"Backwards" is relative to the original way a subject was taught. My from my experience math is taught formula first rather than by starting with an intuition based on physical representation.
Starting with developing an intuition like 3B1B and then deriving a formula would be "backwards" to how I've been taught in the past.
Gilbert Strang's lectures on linear algebra work this way. He typically first gives a simple example (like for least squares, fitting a line to three points in two dimensions) and then over the course of the lecture susses out a broader generalization / formula from the simple example.
I generally agree with this approach, but sometimes even the
'simple' example isn't intuitive or motivating to someone; it highly depends on your audience.
E.g. a lot of math courses under my school's engineering curriculum would start off with examples from physics, but if you don't have the proper physics background or aren't interested in those applications, it's just another layer of abstraction to slog through.
My high school stats textbook would use classic problems from medicine (e.g. x/n people sampled are sick, what bounds can we put on the distribution of how many people are sick in population?), but that might not be particularly motivating to someone who has no interest in medicine or why an epidemiologist might care to know the distribution.
The best starting point to teach anything is the point that is closest to what the student understands and motivates them, but unfortunately that can vary a lot from person to person.
What you're saying makes sense and is one viewpoint. I could see it the opposite way too:
In school, it's good for someone who doesn't know or care about epidemiology to get a slice of what would be useful to an epidemiologist. Likewise in reverse.
The reason Macs have always had nice topography is because Steve Jobs happened to audit a calligraphy class taught by a monk (who stopped being a monk because he met a nice girl).
I'm not banging the interdisciplinary drum- we all already know learning outside our interests is good. I'm saying it's probably a good educational tool to force students to look at problems based on their utility to someone else.
Sometimes the further a problem is away from being directly useful to you, the wider your horizons will be once you understand how to solve it, and (more importantly) why to bother.
math for mathematicians excepted, starting with an application that shows how to do something useful and working backwards seems pretty reasonable to me.
One way to teach reading backwards is to start by creating a personal alphabet together with the student, from first principles.
Make up symbols for various words. This gets cumbersome when you have words like peace, happy, glad, joyful, nice, etc.
To solve for that, make up symbols for each sound. Then start writing new words by assembling the custom symbols you made. The problem you run into is that books/articles/internet aren't printed in your symbols, and no one you know can read them.
Solve for that by introducing the (English/Spanish/Korean/etc) alphabet and the sounds it makes. Write simple words together. Then read simple words together. Then expand.
It depends a lot on the specific field that you're talking about. I studied both music and physics in college, and I think that teaching the history backwards would work for music, but not for physics. You can understand modern harmonic theory without knowing the details of how it evolved out of contrapuntal theory. It would be easy to learn about the current state of music theory as is, and then extend your understanding afterwards by learning about the context and history which led to the current state. Physics isn't really like that. There's no way that you're going to understand general relativity first, and then learn afterwards that the theory evolved from Newton's laws. Some fields successively build on top of their own histories while others morph and change in such a way that knowledge of their histories is nonessential for understanding their current state.
Well, I suppose OK, fair enough. Maybe for the likes of technical history, Newtonian mechanics is easier to understand than Relativistic mechanics, and the same holds for a variety of other scientific theories. Though I'd put forward that in teaching the old ones before the most recent ones, we end up with lots of people who end up not studying the latter at all and not grokking how or why, insofar as we understand things at least, light speed is a speed limit in our universe.
But then, as you correctly point out, some fields change in such a way that knowledge of their histories is nonessential for understanding their current state.
As to history proper, explaining the cold-war era proxy wars warrants a dive into WW2 and the onset of the cold war at some point; which then naturally leads you to dive into GD and WW1 as to why there was a WW2 in the first place; and why there was a WW1 to begin with; and why there was so much German-French animosity then; and why Europe was a powder keg at the time; etc. One can go on and on all the way back to the Roman Empire and Classical Greek history.
I'm admittedly an armchair historian at best, but methinks reversing the arrow of time in history books might yield a very interesting take on the topic that is a lot more approachable to kids and teenagers.
I suspect that if you're studying the History of Physics, as opposed to just physics, you've already got a special interest in the subject. And if you're not, you're not replying to what the earlier post said, which referred all kinds of _history_.
The original post, I think, was broadly about trying to engage people in the history of something they're not already interested in. For that, the device seems reasonable.
At least it does to me. But maybe that's because I actually did work backward from Led Zeppelin, to the Stones, to Muddy and Wolf, to Robert Johnson and learned to love them all. But if you started me on Johnson, or worse, Charlie Patton with those horrid recordings, you'd have lost me immediately.
"As a great Swiss historian once pointed out in another connection, history is the one subject where you cannot begin at the beginning." - J. M. Roberts
As a terrible programmer my trick is to read statements backwards. Maybe programming should be taught that way too not just reading of it but the history of it all the way back to Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace and even weaving looms.
Reading code forwards overwhelms your working memory because lots of information is at the beginning (e.g. class members).
If you read it backwards, you directly dive into the logic, while variable names give away what they're supposed to hold. As you progress further, you get a clearer view, and finally see how these variables are defined.
Better to organize code backwards in the first place. Within a file, I try to start with the juicy logic and then work down to the boring support functions. C++ makes this slightly inconvenient because everything has to be declared above its use, but JS lets you organize things with very few constraints.
That's what I was taught back in undergrad. I can't quite remember the context, but I do remember having to start at the end and tracing backwards when looking at some simple programs.
Curious about this. How do you do that? Shouldn’t you still have to read the statement forward to then be able to read it backward? I can see in lispy languages how you could do that, because of the structure of S-Expressions, not sure how you would do that with more conventional syntaxes (let’s say C-like).
I think that personally I do a lot of back-and-forth in-between forward and backward reading to construct the program logic in my working memory.
Edit: maybe, could you describe what you mean by reading backward? I read it originally as “reading from the first expression to be evaluated to the last one”, but I see now that you are talking about statements. If that’s the case I see a lot of issues related to the context/scope of a statement. Do you read, let’s say, from the last statement before closing a function, then up?
As I say I am a terrible programmer the best example I could think of was this for Python 3.
float_num = float(input("Enter float num: "))
The way I read it is: I need to enter a number, the number is input, it's a float, that number will be assigned to the variable float_num.
It's not the best example but for me at certain times it's far clearer. Most times it seems like I am reading the equivalent of a person writing backwards then it dawned on me to read it backwards.
As a product manager, I have often found it beneficial to write requirements backwards. Start first with the desired result of a feature or flow and work backwards to the necessary steps, options, preconditions, actors, setup/enrollment steps etc. that would have been required required to get there.
Personally I have to be careful of this....it’s easy for me to focus so much on the solution that the problem is never even clearly articulated to the developers (who may have a better solution that I came up with once they grasp the problem).
I ran across an interesting essay on Medium recently on this topic, advocating a new approach to roadmaps focused on the problems: the problem roadmap. Instead of saying what new features the team will be working on in the future, map out what problems they’ll be working on.
The author observes that self-driven students of very selective parts of Music History are "driven by emotion rather than obligation" and usually start from a passion for some current music. This seems true enough. The next step, however, is a giant leap:
> shouldn’t music history writing and teaching be done in the same backwards direction?
No, that doesn't follow, because we are now talking about obligatory learning of the rest of Music History, which will be what I just experienced for most of the author's text: An endless litany of names, names, names, names, names, some arrows drawn between them, some dates and places attached.
It doesn't matter which order you teach me all the rest of Music History. It doesn't get better that way, although it probably doesn't get worse, either.
True, but if you start with an artist I like today, and work backwards through some of her influencers, I'm likely to find I like some of those. Then repeat. I may find myself liking, or at least appreciaing, one after another.
I enjoy blues. I started with curiosity about current sound tracks on popular movies and TV shows. Then I followed it back to it's roots in rudemantry instruments played by African Americans in the Deep South. That, in turn, can be traced back to the music of Africa mixed with American Folk.
I feel like I have a stronger appreciation when I learn it in reverse.
Of course, I am not learning it in order to get a full knowledge of it, rather, I am enjoying it in reverse.
Exactly. It seems like this author got really into Sam Smith, did a deep Wikipedia dive, then somehow extrapolated that into
a wide-sweeping theory of pedagogy, with bold assertions like "That’s how we learn about music: backwards, always backwards."
There are so many counter-examples. I am instantly reminded of a childhood friend who was really into classical music. I don't think he arrived there working all the way back from present. I started listening to The Who because my dad had a CD of theirs in his car, which led to other classic rock. It had nothing to do with a backward time travel from whatever contemporary music I was hearing at the time. I think a lot of music learning happens more serendipitously like that, through friends, random encounters, etc. The historical research is definitely a part of it but this article way overstates it.
It doesn't have to be going backwards from the present, right? In your example, the person could work backwards from classical music. You could work backwards from The Who, or classic rock.
Going backwards from a natural point of interest sounds like it would be the best method to learn history.
As someone who learned young to love Charlie Parker, & co., I suspect your friend loved what he grew up listening to at home. Classical music _was_ the contemporary context for your friend, just like your context included the Who.
If you didn't ever go back further than the Who, btw, I'm not sure you 'learned history' in the usual sense of the phrase, and I'm not sure you can teach a history class based on random encounters.
