Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

“You see that Xena Warrior Princess, she’s your favorite historical figure”

…and I thought I was bad at history. Or maybe we should be asking ourselves more about what history is? Why do we believe the history we were taught in school? Is there anything happening here apart from a speeding up of the story telling and chinese whispers?

Nokia blip prompts class action suit

“Such suits have proved difficult for investors to win.”

I don’t believe people actually consider this reasonable behaviour? Stockmarkets are partly about risk – if you don’t want to take risk go to a bank. Sure if theres wilful misleading going on thats a different story but for a company the size of Nokia there are enough analysts paying attention to what they’re up to to be able to point out anything that looks even vaguely like wilful misleading.

While I’m at it, the New Scientist was having another of those days:

Teenage lesbians have worst rates of smoking
Murder detectives must rethink maggot theory
Passover oil lamps pose risk to children
Parasite suspected in Alaska moose deaths
Concrete canoes float during contest in Oregon


Categories: Memories.

/ 2 Comments

2 comments

  1. strange_complex

    “You see that Xena Warrior Princess, she’s your favorite historical figure”

    …and I thought I was bad at history. Or maybe we should be asking ourselves more about what history is? Why do we believe the history we were taught in school? Is there anything happening here apart from a speeding up of the story telling and chinese whispers?

    Gosh, I’m depressed now… I’m rather glad they don’t seem to have asked about any Roman figures or events, as I don’t think I could bear to see the results!

    I actually thought it brought up (unintentionally) an interesting point about the line between historical ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’, though. Both King Arthur and Robin Hood _might_ have existed in some form, although they’ve obviously been heavily mythologised: so the people who believed in them might be right. This in itself demonstrates a more general point about history which the writer of the article doesn’t seem to recognise: viz, that we can never really ‘know’ the past and distinguish in black and white terms between the true and the false. In a very real sense, the past simply does not exist once it is over. We can only ever put forward interpretations of it from our perspective in the present which seem probable.

    That does include spotting the very strong probability that e.g. ‘Lord of the Rings’ is a fictional work, what with all the compelling evidence for it having been written by J.R.R. Tolkien from his own imaginings, submitted to a publisher for publication, etc., though! It’s just that with people like Robin Hood and King Arthur, this sort of evidence for the production of the story is lost in the mists of time, so the balance of probability (between fiction and ‘truth’) is less clear.

    I do agree that history is (or certainly has been) taught appallingly badly in schools, though. Children tend to simply be told facts and figures, without being helped to understand why we should want to know about our past, and how we can know anything about it. In theory, history teaching should offer all sorts of brilliant opportunities for showing children how to evaluate texts, images, artefacts, etc., and how to think logically and question assumptions (all of which are applicable to living in the present as well). But my experience of history at school was never like that.

    I have actually been looking in some detail at history teaching within the National Curriculum recently, in order to write a lecture on the communication of archaeology to the public. It all looks very worthy, with a lot of stuff about evaluating evidence, asking questions, etc: details are here. But I don’t know how much that translates into genuinely interesting and inspirational teaching in practice.

    Penny

    Reply
    • neilh

      When I was taught history it was a question of remembering dates and how people interacted with each other, none of which I cared about at all as a kid so it was all rather a waste of time as far as I was concerned.

      Of course, since then some context has been added, without the context it is just a set of names and numbers, so now I understand why some of these things are the way they are. I think one of the more important things, something that was never covered by my schooling, is what we can learn from history, from understanding why and how things happened.

      Reply

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