I absolutely don’t doubt that individual accounts will have useful lessons to learn. But personal experience will always have personal biases. People will literally change the way they experience reality to facillitate their world view, which is why the sentiment of this post is stupid af. Just because “you were there” doesn’t make you any more of an arbiter of truth than someone who wasn’t. At most it provides you with the advantage of a perspective more directly affected by said events.
I don’t disagree, and I know that what a history class wants to know isn’t likely coming from a random person’s account.
I do think that’s why I thought history was boring in school though- I care very little about the date of the signing of the magna carta, but I would have loved a rogue priest writing about how he thought things changed. Literally, if all he cared about was that they now had to pay less taxes or got less support, that would be cool to know. I know that learning about appeasement is important, but I got much more out of memoirs from people during the holocaust. Reading about one of the imprisoned Jews being really irritable in (I think) Night was a revelation for eleven year old me- I’d only previously read about them being afraid and meek, and that wasn’t the full spectrum of emotions, so it felt shallow comparatively.
My sister teaches at a historical magnet school, and one of the things they do is group events differently, so you might learn about the magna carta, blair mountain, and occupy Wall Street together, to look at power in collectivity, for example. I hear about this and see the value, but it does feel subjectively wild to include occupy there. I think the proper way to voice that is through a light hearted tweet, not rejecting immediately any differing view.
Individual experiences definitely have biases, but time and time again history textbooks have also been shown to have significant biases. Not to invalidate them, but any source will have a bias, and you can have a bias yet still be accurate.
I absolutely don’t doubt that individual accounts will have useful lessons to learn. But personal experience will always have personal biases. People will literally change the way they experience reality to facillitate their world view, which is why the sentiment of this post is stupid af. Just because “you were there” doesn’t make you any more of an arbiter of truth than someone who wasn’t. At most it provides you with the advantage of a perspective more directly affected by said events.
I don’t disagree, and I know that what a history class wants to know isn’t likely coming from a random person’s account.
I do think that’s why I thought history was boring in school though- I care very little about the date of the signing of the magna carta, but I would have loved a rogue priest writing about how he thought things changed. Literally, if all he cared about was that they now had to pay less taxes or got less support, that would be cool to know. I know that learning about appeasement is important, but I got much more out of memoirs from people during the holocaust. Reading about one of the imprisoned Jews being really irritable in (I think) Night was a revelation for eleven year old me- I’d only previously read about them being afraid and meek, and that wasn’t the full spectrum of emotions, so it felt shallow comparatively.
My sister teaches at a historical magnet school, and one of the things they do is group events differently, so you might learn about the magna carta, blair mountain, and occupy Wall Street together, to look at power in collectivity, for example. I hear about this and see the value, but it does feel subjectively wild to include occupy there. I think the proper way to voice that is through a light hearted tweet, not rejecting immediately any differing view.
Completely irrelevant to the topic, but I only ever hear about magnet schools in the context of LA- do they only really exist there?
This one is very far from California :)
Okay thanks!
Individual experiences definitely have biases, but time and time again history textbooks have also been shown to have significant biases. Not to invalidate them, but any source will have a bias, and you can have a bias yet still be accurate.