I guess I was thinking more along the lines of learning about the diversity of musical styles and cultures than specifically "music history" in a more academic sense. Random encounters can expose you to music you were not familiar with, in a way that a history lesson might not, and then you go and start digging into it.
Clickbait title. This is not teaching backwards, it is teaching it forwards but via recursion towards the causal factor. Good luck with that when the stack gets deep.
Same cautionary tale with the use of recursion.
There is a certain way that history progressed (the motivic force, so to speak) and it would make no sense to reverse the order. And given the stack issue, better not be faddish and just pick a time and go forward from there.
History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures.
History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the past.
However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it's not, we like "stories", we don't understand, don't believe in, and outright reject chance.
I honestly can't imagine how this would work. Even in cinema I rarely like this approach (telling a story backwards). In music history I think it makes sense to go a couple of steps backwards (if you are just a fan trying to better understand their preferences), but if you are really interested - you have to start from the beginning and look how things have developed.
Same thing in programming - starting up with something you can immediately use like JavaScript or Python is a nice thing because it will 'fool' you (in a good sense) that you are now a programmer. (I once knew a successful person who told me "I never start a project I can't fool myself into thinking I can complete within a weekend"). You can only do a couple of iterations back, before it gets too complicated to go backwards.
It's like discovering the usefulness of an integral (Calculus) and then going backwards in order to understand it if you have no prior math knowledge and experience... I often read papers full with math I don't understand and I am forced to go backwards, but it only works because I hit a previous knowledge not so far back in that graph.
I think it might actually work. In teaching "history," you are always picking an essentially arbitrary starting point. I think you could easily start with something like nuclear negotations between the Soviet Union and the USA, then work backwards from there. Why was it these two powers that had nuclear weapons? Well, let's talk about World War 2... How did this Hitler guy come to power in Germany in the first place? Well, let me tell you about World War 1... Obviously there would need to be some linearity to each individual chapter, but moving backwards in time at the thematic level absolutely seems possible and even advantageous in certain respects. History is a very different subject from the sort of applied technical things you're describing. But in fact you might be making a good argument for doing it this way: you're describing the need for some kind of anchor in a knowledge graph. There probably isn't a better anchor than the current existing world as everyday people experience it. Why not start there?
I think it only sounds like a good idea because you already know the details of what comes before. If you had absolutely no knowledge of history, I think this method would not work well.
There are so many details that led up to WW2 that going backwards would just feel messy. All the things happening in Europe would have to be described in a way where you already know about the next war but now have to list off these different events.
I don't think that going backwards is going to make things interesting for anyone who isn't going to be interested in it forwards. The technique of teaching (a good teacher) will do more for this than teaching things backwards.
I see what you mean but that's sort of what I meant by doing it linearly at a topic level. Absolutely, you don't want to start with the end of World War 2 and then move backwards to its causes. But I think it's entirely feasible to learn about the Cold War, then study WW2, then study WW1, etc... I don't know, I don't have especially strong feelings about it, but it definitely seems at least viable.
I would imagine ww2 best described in both orders: you start with the main participants, their alliances, and their general strategies/incentives, then you iterate over each country prior to the war, and why they started to get involved in it, and finally you discuss the war itself, and its major events
I think people in this thread might be overstating the degree to which history isn't already taught this way. I just got done teaching a world history class (from the Paleolithic to 1500) at a university. Granted, we don't tend to teach classes like this in a completely reversed chronological order, like Pulp Fiction or something. But I began the course with the famous "hockey stick" graph of human population and had them think throughout the class about how we got to where we are. Was farming inevitable? Were world empires? Was the Industrial Revolution? If yes, why? And if not, how might it have gone differently?
The class was oriented entirely around the starting point of our present (both as a group of people living in a university town in California and as a global society). We worked backward from that present to key in on some of the main changes of the past several thousand years, notably the origin of written language, agriculture, urbanized societies, global trade, and science. Teaching world history without that present-day hook would be virtually impossible because there is just too much to cover and you need some kind of limiting factor. As you note, the best anchor is the current existing world, so that's what world history teachers tend to use.
Yeah you're entirely right. I was a history student in undergrad and graduate school, and obviously this sort of thing does occur naturally in some courses. But I do think it's still fairly rare that someone intentionally strategizes working backward in a rigorous way. I mean again, I don't consider this some be-all-end-all, I just consider it a viable strategy (among many alternative viable strategies). Mostly I'm responding to the opinion that this couldn't feasibly work.
I had a history book in school which basically attempted to tell history backward. It didn't work very well in my opinion. The problem is, telling history backwards makes for en extremely "whiggish" view of history where everything is understood in the frame of how it lead to the current state of the world. It makes it very hard to escape hindsight bias.
> I often read papers full with math I don't understand and I am forced to go backwards, but it only works because I hit a previous knowledge not so far back in that graph.
This is the best way to learn new things (besides spending time face to face with an expert tutor). You have a motivating problem, an idea of where you are going, and a whole graph to traverse backward until you fit the pieces together. You will remember the parts you come across because they are connected together (both forward and backward), and you will be working closer to the edge of your capabilities. It is much easier to achieve flow doing this kind of learning.
If you have too many unconnected edges in the graph, then sometimes you have to give up and pick a closer/easier subject to study, but the time spent was still not wasted, as it provides useful orientation for future attempts.
Not sure how well it works if a lecturer or textbook is guiding you though. The whole point is picking your own problems and questions, and then figuring out how to solve/answer them.
> I once knew a successful person who told me "I never start a project I can't fool myself into thinking I can complete within a weekend"
Not sure about “never”, but doing many of these little projects is often a more valuable use of time than banging against a project whose scope is so big you have no idea where to start.
As an adult, the way I’ve come to learn is exactly the same as you. It’s way more efficient, too: if you begin with the end and work backwards, you can ignore the things that aren’t very useful. Like if you’re learning how to make a graphics engine and you don’t know linear algebra, you can learn only those parts of linear algebra that are relevant to the work of creating an engine and leave all the other useless stuff behind. (And in linear algebra there seems to be a ton of pretty useless stuff.)
This is probably a bad idea for a mathematician or scientist, but for a programmer who’s in the trenches just trying to build stuff, it’s great.
Simple. You pick a current event. A, and say how it was influenced by this historical event B, and how it was motivated by an even more historical event C.
The only real advantage over starting with C, is that you have the motivating current event A to capture the attention of your students.
I think it is a valuable approach to art history, but I am doubtful it will work for history in general. Going backwards, looking for the causes of what happens later, is very prone to hindsight bias.
In a history lesson, the teacher will not be looking to students to uncover new explanations, so I'm unsure why that would matter - the narrative is already set. Which direction you're describing it in boils down to how to best convey the knowledge to students.
I guess this depends on how it is taught. If it is just memorization of historical events then it probably wouldn't matter. But if the students are expected to try to understand the mindset of the people acting throughout history, then it is quite important to avoid "presentism" and "hindsight bias".
History is about what happened, not what could have happened. You can then speculate on how things could have been given some specific changes, but the fact is that we don’t know how the alternate universe would develop and evolve, and you are now closer to fiction than history.
In a way it’s correct to say that it was inevitable, because it did happen. All the other alternatives didn’t, even if we believe they could have.
Unfortunately when we have no idea why things happened there is zero predictive power. So, history without context is little more than a story and at best interesting.
Really, nobody actually studies history going forward. We don't for example study random people's backgrounds on the off chance they might have an impact. Rather we pick important figures based on what they did and then go back and take a look at their backgrounds.
So the trap in teaching history going forward is you hide why things are being studied. The most critical part is filtering and thus ignoring 99.99999% of what happened. Further by focusing on only important things people start to associate importance with what is being focused on right now.
> Really, nobody actually studies history going forward. We don't for example study random people's backgrounds on the off chance they might have an impact. Rather we pick important figures based on what they did and then go back and take a look at their backgrounds.
I don’t believe that to be correct, actual history studies seem to be a lot of back-and-forth on topics surrounding, let’s say, a particular event that we know happened or believe to happened. Then in this back-and-forth you will have the spotlight on some specific characters who seem to be related to the event (and then, as you said, a huge part of the actual details are filtered out, I don’t see how that could be otherwise). So of course you have to go in the past to focus on an event.
> So the trap in teaching history going forward is you hide why things are being studied.
Aren’t topics studied because they are believed to be true, or because researchers think that there is some interesting knowledge to find? What are those reasons that we hide?
> Further by focusing on only important things people start to associate importance with what is being focused on right now.
Research is not the same as education. History education has frequently been used as indoctrination for example. This plays into why the focus is on rulers more often than say low level economic details.
Which is what I am getting at. We have a vast quantity of solid information about the past, teaching is mostly about picking what to present not how accurate something is. First grade history texts are full of inaccurate information, but that's not really relevant to their purpose.
Sure, research can get into nitty gritty details like the tradeoff in knot designs used on ships. It can be interesting, but it's impact on society is basically nonexistent.
This point of view is, I think, completely false and what I was arguing against.
If you toss a coin you will get one result; saying it was "inevitable" because it happened is to misunderstand everything about randomness and statistics, etc.
I think that you misunderstood my comment. I’m not arguing about probability, I’m saying that the toss of coins have already been done, and cannot be repeated or changed. That’s exactly what defines the past. You can spend time studying the details of why you got a specific result of your toss of coin (wind strength, forces applied to the toss, etc), and you can speculate that changing a parameter would have given different results, but you cannot change the toss that you did.
Now, let’s say that you have an actual toss of coin at one point in history that results in a missile being launched. The missile has been launched, that cannot be changed. The fact that tossing the coin n times more results in differents results doesn’t change the fact that the missile has been launched. Sure you can speculate what would happen if the result would have been different the first time, and your educated speculation may even be pretty good and based on strong facts, that doesn’t change the fact that you’re now in a fictional scenario.
That seems to be a rational point of view to defend, I would be interested to know what flaws you see.
But saying "what happened, happened" isn't teaching us anything, it's just a tautology.
Also, random is just random. It's not "too many parameters for me to keep track of and account for". That's a very important distinction. Many people believe "chance" is a word used to cover our ignorance. But that's not what it means.
> But saying "what happened, happened" isn't teaching us anything, it's just a tautology.
That’s a very reductionist summary of what I wrote that I wouldn’t consider accurate.
I disagree that there is nothing to learn from what happened, even without considering alternative reality (by the way, I’m not arguing against that, as I said that’s just closer to fiction than history, but that’s still an interesting tool). You can see patterns and systems, name and describe them, try to see if we can find similarities with other events. But you cannot change their output, because it already happened.
Randomness is defined by the lack of patterns and predictability, in practice a system chaotic enough will be considered random (see your toss of coin, in fact it’s just a physic problem with a very high number of parameters).
I believe that you give way too much credit to the concept of pure chance (that you don’t define). I personally believe that human history is mainly the result of high level systems interacting with each other (thus can be described and analyzed), studying them backward seems to be prone to a lot of bias as we are trying to make them reach what we consider to be the contemporary state.
>History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures. History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the past.
That, besides being totally unintuitive to our sense of time, puts even bigger emphasis on making the future seem inevitable (the past harvested as the "seed for post events").
Some seeds grow, some don't. Just because we look for seeds that lead to the future, doesn't mean they were there (things happen for no reason) or that there weren't many other seeds that didn't bear fruit, or later, or differently.
Think about your family tree: does it make more sense to try and search for your ancestors, or to find some guy in the 13th century and compile a list of all of his descendants?
You can do both, of course, and for some very important historical figures it's important to list their descendants; but for you personally, what approach feels more logical?
>Some seeds grow, some don't. Just because we look for seeds that lead to the future, doesn't mean they were there (things happen for no reason) or that there weren't many other seeds that didn't bear fruit, or later, or differently.
You can far more easily make the same argument in the normal forward taught history (in fact that's what you do above, when you say: "some seeds grow, some's don't".
Teaching history backwards it's harder to point that, because you start from what's already established (grown).
The British East India Company was the largest drug cartel of the 19th century. They forced the Chinese to buy opium, and decades later that opium made it to the Americas. Each time you turn on the TV and hear about of some random dude overdosing with illegal opioids, you can blame the British for that.
Lawrence of Arabia, the Sykes-Picot agreement, among other British interventions, helped create a state of permanent war in the Middle east. Each time you hear of war or violence in the Middle East, or some kid being blown up by a drone or burned alive with white phosphorus, you can blame the British for that.
However, they're not seen as the villains of history, we speak their language and some idiots wear t-shirts with their flag. Go figure.
I think a better grasp of history would lead you to believe that there's nothing especially British about these activities. This is the exploitation of the powerless by the powerful, and is a close to a universal law throughout history as you're likely to find.
So, in your revisionist mindset, the opium wars were just like any other war?
The motivation of the opium wars was to fix the British Empire trade deficit by selling opium to China, turning them into drug addicts in the process. When the Chinese started seizing their opium they declared war.
It's fucked up to just imagine what kind of morally bankrupt psycho could have thought of that as a solution to an economic problem, and what kind of society it takes to get everyone aligned to execute it.
in my revisionist mindset it's a lot like King Leopald in the Congo, the near extermination of native Americans (to get their land), the slave trade, the proxy wars in Asia and Africa to fight (or expand) communism and other horrors.
Fair enough, those are good examples. I take back the ad-hominem.
The term to describe what happened in North America is settler colonialism (where settlers seek to replace population with their own rather than assimilating it).
I agree! Starting from the beginning in history is boring because it has little relevance to other things you know. Going backwards would solve that. You'd be engaged at the beginning and then for the next part you'd remember what you learned, etc.
Also by teaching from the beginning you tend to learn the same things over and over. I probably learned about Paul Revere in 3-4 different US history classes growing up, but the Cuban Missile Crisis only once.
Not for science history. It's very hard to grasp what the hell the LHC is about. First tell me why how they figured out water wasn't an element but a combination of two.
It can kind of work for that. Looking at Wikipedia the LHC article links to "Composite particles" to "History of atomic theory" to
"Leucippus (/luːˈsɪpəs/; Greek: Λεύκιππος, Leúkippos; fl. 5th cent. BCE) is reported in some ancient sources to have been a philosopher who was the earliest Greek to develop the theory of atomism—the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms."
The LHC is about looking for more "indivisible elements" by smashing stuff harder.
This would not only be a great way to teach history, but also literature and probably other things like philosophy as well.
In literature, it is not uncommon to start with the past reading things like the Odyssey, moving forwards to Beowulf, then Canterbury Tales, then Shakespeare, then John Milton, then Dickens, and on and on.
The result is you start with the least accessible work and move forward to the most accessible. On the hand hand, by starting with a modern work like Catch 22 or whatever, you start with an accessible work that is more likely to be an enjoyable to the reader in its own right, not just as an important work. As you move backwards the reader is also gradually increasing their reading prowess, becoming more attuned to the finer points of literature, and thus more able to enjoy the older, less naturally accessible works.
Having middle and high school students wade through Shakespeare and Nathaniel Hawthorne always seemed like such dumb idea to me. For every one student that is interested by such texts, another 10 are turned off literature completely by the dense diction and distant context. Better to start with J.K. Rowling than Herman Melville if it lets more students discover the joy of reading.
I disagree in the sense that this will end up putting an overemphasis on contemporary work, and not enough on classic works. Think about how often cirriculum never gets to the end of, when such seminal and formative works such as Plato and Aristotle are fit into the last weeks you will inevietably gloss over them. We already make Gods out of our contemporary world view at the expense of downplaying the brilliance of past thinkers. I dont think we need to fan this flame. We will end up with an aesthetic that is so devoid of the basics that it barely comprehends itself, and if ever hits a dry spell will never be able to recreate its former greatness
Specifically with history, contemporary topics being skipped over is not only common but an incredible disservice to humanity. Many schools spend months on Columbus but only 1-2 weeks on the entire post Cold War era. Which one is more important for future voters to understand?
> Specifically with history, contemporary topics being skipped over is not only common but an incredible disservice to humanity. Many schools spend months on Columbus but only 1-2 weeks on the entire post Cold War era. Which one is more important for future voters to understand?
Contemporary events are often thought to be outside the scope of "history":
History depends on perspective: We don't know the consequences and thus the significance of many events; what will happen with climate change? The consequences of the Iraq War and 9/11? And also we are emotionally lost in the trees and can't see the forest, so to speak.
Also, history depends on having lots of information, much of which isn't available for a long time (declassified info, memoirs, archives, other things later revealed, etc.).
Finally, arguably history is studied so we can learn from it, not act on it.
I think the topics the parent brings up are very important, but arguably they belong in another class.
No, you are misunderstanding what he is suggesting. He didn't say cover all of contemporary literature. He is saying spend a few years getting students hooked on contemporary literature, and then get them into say 19th century literature like with Dickens, and so on working backwards.
And let me ask you this, do think the way literature at present is taught in elementary and secondary schools is effective in getting students involved, such that they voluntarily read high-quality works for the rest of their lives?
In addition to alluding to older literature, modern books also routinely refer to historic events, philosophy, developments in science, politics, religion, and just about everything else. So what, don't read any novels or poetry until you know the rest of human history and knowledge, inside and out, lest you miss a few allusions?
If we turn students off reading entirely, because we made them slog through the whole Bible (the ulitmate all-time most-alluded-to-by-English-literature champion) before letting them read something that might actually interest them, then what does it matter if they "get" the allusions?
By the way, not a slag on the Bible. I thought it was a pretty good read actually with exception of a few boring chunks in the old testament. But my humble opinion is that it will bore the shit out of the majority of high school students. I also wouldn't recommend Thomas Pynchon or James Joyce's Ulysses to high school students. They're great books if you come to them at the right time, but probably not the best tools for teaching literature.
There was a great essay a while back that I can no longer find that summarized Guns, Germs, and Steel by continually asking the question "why?" It start with "Why is Western Europe and America so dominant culturally and economically?" Then regressed back to questions like "why did Europeans colonize the Americas instead of the other way around" to "why did the Europeans have steel, disease, and gunpowder but the Native Americans didn't?" down to "Why did agriculture develop in the fertile crescent and spread to Europe earlier than corn spread to the Americas?"
It's a wonderful rhetorical device. Human nature is to pay attention to conflict and we like to see how it's resolved. By asking a series of "why" you broadly expand a person's view and they understand why you're talking about, at some point, the minutia of zoological diversity in the middle east. I never did well in school because I always want to know the "why are we talking about this" up front, and teacher's answers were always just "it's in the syllabus." I like programming because it asks the problem first, then I have to solve it.
It is very appealing, for sure, but it runs the risk of falling into the same trap of "trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures".
I don't think we know if history was inevitable. How much do we attribute to specific events because they're the ones that happened, rather than simply the result of deeper, sociological, economic, and cultural causes? The best we can do is explain what we can explain, and I don't know if trying to teach people that history is essentially random is even a goal that you should strive for to begin with.
Maybe the best explanation of history to teach, if not the most correct, is "history happened the way that it did because of trillions of choices that people made."
> Maybe the best explanation of history to teach, if not the most correct, is "history happened the way that it did because of trillions of choices that people made."
Many times it's just luck. The existence of life at all, the death of the dinosaurs, the ice ages, droughts, famines, epidemics (e.g., the Black Plague) ... all luck. From an entire society's perspective, one or a few people who discover something big is luck. And when a set of actions together have large consequences, sometimes it's just (un)fortunate coincidence.
> From an entire society's perspective, one or a few people who discover something big is luck.
Do we have cases of that in history at all? All the important scientific, technological and social breakthroughs I can think of are clear, incremental extensions of contemporary state of knowledge and societies. Individuals who were at the right place and with right skills are attributed the discoveries, but the truth is, if they didn't "make" those discoveries, short time later their colleagues would.
There is an endless debate among historians, AFAIK, about whether events are due to structural (that is, systemic) issues or due to personal agency - the 'great person' hypothesis.
You are talking about science, which if course is one narrow domain; and even in science, I tend to agree with you but if there were no paradigm shifters (using Kuhn's model) such as Newton, Darwin, or Einstein, would we have made those discoveries? Would the whole course of research in those fields have changed? Changed to where we are now? Soon after those people? At all? If it's inevitable, why weren't those things discovered outside Europe? Was the Enlightenment, the foundation of the scientific revolution, inevitable? Again, if so, why not elsewhere? Why not 1,000 years earlier?
In geopolitical matters, would the world be the same without Napoleon, the founders of the U.S., Lenin, or Hitler? What about Admiral Nelson? What if someone else was U.S. President on 9/11? Clinton? Trump? Would the world be the same without Moses, Jesus or Mohammad?
My point is not that I know the answers, but that it's not so clear cut that outcomes are due to structural reasons.
If you read Guns, Germs and Steel, it doesn't argue that the specific sequence of observed history was inevitable. In fact, it argues against an "inevitability" position.
The book's goal is to present a coherent explanation of the observed course of history for the general public, without resorting to and in fact debunking "western Europeans dominated because they are a superior breed of human and their culture is superior to other cultures, and superior people win" arguments.
Thus, it argues that the environments in which different groups of humans found themselves influenced the course of observed history (things like climate, geography, availability of domesticable species, etc. all can provide advantages or disadvantages to people in a particular area), but does not argue that these factors made the specific sequence of actual human history inevitable. I suspect the author would agree that if you could re-run human history a huge number of times, you'd see variation in the results; he'd just argue that the factors he covers make certain outcomes more probable than others, so they would occur more frequently in such a mass simulation of possible histories.
The criticism seems to be mostly that it's too broad and lacks nuance rather than being something akin to pseudoscience. When I read the book I never thought the book was meant to be the be-all and end-all of history, so I never really understood that criticism. Yes, history is complicated. I'd just keep that in mind. It kind of reminds me of when people criticize the book Code for not being a technical enough discussion of computer hardware.
That's not really the criticism. Jared Diamond is very extremely wedded to the environmental determinism theory (this becomes more obvious after you read Collapse; it's somewhat more muted in Guns, Germs, and Steel), and this theory has serious gaping holes that Diamond never really addresses.
One of the problems of GG&S in particular is that the book presupposes that the European colonization of the Americas was inevitable. For anyone who's actually studied that topic--and Diamond pretends that no one has ever done that before, which is a big fat lie--the most immediate and important conclusion is that it was not inevitable. Pre-Columbian history is already a topic where pretty much everything you were taught is completely and totally wrong [1], and Diamond takes these wrong facts as axiomatic, and people constantly suggest Guns, Germs, and Steel to help reinforce the explanation--it's no wonder there's a large amount of exasperation on the topic.
[1] If you want a good book on this, read Charles Mann's book 1491. It's also a great way of showing how a non-specialist in history can competently approach the topic.
The problem with that approach is that you can end up begging the question and not realizing that your proposed answers start to deviate wildly from evidence.
For Jared Diamond, the answer to the question of European domination is solely that Eurasia won the agricultural jackpot [1] and the Americas lost it, and anything that happened in the intervening 10,000 years doesn't factor into it. But... the Americas won the agricultural jackpot (there's a reason why potatoes became a staple crop in much of the world). And the European conquest of the Americas was anything but preordained: the Spanish only conquered Tenochtitlan (which was a larger city, it should be noted, than likely any of the Spanish had ever seen before) with the help of their 20,000 Tlaxcala allies.
[1] The astute will notice that there's a related question that Diamond 100% completely ignores... why didn't China dominate?
> For Jared Diamond, the answer to the question of European domination is solely that Eurasia won the agricultural jackpot
This is oversimplified to the point of either being disingenuous or misinformed, and China was discussed in the book. There are valid issues with the work, including environmental determinism[1], but it was a wide ranging pop sci book and as such has many surfaces and incentives for attack.
I argue that although Diamond makes interesting points,
his work from Guns Germs and Steel to Collapse is a
distorting disservice to the real historical record.
Diamond claims that the differential success of the
world’s nations is due to the accidents of agriculture,
except when societies “choose to fail.” This claim does
not withstand scrutiny. [...] Unfortunately his
story-telling abilities are so compelling that he has
seduced a generation of college-educated readers.
I read the book, a very long time ago, but my understanding is that China was never interested in expansion, culturally. China itself was a vast, insular monarchy for thousands of years, protected by the Himalayas to the west, an ocean to the east and south, and vast steppes to the north. The Chinese, culturally, were convinced of their innate superiority (like most cultures!) and only wanted to perfect their kingdom, not grow it.
European culture, on the other hand, was not homogenous and the in-fighting between "white" nations forced each one to find advantage anywhere they could find it, including overseas, and the valuable raw-materials a globe-spanning empire can give the homeland. The technical difficulties of running large navies, building ships, lead to lots of engineering advances.
So, I guess if China hadn't been unified, and had been more vulnerable, parts of it would also have been forced to seek advantage in trade, and history would have been a very different story.
China did dominate. Everybody that invaded China, became Chinese. It's a massive success story. If you're asking why it didn't colonize, that answer can also come down to geography. It's landmass was so good, it literally had no need for colonization. Once Europe chopped down its forests and got everything it could out of mines, it had a surplus of people that craved more things, this drove it to expand outwards.
China's just big and resourceful enough to provide. Once it collapsed into one big polity, something made necessary by lack of natural barriers like in Europe preventing individual nations from being able to protect themselves, everybody could work together to build China.
Europe's geography just wasn't as good. Good enough to get to colonization, but not good enough to avoid the need to.
You see this happening now in the US, which boasts the second best geography in the world after China. We had a few colonies, but really, our landmass provides us with everything we need. It just wasn't good enough without European horses.
I Don't think so. The trouble with America was that the people wiped most big fauna before doing any serious domestication attempts. America always lacked force-power for agriculture by lacking suitable animals. Deer and antelopes are un-trainable and intractable, specially when in heat; big cats pose a lot of problems; bears are too solitary and individualistic and pronghorn were skittish, designed to run fast and go away, not easy to confine in small spaces. And Lamas, almost the only big animals available suitable to domestication, are still too small and lack power to help with a plow. Maybe glyptodonts would made marvelous and valuable domestic animals. We'll never know.
The old world instead had the horse and the bull, that made an huge success in agriculture. Small details like egyptians having a small friendly carnivore around made a huge difference in an economy based on grain. And the carp recycling agriculture debris and the chicken where a blessing for China also.
The essay you read might have been by Yanis Varoufakis. (Former Greek finance minister.) The aboriginal peoples of the world .... had everything they needed, so tend not to invade for "more." To answer the question, "why" maybe a bit deeper view is worthwhile.
An alternative way to look at it could be Yanis Varoufakis passage:
"Debt, money, faith and state all go hand in hand. Without debt there is no easy way to manage agricultural surplus. As debt appeared, money flourished. But for money to have value, an institution, the state, had to make it trustworthy. When we talk about the economy, this is what we are talking about: the complex relations that emerge in a society with a surplus."
> The aboriginal peoples of the world .... had everything they needed, so tend not to invade for "more." To answer the question, "why" maybe a bit deeper view is worthwhile.
I don't think this works as an explanation. Could not all countries in what we now call Europe have sustained themselves if they so chose?
