With increased attention being paid in mainstream media to the concept of “Big History,” we thought it would be appropriate to solicit the opinion of someone who works in the field of microhistory. Steven Bednarski, author of A Poisoned Past: The Life and Times of Margarida de Portu, a Fourteenth-Century Accused Poisoner, and an Associate Professor of History at St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo, provides the following thoughts on why Bill Gates is to history as Wikipedia is to Voltaire.
A recent New York Times article summarizes neatly Bill Gates’s move to push Big History into and onto American high school and college classrooms. While on the surface Big History may appear the salvation of historical teaching, and indeed has its place, in the long run it encourages facile, superficial knowledge.
About ten years ago, I was speaking with eminent Harvard historian Daniel Lord Smail on his new passion, so-called Deep History. Like me, Smail began his career reading medieval legal records from the south of France. When we spoke, he surprised me by proposing an almost complete shift away from such traditional, archive-based approaches to the past and toward something alien. Smail opined that traditional history had become too “micro,” too tied to written texts, that historians had lost track of the grand narrative, and that the result was a discipline far too shallow. To combat this he proposed a sweeping interdisciplinary approach that united paleohistory, the very origins of our species, to the recent past. This approach drew on his love of anthropology but married it to emerging ideas from neuroscience and neurobiology; it also incorporated exciting insights from archaeology, primate studies, linguistics, even genetics. In his On Deep History and the Brain, Smail eventually argued that moods, stimulants, and feelings, all neurological in nature, played a guiding role in shaping culture. In his more recent Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present, he and his collaborators discard individuals and events for cultural trends that span tens of thousands of years. They offer a chapter, for example, on the history of “goods,” writ large. It claims that sea shells collected and traded by early man in the Upper Paleolithic began a primitive system of currency but also “a system for communicating information about status and prestige as well as identity and belonging.” The result is that “The history of goods … is also a history that explores startlingly familiar patterns operating at different scales, a history that stretches over vast reaches of human time.” When Smail first spoke about all this to me, I was stunned.
In the course of the last decade, I have watched, nose firmly planted in ancient paper records, as ideas like Deep History, or the more popular Big History, took root in the United States. Today, Deep History has achieved impressive success in some intellectual circles, married as it is to sound scientific inquiry, though the majority of professional historians remain skeptical. In contrast, Big History, a more popularized attempt to frame all knowledge from the Big Bang to the Big Lebowski, is the real money maker.
Whereas Deep History conserves humans at the heart of history, and tells tales insightful to the human experience, Big History, according to one website, is “a framework for all knowledge.” More accurately, Big History traces the origin of the universe and explains how life evolved and where it is going. In this sense, it is about, to some extent, people, too. But not in the sense of actual history per se.
All other forms of history share the premise that the study of past people’s words, deeds, thoughts, etc., though often cast within a distant and strange landscape, lend insights to guide and inform our present condition. Most modern historians, those who reject Big History, anyway, would say that the study of the past is not so much about what happened and when, but why. In struggling with the whys of the past, we gain useful insights into our own issues. Big History, in contrast, tells how and why things happened: the universe exploded, the Earth formed, single-celled organisms emerged, bipeds appeared, hunter-gatherers began to organize, sedentary farming provoked new technologies, and so on. But the hows and whys of big history are superficial, observable, presumably knowable, and ultimately incontrovertible truths. This is very different from, say, trying to understand why most Germans voted for Hitler, or how and why attitudes toward disability morph over time, or how and why cultures structure and renegotiate gender identities. Those hows and whys are slippery, more difficult to see clearly, but, in the end, more informative guides to understand the world as most humans experience it. At the same time, their opacity and complexity renders them difficult to quantify. After all, how can you mark a student right or wrong on a true / false test about gender construction?
The enormous popularity of Big History, unlike Deep History, which remains relegated to academic discourse, is due to the enthusiastic personal support of Bill Gates, a lover of standardized testing. Gates’s philanthropic Foundation, closely connected to his attempt to reform history teaching, has, since 2000, spent over 200 million USD on the Common Core State Standards initiative. This initiative is currently in place in forty-six US states. Its aim is to allow policy makers to standardize and measure uniform curricular output in US schools, much as Microsoft would gauge quality control on a microchip production line.
