Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone) - REVIEW

by Sam Wineburg

Let’s start with two truths about our era that are so inescapable as to have become clichés: We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percentage of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive. All of it is pernicious.

With the internet always at our fingertips, what’s a teacher of history  to do? Sam Wineburg has answers, beginning with this: We definitely can’t stick to the same old read-the-chapter-answer-the-questions-at-the-back snoozefest we’ve subjected students to for decades. If we want to educate citizens who can sift through the mass of information around them and separate fact from fake, we have to explicitly work to give them the necessary critical thinking tools. Historical thinking, Wineburg shows us in Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), has nothing to do with test prep–style ability to memorize facts. Instead, it’s an orientation to the world that we can cultivate, one that encourages reasoned skepticism, discourages haste, and counters our tendency to confirm our biases. Wineburg draws on surprising discoveries from an array of research and experiments—including surveys of students, recent attempts to update history curricula, and analyses of how historians, students, and even fact checkers approach online sources—to paint a picture of a dangerously mine-filled landscape, but one that, with care, attention, and awareness, we can all learn to navigate.

It’s easy to look around at the public consequences of historical ignorance and despair. Wineburg is here to tell us it doesn’t have to be that way. The future of the past may rest on our screens. But its fate rests in our hands.

About the Author - Sam Wineburg

Sam Wineburg (samwineburg.com) is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education, Emeritus, at Stanford University. In the words of Lee Shulman, past president of the Carnegie Foundation, Wineburg “has not merely contributed to our understanding of how history is created, taught and learned; he has nearly single-handedly forged a distinctive field of research and a new educational literature.” Wineburg's interdisciplinary scholarship sits at the crossroads of three fields: history, cognitive science, and education, and his writing has appeared in such diverse outlets as Cognitive Science, the Journal of American History, the New York Times, TIME Magazine, and the Smithsonian. His work has been featured on C-SPAN, NPR, ABC News, the BBC, and stories about his work have appeared in newspapers throughout the world. Educated at Brown and Berkeley, he earned his PhD at Stanford in Psychological Studies in Education. In 2002, his book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, won the Frederic W. Ness Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities for scholarship that makes the most important contribution to the “improvement of Liberal Education and understanding the Liberal Arts.” He is the founder of the Stanford History Education Group (sheg.stanford.edu), whose free curriculum has been downloaded more than 14 million times. In 2007, he was awarded the American Historical Association’s “William Gilbert Prize” and in 2008 the “James Harvey Robinson Prize,” for the most important scholarship on the teaching of history and the most important teaching innovation, respectively. In 2013, he was inducted into the National Academy of Education and also named the Obama-Nehru Distinguished Chair by the US-India Fulbright Commission and spent four months crisscrossing India lecturing about his work. In 2018, his research group created a state-of-the-art curriculum on digital literacy (cor.stanford.edu) that has been recognized by UNESCO with its "Global Media and Information Literacy" award and been downloaded by thousands of schools all over the globe.

University of Chicago Press
ISBN-13: ‏ 978-0226357218