And anyway, assuming we all agree on what is meant by aboriginal peoples, aren't there plenty of examples of aboriginal peoples carrying on extended wars and raids?
Except that Jared Diamond cherry picks material to fit a theory he already came up with. His "history" has little to no relation to actual course of history.
He's one of the authors, like Gavin Menzies and Ayn Rand, that make me automatically disqualify my interlocutor from knowing what they're talking about.
But this is not how historians think about history. This risks presentism. History should be understood in its own context, not by the events that came afterwards. Presenting history backwards makes it feel like prior events happened in the context of future events when historical actors had no understanding of those future events.
Instead history is best understood in the context available to the people at the time.
The academic work of history and teaching history to non-historians have different constraints; the latter requires certain reduction to causality. Or at least that seems like the current state of affairs. I’m not necessarily a fan, but it’s better than no education at all.
Disagree totally. It is more important here. The reason we teach the humanities to non-experts is to teach empathy and the ability to fully separate from your own context. Teaching history backwards sabotages this effort.
Where and when and with whom would you propose teaching people? This is a solvable problem, but you have to justify being ABLE to just do it right the first time.
> However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it's not, we like "stories", we don't understand, don't believe in, and outright reject chance.
I'm convinced the 'human' mind loves causality because the human mind loves to believe it is the cause of 'things happening'. This especially holds in chaotic situations where the mind feels it has zero control over anything, down the very nature of itself.
This however, is not always the ideal philosophy to hold (at least to me). I don't know about current culture, but much of eastern philosophy does not share the same sentiment about causality. It's often both, a sort of 'yes-no', the individual self being neither the controller nor the controlled.
Forwards, backwards, I don't think it matters. People fill in the gaps regardless. People see what they want to see, until that gets boring. Then they do something different, wait and see if that changes things. Does it? Maybe.
One reason to teach history backwards is that people are already interested in what is happening today, and so it is easy to get them interested in what lead up to it. And one reason this is so is that learning what caused present problems helps you in figuring out what to do about them.
>History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures.
No, that's completely wrong.
For one thing, any good history book will include numerous accidents that could well have happened differently, and sent history off on an entirely different direction. I am surprised you were unaware that is how good history books are written.
As to an infinite number of possible futures, there are a far larger number one might imagine that are in fact impossible, like humans decided a thousand years ago to walk to Mars, and doing it. They are impossible because of basic realities, and history is a key way you discover and teach them. And that is important because many of these basic realities are of the greatest importance for intelligent decision making today.
I think the backward thinking has problems too. If you ask the wrong questions you will inevitably get to an improper understanding as well. Things make a lot more sense when taken in their proper chronological context, since thats how humans perceive time in the first place.
I agree. History backwards is a "this is why this is so" lesson.
While history forwards is..."here's some stuff, it'll all make sense in a few years if you keep studying".
Understanding how we've arrived here, and all the connections going backwards can be profoundly enlightening, allowing you to try to project events forwards, because cause and effect are laid out for you.
Memorizing books full of facts just turns you into an encyclopedia and don't really let you try to understand how to break the present down to get at what the driving forces are behind the now.
No. We already know this is a bad idea. It's seen most clearly in the history of science, where people want to trace back just the theories that worked as opposed to looking at all the options being worked on at a given time. See the Strong program.
In more general history, it leads you to founding myths and connecting largely unconnected things like modern France to Charlemagne's Frankish empire.
Seconded. I've learnt history forwards at the school and all I've got was a mess on weakly connected facts.
Since then I was learning about the history the other way round: I kind of know what happened during my lifetime, I have an vague idea of what followed from what. What people thought, what people did etc.
I can get further back by asking my parents or reading press from. say, sixties. Books written by folks at the time help as well.
I can get as far back as WWII by remembering what my grandparents said.
Going even further back is hard as there's not a lot of survivors anymore, but you still have contemporary press and books.
Even further back... I've moved to Switzerland few years ago and I've started to understand how European culture worked before WWI. Switzerland, not taking part in the wars of XX. century preserved that past to some extent.
Going even further back is hard. The documents are starting to get scarce. Also, the world is getting more alien in XIX. century. There was an article discussed on HN about a message from 1880. The world there is strange on not one you can easily relate to: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-44265475
But with enough trying, I think I can cover at least second half of XIX. century in next few decades, meaning that I will be able to think about it as if I was living at the time.
Traversing a tree backwards is easy only if you focuse in following only one of the branches. Otherwise you would be arriving to the same places and in need to repeat/refresh/redone the basal parts all the time.
History told backwards makes events seem more inevitable and not less. You are looking for the cause of what will happen instead of wondering. Knowing the end colors how you read all the events leading up to this. I believe this is the problem with traditional history. It is told forward but the people writing it are looking for the seeds of the cause and overfitting the narrative.
Wouldn't this limit your study to only musicians that influenced current trends?
I've definitely discovered a lot of music from digging into the influences of groups I like, but this seems like a kind of survivorship bias to only focus on the ones that have direct lineage to what's popular at the moment you're engaging in study.
I don't understand how it could be different. There has obviously been way too much music in the past to teach in it's entirety. We have to decide what to teach based on what we currently think is "important". And though we can try to fool ourselves that there is some measure of objective importance, at the end of the day, I'm pretty sure it always boils down to popularity within some milieu.
Of course there have to be criteria for any course of study that leaves out plenty of artists that have to be considered not significant enough to cover.
If you were designing a course in either chronological order or in reverse, niether one might ever touch on groups like the Residents, Young Marble Giants, Donovan or Charles Ives--but what if you couldn't even get back to Mozart, Charlie Parker or Woody Guthrie from your current starting point?
The your current starting point is exceedingly narrow.
Don't take it too literally. E.g. don't assume you'd start at a single leaf and trace a graph only backwards, but looking at "here is this set of music trends that are common now. Why do this subset over here have X in common? Lets backtrack... " and then don't be afraid to take steps to the side as well.
The point of the article I took was that when we're exploring music (and other art forts) we tend to be exposed to current trends, and then we tend to explore backwards to something similar but not quite the same.
But we don't go strictly backwards. We may very well e.g. trace an influence back to a wider genre and start exploring to the sides, and even then forwards again.
started with.
I think the more important point is to aim to start with something that students are likely to be immersed in and follow threads that hopefully retain their interest because it retains their connection to something they enjoy, rather than e.g. jumping 500 years back in time and taking ages tracing things forwards before you've reconnected it to something they care about.
To take a very contrived example: If you like German electronic artist Zombie Nation, what's the odds you'll find starting with 40's easy listening interesting?
But go backwards: In 1999 they sampled Lazy Jones for Kernkraft 400 [1]. Lazy Jones was a 1984 game with a very memorable main track [2].
If you start poking around in mid 80's chip tunes, you'll pretty much have to cover Monty on The Run [3] - one of the big things that MOTR brought, was a much more ambitious orchestral inspired score with heavy use of rapid transitions and vibrato to get closer to simulate real instruments despite only having three voices to play with. Compare Lazy Jones and MOTR with Kernkraft 400 - while Kernkraft 400 copies the tune, MOTR is at places surprisingly close to having a sound you might expect in modern electronic music.
As it happens, among many other references to earlier styles of music, the immediate influence on MOTR was the Dick Barton theme tune [4] from the late 40's.
If you dig deeper, you'll find many additional influences and threads to unravel in between.
wouldn’t there be an issue of diversity, where the pool of studied matter would get smaller and smaller ?
I would contrast this to languages, where we still study ancient languages, as well as preserve “dying” languages for future reference. Teaching music genres that didn’t ‘survive’ would have its benefits.
more simply, start by teaching things that people are currently interested in, and work back from them. if you like something, you are curious about where it came from
I couldn't agree more. It's very difficult, but in my opinion the most complicated part in teaching is getting the attention and grabbing the interest of students. If you have that, as long as you do it ok, people will learn. First, find the connections between the subjects and the students. Then, you can start teaching.
Of course, teaching some things in order might be important or useful, and students have some decent degree of attention too. And sometimes you need to explain boring things. Ok, but people learn the most when they want to learn. Curiosity can be induced.
Whenever I'm being taught a game, my first question is always "What's the goal?" I find that without knowing what I'm supposed to be trying to achieve, it's extremely difficult for me to remember all the rules explained to me beforehand because I have no context as to why they're important.
This is part of an enormous cultural trend in the US that has determined that people need to be tricked or somehow otherwise eased into learning, because otherwise learning is too boring! This trend is responding to a real issue, because capitalism has so successfully neutered the common man into a entertainment/carbohydrate consuming machine that the desire or need to learn is only associated with the need to earn an income, if at all.
> We don’t start our investigations at some arbitrarily chosen point in the past; we begin where we are, from our current burning passion.
Who said anything about choosing an _arbitrary_ point in the past? What the author tries to do here is to make the past arbitrary, not interesting, perhaps less relevant than it ought to be. But that's not the problem.
The problem is that this article talks about music history being taught in the first place. In what percent of schools is music history taught in any serious manner by a serious instructor? I honestly am fundamentally perplexed by this article because I would expect first it would establish that music history should be taught in schools at all. Then the author could get into implementation specifics.