Big History is not without virtue. At its best, it achieves what educators sometimes call knowledge integration. This is an important and worthwhile trend in pedagogy. It pushes students to make connections between and across curricula. It encourages them, for example, to consider how the lessons they learn in first-year economics apply to their upper-year course on social justice and how both inform a more holistic understanding of the problems presented by law makers in a legal studies course on the regulation of healthcare. In other words, knowledge integration fosters the idea that an informed mind reads between the lines and across the page, deconstructs problems, and connects the dots. On a fundamental level, this has been an underlying goal of human education since at least the Romans’ Seven Liberal Arts. Big History, done well, embraces the spirit of knowledge integration and its accompanying push for interdisciplinary collaboration between specialists.
But while knowledge integration and interdisciplinarity are good for global citizenship, Big History falls short. For those of us who think about the teaching and learning of history, there is perhaps no greater modern guru than Stanford’s Sam Wineburg. Wineburg, when interviewed for the New York Times article, astutely underlined the glaring shortfall of Big History: its failure to impart a methodology. Simply put, Big History links cool ideas and purports to show how Creation, evolution, extinction, etc. led us to where we are today. But it fails to ask questions about why this matters, how we came to frame the question, what this says about our quest for knowledge and understanding, and so on. Good historical methodology is not so much interested in knowing what really happened in the past as it is with asking how we think we know what we know, and whether and why we care.
Historical methodology is, of course, a complex thing to teach but it is a foundation upon which critical thinking grows. It may be amusing or diverting to watch a YouTube video that connects the birth of the sun to the pyramids and then global warming, and people should contemplate such topics, but this is something other than history.
The goal of real history teaching is to inculcate in people historical reasoning, the ability to interpret past events and gain insights from them. To do this, though, students must understand past events, struggle with continuity and change over time, seize that there are different ways to view the past, assess their merits and pitfalls, interpret evidence appropriately, make connections, grapple with causation and motivation, and incorporate modern debates. It is insufficient for Big History lecturers to offer a “complete history of cosmology, starting with the ancient God-centred view of the universe and proceeding through Ptolemy’s Earth-based model … and eventually arriving at Hubble’s idea of an expanding universe.” This sort of chronicling is readily available, say, on Wikipedia. Real historians would begin with the sources that teach us about a God-centred view of the universe, interrogate them, ask how and why they were produced, and attempt to discern what this tells us. When such historians came to Ptolemy, concepts of Greek sexual and political organization necessarily informed his systemic worldview, and they would very likely ask students to struggle with such issues.
When a Big History supporting principal of a Brooklyn high school claims that “many progressive social-studies teachers would tell you that World History is a completely flawed course [… and that …] Kids don’t come out of it really having a sense of global history,” she completely misses the point of historical education. “Kids” do not need to master global history in grade ten. They need to be exposed to themes, documents, and interpretations. They need to spark their awareness that their personal stories are connected to every other human being’s, and to develop a hunger to make sense of it all. Real history teaching is not about mastering facts. It is a lifelong journey, a quest for meaning. While Big History may, on the surface, provide a facile nod in the direction of connecting all knowledge, it lacks the necessary complexity to shine true light on the human condition. For that, there are no shortcuts.
So why the appeal of Big History among policy makers? The answer is startlingly simple. Big History conforms to dominant capitalist, corporate ideals. It reduces complex, critical thinking to objective right-or-wrong answers. Through its prioritization of big questions (the Big Bang, evolution, the formation of the Earth’s crust, etc.) it indirectly implies opprobrium for matters of less than cosmic consequence. How can events that unfolded over fifty years be as significant as those that took millions? What better way to eliminate, say, the rise of universal suffrage, the formation of the labour movement, or the quest for gay rights from high school and university conversations? Big History’s erosion of deeper thought and the careful pre-selection of topics, questions, and answers all restrict shockingly the life of the mind. While they may serve corporate agendas in that they churn out compliant workers, they also undermine democracy and, thus, pose a real threat to personal freedom and happiness.
It is no surprise, therefore, that US teachers have begun to appreciate the dangers of taking educational direction from a patron with no pedagogical (or historical) training. Recently, the American Federation of Teachers, a past recipient of millions of dollars of Gates funding, parted company with the billionaire. Canadian public schools have so far resisted Big History, though they, too, struggle with government imposed standardized testing. In the UK, where “state education is rapidly following the US model,” denouncement of Big History has also begun.
So now someone must explain to Bill Gates and to other would-be capitalist reformers of public education why Big History troubles so. It is because the sort of complex struggle that underpins actual learning resists easy quantification, eludes standardized testing, and, if done right, produces wonderful and unpredictable outcomes. These outcomes may be bad news for the corporate agenda, but they are essential for the human soul.
Steven Bednarski, St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo
