failure." For it was, he argues, during the period after 1848 when the peoples of Eastern Europe developed their passionate and divisive sense of nationality, the burden of rural overpopulation grew, and the region "failed to meet the challenge of the new, industrial age." And so on, back to the fourth century.

I know no one cares, but Longworth's book is actually pretty good as a general introduction for people not in classes on the subject (which is how I read it).

I know no one cares, but Longworth's book is actually pretty good

It's true I'm not particularly interested in Eastern European history, but I am glad to have one concrete recommendation out of this thread. Obviously it's possible to talk about history "backwards," but it's useful to have an actual example to draw on.

Thanks. I'd actually try to contribute something to the rest of the discussion but the combination of a cold and probably-squirrels-and-maybe-other-animals-crawling-in-and-scratching-at-the-walls-at-early-morning-hours-induced sleep deprivation means I'm going to try to sleep now. I hate this house.

Not that you asked, but do you have a fan? White noise is really helpful for obliterating those disturbing rodent noises.

I might try that out now that it's warmed up (mostly).

Actual teaching plan.