But the United States hasn't been interested in music history since Leonard Bernstein's Omnibus[0] lectures aired in the 50s, if it was even then. Today, "Classical Music" isn't for old people anymore, it's for keeping vagrants away from your property[1].
So what the author is really attacking here is the past, because more than ever the past has been deemed too boring on a massive cultural scale. This is just one example of people attempting to make palatable "the past" or whatever else is now too boring, too nerdy or too impossible for regular people to approach.
It is not a question of beeing "tricked" into learning. It is just that we lean best when we start somewhere we can understand and relate to our current experiences and understanding of the world. Then learning from this point will expand the frame of reference allowing us to learn more and more. This is not due to capitalism, this is fundamental for humans.
Indeed, the existence of Swift Playgrounds does not degrade a person interested in computer programming. Nor iPhone's skeuomorphic UI origins degrade those who desired access to mobile computing.
>The problem is that this article talks about music history being taught in the first place.
Music history is an elective required for music majors in US liberal arts colleges. For example, at Colorado College[0]: MU150 Music in Western Culture, MU212 Mozart and his Age, MU284 Beethoven, MU285 Music of the Baroque & Classical Eras, MU286 Romantic and Early Modernist Eras.
[0] https://www.coloradocollege.edu/academics/curriculum/catalog...
> We don’t start our investigations at some arbitrarily chosen point in the past; we begin where we are, from our current burning passion.
That reveals a problem with learning backwards-- rampant epicism in which students would rarely choose to learn about, say, dead ideas like sonata form.
Rather than requiring the student to learn linearly through time, the professor ought to select a handful of musical periods and/or case studies and then randomize the order in which they are taught. Make a big spectacle of picking numbered ping pong balls from a bingo machine in the lecture hall. In the U.S. these are usually elective classes so they are essentially an institutional form of entertainment, anyway.
In other words-- it shouldn't matter how you pick a period/style/composer. What should matter is that students improve their ability to use their ears and their growing knowledge to investigate any music, no matter its origin or time period.
Publicly using randomness to select from possible periods/cases would show good faith that the professor is skilled enough to leave the chosen topic up to fate. That would make it harder for profs who aren't fully comfortable with all the material, which is probably why nobody teaches this way. :)
"If we had tried to tell this story forward, we would have lost most of our audience once they encountered Tharpe’s old-fashioned dresses, twangy guitar and sanctified lyrics." This is an obnoxious piece.
definitely tangential, but i was interested anyway until i got to the no-detail, gimme-your-email web page. I think these prelaunch page things are over, and if they're not, they should be.
If you start taking music lessons, you might learn some simple pop songs first and move your way backwards to older, often complex pieces that have stood the test of time.
I don’t think everyone just starts learning music playing Bach or medieval music. It’s far far less of a straight path than this article suggests.
Just like with programming, I start with the end result that I have in my head and then teach myself everything backwards thats needed to produce the end result
This reminds me of the hours I spend poring over the Allmusic Guide to Rock I had borrowed from the local library, tracing backwards from Van Halen, Nirvana, and Beastie Boys to discover their influences. I had taken piano lessons for several years and had learned Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Debussy — sometimes tracing back led me to what I had learned on piano.
I agree that working backwards can lead to wonderful discoveries. What can be difficult to grasp as you go back is what the music sounded like at the time—how an album sounded because it was the first time musicians had made that sound.
First, people do learn and process differently. No one size fits all here.
Adding this to the forms we have developed makes great sense. No argument.
I personally prefer to take it in mixed mode. If I'm wanting to do something, understanding related history helps. Maybe that's a backward progression back to roots.
But, it can be a chain of forward influences too. Who built on what and how, why?
In a more general sense, maybe narrative makes the best learning. What happened?
Also playwriting. There's a really good book explaining that if you read a play backwards you can work out the causality much better and get a far greater understanding of the play:
Counterpoint: learning in this way is a good method of keeping attention ("you should learn this because your favorite artists liked these artist!") but if you actually listen to the old stuff first, you can also appreciate it in the RIGHT order of things. It is, however, pretty difficult to listen to much of what's come before. I think a healthy appreciation in both directions, digging into whatever node you happen to traverse is the preferred method.
What do you think is difficult to listen to about earlier music? I can't say that music of the past was difficult for me, except for music written before leading tones became almost obligatory, i.e. before the advent of functional harmony — and that was a pretty rapid adjustment. I suppose some of the medieval music that uses parallel fifths between raised 4/7 and 5/1 at cadences took a little getting used to, as well.
It’s not the listening - it is the sheer volume. If you track backward you know there will be a connection. If, however, you attempt to start with the past you’ll need to go pretty wide to get to all the things heavily influencing modern work.
I guess you could recommend a list. Start with medieval madrigals and then work your way to Stax records anthology? Haha
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadJudging by your username you want to see the world burn.
An effective ad hominum!
Starting with developing an intuition like 3B1B and then deriving a formula would be "backwards" to how I've been taught in the past.
Unfortunately, OCW seems to be having some kind of copyright issue with YouTube, but here's a link to the video anyway. https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra...
E.g. a lot of math courses under my school's engineering curriculum would start off with examples from physics, but if you don't have the proper physics background or aren't interested in those applications, it's just another layer of abstraction to slog through.
My high school stats textbook would use classic problems from medicine (e.g. x/n people sampled are sick, what bounds can we put on the distribution of how many people are sick in population?), but that might not be particularly motivating to someone who has no interest in medicine or why an epidemiologist might care to know the distribution.
The best starting point to teach anything is the point that is closest to what the student understands and motivates them, but unfortunately that can vary a lot from person to person.
In school, it's good for someone who doesn't know or care about epidemiology to get a slice of what would be useful to an epidemiologist. Likewise in reverse.
The reason Macs have always had nice topography is because Steve Jobs happened to audit a calligraphy class taught by a monk (who stopped being a monk because he met a nice girl).
I'm not banging the interdisciplinary drum- we all already know learning outside our interests is good. I'm saying it's probably a good educational tool to force students to look at problems based on their utility to someone else.
Sometimes the further a problem is away from being directly useful to you, the wider your horizons will be once you understand how to solve it, and (more importantly) why to bother.
Make up symbols for various words. This gets cumbersome when you have words like peace, happy, glad, joyful, nice, etc.
To solve for that, make up symbols for each sound. Then start writing new words by assembling the custom symbols you made. The problem you run into is that books/articles/internet aren't printed in your symbols, and no one you know can read them.
Solve for that by introducing the (English/Spanish/Korean/etc) alphabet and the sounds it makes. Write simple words together. Then read simple words together. Then expand.
But then, as you correctly point out, some fields change in such a way that knowledge of their histories is nonessential for understanding their current state.
As to history proper, explaining the cold-war era proxy wars warrants a dive into WW2 and the onset of the cold war at some point; which then naturally leads you to dive into GD and WW1 as to why there was a WW2 in the first place; and why there was a WW1 to begin with; and why there was so much German-French animosity then; and why Europe was a powder keg at the time; etc. One can go on and on all the way back to the Roman Empire and Classical Greek history.
I'm admittedly an armchair historian at best, but methinks reversing the arrow of time in history books might yield a very interesting take on the topic that is a lot more approachable to kids and teenagers.
The original post, I think, was broadly about trying to engage people in the history of something they're not already interested in. For that, the device seems reasonable.
At least it does to me. But maybe that's because I actually did work backward from Led Zeppelin, to the Stones, to Muddy and Wolf, to Robert Johnson and learned to love them all. But if you started me on Johnson, or worse, Charlie Patton with those horrid recordings, you'd have lost me immediately.
Reading code forwards overwhelms your working memory because lots of information is at the beginning (e.g. class members).
If you read it backwards, you directly dive into the logic, while variable names give away what they're supposed to hold. As you progress further, you get a clearer view, and finally see how these variables are defined.
I think that personally I do a lot of back-and-forth in-between forward and backward reading to construct the program logic in my working memory.
Edit: maybe, could you describe what you mean by reading backward? I read it originally as “reading from the first expression to be evaluated to the last one”, but I see now that you are talking about statements. If that’s the case I see a lot of issues related to the context/scope of a statement. Do you read, let’s say, from the last statement before closing a function, then up?
float_num = float(input("Enter float num: "))
The way I read it is: I need to enter a number, the number is input, it's a float, that number will be assigned to the variable float_num.
It's not the best example but for me at certain times it's far clearer. Most times it seems like I am reading the equivalent of a person writing backwards then it dawned on me to read it backwards.
I ran across an interesting essay on Medium recently on this topic, advocating a new approach to roadmaps focused on the problems: the problem roadmap. Instead of saying what new features the team will be working on in the future, map out what problems they’ll be working on.
> shouldn’t music history writing and teaching be done in the same backwards direction?
No, that doesn't follow, because we are now talking about obligatory learning of the rest of Music History, which will be what I just experienced for most of the author's text: An endless litany of names, names, names, names, names, some arrows drawn between them, some dates and places attached.
It doesn't matter which order you teach me all the rest of Music History. It doesn't get better that way, although it probably doesn't get worse, either.
I enjoy blues. I started with curiosity about current sound tracks on popular movies and TV shows. Then I followed it back to it's roots in rudemantry instruments played by African Americans in the Deep South. That, in turn, can be traced back to the music of Africa mixed with American Folk.
I feel like I have a stronger appreciation when I learn it in reverse.
Of course, I am not learning it in order to get a full knowledge of it, rather, I am enjoying it in reverse.
There are so many counter-examples. I am instantly reminded of a childhood friend who was really into classical music. I don't think he arrived there working all the way back from present. I started listening to The Who because my dad had a CD of theirs in his car, which led to other classic rock. It had nothing to do with a backward time travel from whatever contemporary music I was hearing at the time. I think a lot of music learning happens more serendipitously like that, through friends, random encounters, etc. The historical research is definitely a part of it but this article way overstates it.
Going backwards from a natural point of interest sounds like it would be the best method to learn history.
If you didn't ever go back further than the Who, btw, I'm not sure you 'learned history' in the usual sense of the phrase, and I'm not sure you can teach a history class based on random encounters.
Same cautionary tale with the use of recursion.
There is a certain way that history progressed (the motivic force, so to speak) and it would make no sense to reverse the order. And given the stack issue, better not be faddish and just pick a time and go forward from there.
History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures.
History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the past.
However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and effect everywhere even where it's not, we like "stories", we don't understand, don't believe in, and outright reject chance.
Same thing in programming - starting up with something you can immediately use like JavaScript or Python is a nice thing because it will 'fool' you (in a good sense) that you are now a programmer. (I once knew a successful person who told me "I never start a project I can't fool myself into thinking I can complete within a weekend"). You can only do a couple of iterations back, before it gets too complicated to go backwards.
It's like discovering the usefulness of an integral (Calculus) and then going backwards in order to understand it if you have no prior math knowledge and experience... I often read papers full with math I don't understand and I am forced to go backwards, but it only works because I hit a previous knowledge not so far back in that graph.
There are so many details that led up to WW2 that going backwards would just feel messy. All the things happening in Europe would have to be described in a way where you already know about the next war but now have to list off these different events.
I don't think that going backwards is going to make things interesting for anyone who isn't going to be interested in it forwards. The technique of teaching (a good teacher) will do more for this than teaching things backwards.
The class was oriented entirely around the starting point of our present (both as a group of people living in a university town in California and as a global society). We worked backward from that present to key in on some of the main changes of the past several thousand years, notably the origin of written language, agriculture, urbanized societies, global trade, and science. Teaching world history without that present-day hook would be virtually impossible because there is just too much to cover and you need some kind of limiting factor. As you note, the best anchor is the current existing world, so that's what world history teachers tend to use.
This is the best way to learn new things (besides spending time face to face with an expert tutor). You have a motivating problem, an idea of where you are going, and a whole graph to traverse backward until you fit the pieces together. You will remember the parts you come across because they are connected together (both forward and backward), and you will be working closer to the edge of your capabilities. It is much easier to achieve flow doing this kind of learning.
If you have too many unconnected edges in the graph, then sometimes you have to give up and pick a closer/easier subject to study, but the time spent was still not wasted, as it provides useful orientation for future attempts.
Not sure how well it works if a lecturer or textbook is guiding you though. The whole point is picking your own problems and questions, and then figuring out how to solve/answer them.
> I once knew a successful person who told me "I never start a project I can't fool myself into thinking I can complete within a weekend"
Not sure about “never”, but doing many of these little projects is often a more valuable use of time than banging against a project whose scope is so big you have no idea where to start.
As an adult, the way I’ve come to learn is exactly the same as you. It’s way more efficient, too: if you begin with the end and work backwards, you can ignore the things that aren’t very useful. Like if you’re learning how to make a graphics engine and you don’t know linear algebra, you can learn only those parts of linear algebra that are relevant to the work of creating an engine and leave all the other useless stuff behind. (And in linear algebra there seems to be a ton of pretty useless stuff.)
This is probably a bad idea for a mathematician or scientist, but for a programmer who’s in the trenches just trying to build stuff, it’s great.
The only real advantage over starting with C, is that you have the motivating current event A to capture the attention of your students.
In a way it’s correct to say that it was inevitable, because it did happen. All the other alternatives didn’t, even if we believe they could have.
Really, nobody actually studies history going forward. We don't for example study random people's backgrounds on the off chance they might have an impact. Rather we pick important figures based on what they did and then go back and take a look at their backgrounds.
So the trap in teaching history going forward is you hide why things are being studied. The most critical part is filtering and thus ignoring 99.99999% of what happened. Further by focusing on only important things people start to associate importance with what is being focused on right now.
I don’t believe that to be correct, actual history studies seem to be a lot of back-and-forth on topics surrounding, let’s say, a particular event that we know happened or believe to happened. Then in this back-and-forth you will have the spotlight on some specific characters who seem to be related to the event (and then, as you said, a huge part of the actual details are filtered out, I don’t see how that could be otherwise). So of course you have to go in the past to focus on an event.
> So the trap in teaching history going forward is you hide why things are being studied.
Aren’t topics studied because they are believed to be true, or because researchers think that there is some interesting knowledge to find? What are those reasons that we hide?
> Further by focusing on only important things people start to associate importance with what is being focused on right now.
Sorry, I don’t understand what you mean by that.
Research is not the same as education. History education has frequently been used as indoctrination for example. This plays into why the focus is on rulers more often than say low level economic details.
Which is what I am getting at. We have a vast quantity of solid information about the past, teaching is mostly about picking what to present not how accurate something is. First grade history texts are full of inaccurate information, but that's not really relevant to their purpose.
Sure, research can get into nitty gritty details like the tradeoff in knot designs used on ships. It can be interesting, but it's impact on society is basically nonexistent.
https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/471921
Disagreeing with this:
> History is about what happened, not what could have happened.
If you toss a coin you will get one result; saying it was "inevitable" because it happened is to misunderstand everything about randomness and statistics, etc.
Now, let’s say that you have an actual toss of coin at one point in history that results in a missile being launched. The missile has been launched, that cannot be changed. The fact that tossing the coin n times more results in differents results doesn’t change the fact that the missile has been launched. Sure you can speculate what would happen if the result would have been different the first time, and your educated speculation may even be pretty good and based on strong facts, that doesn’t change the fact that you’re now in a fictional scenario.
That seems to be a rational point of view to defend, I would be interested to know what flaws you see.
Also, random is just random. It's not "too many parameters for me to keep track of and account for". That's a very important distinction. Many people believe "chance" is a word used to cover our ignorance. But that's not what it means.
That’s a very reductionist summary of what I wrote that I wouldn’t consider accurate.
I disagree that there is nothing to learn from what happened, even without considering alternative reality (by the way, I’m not arguing against that, as I said that’s just closer to fiction than history, but that’s still an interesting tool). You can see patterns and systems, name and describe them, try to see if we can find similarities with other events. But you cannot change their output, because it already happened.
Randomness is defined by the lack of patterns and predictability, in practice a system chaotic enough will be considered random (see your toss of coin, in fact it’s just a physic problem with a very high number of parameters).
I believe that you give way too much credit to the concept of pure chance (that you don’t define). I personally believe that human history is mainly the result of high level systems interacting with each other (thus can be described and analyzed), studying them backward seems to be prone to a lot of bias as we are trying to make them reach what we consider to be the contemporary state.
That, besides being totally unintuitive to our sense of time, puts even bigger emphasis on making the future seem inevitable (the past harvested as the "seed for post events").
Think about your family tree: does it make more sense to try and search for your ancestors, or to find some guy in the 13th century and compile a list of all of his descendants?
You can do both, of course, and for some very important historical figures it's important to list their descendants; but for you personally, what approach feels more logical?
You can far more easily make the same argument in the normal forward taught history (in fact that's what you do above, when you say: "some seeds grow, some's don't".
Teaching history backwards it's harder to point that, because you start from what's already established (grown).
The British East India Company was the largest drug cartel of the 19th century. They forced the Chinese to buy opium, and decades later that opium made it to the Americas. Each time you turn on the TV and hear about of some random dude overdosing with illegal opioids, you can blame the British for that.
Lawrence of Arabia, the Sykes-Picot agreement, among other British interventions, helped create a state of permanent war in the Middle east. Each time you hear of war or violence in the Middle East, or some kid being blown up by a drone or burned alive with white phosphorus, you can blame the British for that.
However, they're not seen as the villains of history, we speak their language and some idiots wear t-shirts with their flag. Go figure.
The motivation of the opium wars was to fix the British Empire trade deficit by selling opium to China, turning them into drug addicts in the process. When the Chinese started seizing their opium they declared war.
It's fucked up to just imagine what kind of morally bankrupt psycho could have thought of that as a solution to an economic problem, and what kind of society it takes to get everyone aligned to execute it.
The term to describe what happened in North America is settler colonialism (where settlers seek to replace population with their own rather than assimilating it).
Also by teaching from the beginning you tend to learn the same things over and over. I probably learned about Paul Revere in 3-4 different US history classes growing up, but the Cuban Missile Crisis only once.
"Leucippus (/luːˈsɪpəs/; Greek: Λεύκιππος, Leúkippos; fl. 5th cent. BCE) is reported in some ancient sources to have been a philosopher who was the earliest Greek to develop the theory of atomism—the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms."
The LHC is about looking for more "indivisible elements" by smashing stuff harder.
And so on.
In literature, it is not uncommon to start with the past reading things like the Odyssey, moving forwards to Beowulf, then Canterbury Tales, then Shakespeare, then John Milton, then Dickens, and on and on.
The result is you start with the least accessible work and move forward to the most accessible. On the hand hand, by starting with a modern work like Catch 22 or whatever, you start with an accessible work that is more likely to be an enjoyable to the reader in its own right, not just as an important work. As you move backwards the reader is also gradually increasing their reading prowess, becoming more attuned to the finer points of literature, and thus more able to enjoy the older, less naturally accessible works.
Having middle and high school students wade through Shakespeare and Nathaniel Hawthorne always seemed like such dumb idea to me. For every one student that is interested by such texts, another 10 are turned off literature completely by the dense diction and distant context. Better to start with J.K. Rowling than Herman Melville if it lets more students discover the joy of reading.
Contemporary events are often thought to be outside the scope of "history":
History depends on perspective: We don't know the consequences and thus the significance of many events; what will happen with climate change? The consequences of the Iraq War and 9/11? And also we are emotionally lost in the trees and can't see the forest, so to speak.
Also, history depends on having lots of information, much of which isn't available for a long time (declassified info, memoirs, archives, other things later revealed, etc.).
Finally, arguably history is studied so we can learn from it, not act on it.
I think the topics the parent brings up are very important, but arguably they belong in another class.
And let me ask you this, do think the way literature at present is taught in elementary and secondary schools is effective in getting students involved, such that they voluntarily read high-quality works for the rest of their lives?
If we turn students off reading entirely, because we made them slog through the whole Bible (the ulitmate all-time most-alluded-to-by-English-literature champion) before letting them read something that might actually interest them, then what does it matter if they "get" the allusions?
By the way, not a slag on the Bible. I thought it was a pretty good read actually with exception of a few boring chunks in the old testament. But my humble opinion is that it will bore the shit out of the majority of high school students. I also wouldn't recommend Thomas Pynchon or James Joyce's Ulysses to high school students. They're great books if you come to them at the right time, but probably not the best tools for teaching literature.
I think the article's idea is that people engaged by the current book will be motivated to look up the references.
It's a wonderful rhetorical device. Human nature is to pay attention to conflict and we like to see how it's resolved. By asking a series of "why" you broadly expand a person's view and they understand why you're talking about, at some point, the minutia of zoological diversity in the middle east. I never did well in school because I always want to know the "why are we talking about this" up front, and teacher's answers were always just "it's in the syllabus." I like programming because it asks the problem first, then I have to solve it.
It is very appealing, for sure, but it runs the risk of falling into the same trap of "trying to show that what came after was inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of different possible futures".
Many times it's just luck. The existence of life at all, the death of the dinosaurs, the ice ages, droughts, famines, epidemics (e.g., the Black Plague) ... all luck. From an entire society's perspective, one or a few people who discover something big is luck. And when a set of actions together have large consequences, sometimes it's just (un)fortunate coincidence.
Do we have cases of that in history at all? All the important scientific, technological and social breakthroughs I can think of are clear, incremental extensions of contemporary state of knowledge and societies. Individuals who were at the right place and with right skills are attributed the discoveries, but the truth is, if they didn't "make" those discoveries, short time later their colleagues would.
You are talking about science, which if course is one narrow domain; and even in science, I tend to agree with you but if there were no paradigm shifters (using Kuhn's model) such as Newton, Darwin, or Einstein, would we have made those discoveries? Would the whole course of research in those fields have changed? Changed to where we are now? Soon after those people? At all? If it's inevitable, why weren't those things discovered outside Europe? Was the Enlightenment, the foundation of the scientific revolution, inevitable? Again, if so, why not elsewhere? Why not 1,000 years earlier?
In geopolitical matters, would the world be the same without Napoleon, the founders of the U.S., Lenin, or Hitler? What about Admiral Nelson? What if someone else was U.S. President on 9/11? Clinton? Trump? Would the world be the same without Moses, Jesus or Mohammad?
My point is not that I know the answers, but that it's not so clear cut that outcomes are due to structural reasons.
The book's goal is to present a coherent explanation of the observed course of history for the general public, without resorting to and in fact debunking "western Europeans dominated because they are a superior breed of human and their culture is superior to other cultures, and superior people win" arguments.
Thus, it argues that the environments in which different groups of humans found themselves influenced the course of observed history (things like climate, geography, availability of domesticable species, etc. all can provide advantages or disadvantages to people in a particular area), but does not argue that these factors made the specific sequence of actual human history inevitable. I suspect the author would agree that if you could re-run human history a huge number of times, you'd see variation in the results; he'd just argue that the factors he covers make certain outcomes more probable than others, so they would occur more frequently in such a mass simulation of possible histories.
https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0...
One of the problems of GG&S in particular is that the book presupposes that the European colonization of the Americas was inevitable. For anyone who's actually studied that topic--and Diamond pretends that no one has ever done that before, which is a big fat lie--the most immediate and important conclusion is that it was not inevitable. Pre-Columbian history is already a topic where pretty much everything you were taught is completely and totally wrong [1], and Diamond takes these wrong facts as axiomatic, and people constantly suggest Guns, Germs, and Steel to help reinforce the explanation--it's no wonder there's a large amount of exasperation on the topic.
[1] If you want a good book on this, read Charles Mann's book 1491. It's also a great way of showing how a non-specialist in history can competently approach the topic.
For Jared Diamond, the answer to the question of European domination is solely that Eurasia won the agricultural jackpot [1] and the Americas lost it, and anything that happened in the intervening 10,000 years doesn't factor into it. But... the Americas won the agricultural jackpot (there's a reason why potatoes became a staple crop in much of the world). And the European conquest of the Americas was anything but preordained: the Spanish only conquered Tenochtitlan (which was a larger city, it should be noted, than likely any of the Spanish had ever seen before) with the help of their 20,000 Tlaxcala allies.
[1] The astute will notice that there's a related question that Diamond 100% completely ignores... why didn't China dominate?
This is oversimplified to the point of either being disingenuous or misinformed, and China was discussed in the book. There are valid issues with the work, including environmental determinism[1], but it was a wide ranging pop sci book and as such has many surfaces and incentives for attack.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_determinism
Why is this considered an issue? Is there a good discussion of this that you could recommend?
Have you even read the book? It's mentioned and he gives possible reasons for it, even though it isn't the focus of the book.
European culture, on the other hand, was not homogenous and the in-fighting between "white" nations forced each one to find advantage anywhere they could find it, including overseas, and the valuable raw-materials a globe-spanning empire can give the homeland. The technical difficulties of running large navies, building ships, lead to lots of engineering advances.
So, I guess if China hadn't been unified, and had been more vulnerable, parts of it would also have been forced to seek advantage in trade, and history would have been a very different story.
China's just big and resourceful enough to provide. Once it collapsed into one big polity, something made necessary by lack of natural barriers like in Europe preventing individual nations from being able to protect themselves, everybody could work together to build China.
Europe's geography just wasn't as good. Good enough to get to colonization, but not good enough to avoid the need to.
You see this happening now in the US, which boasts the second best geography in the world after China. We had a few colonies, but really, our landmass provides us with everything we need. It just wasn't good enough without European horses.
I Don't think so. The trouble with America was that the people wiped most big fauna before doing any serious domestication attempts. America always lacked force-power for agriculture by lacking suitable animals. Deer and antelopes are un-trainable and intractable, specially when in heat; big cats pose a lot of problems; bears are too solitary and individualistic and pronghorn were skittish, designed to run fast and go away, not easy to confine in small spaces. And Lamas, almost the only big animals available suitable to domestication, are still too small and lack power to help with a plow. Maybe glyptodonts would made marvelous and valuable domestic animals. We'll never know.
The old world instead had the horse and the bull, that made an huge success in agriculture. Small details like egyptians having a small friendly carnivore around made a huge difference in an economy based on grain. And the carp recycling agriculture debris and the chicken where a blessing for China also.
An alternative way to look at it could be Yanis Varoufakis passage:
"Debt, money, faith and state all go hand in hand. Without debt there is no easy way to manage agricultural surplus. As debt appeared, money flourished. But for money to have value, an institution, the state, had to make it trustworthy. When we talk about the economy, this is what we are talking about: the complex relations that emerge in a society with a surplus."
I don't think this works as an explanation. Could not all countries in what we now call Europe have sustained themselves if they so chose?
And anyway, assuming we all agree on what is meant by aboriginal peoples, aren't there plenty of examples of aboriginal peoples carrying on extended wars and raids?
He's one of the authors, like Gavin Menzies and Ayn Rand, that make me automatically disqualify my interlocutor from knowing what they're talking about.
Instead history is best understood in the context available to the people at the time.
I'm convinced the 'human' mind loves causality because the human mind loves to believe it is the cause of 'things happening'. This especially holds in chaotic situations where the mind feels it has zero control over anything, down the very nature of itself.
This however, is not always the ideal philosophy to hold (at least to me). I don't know about current culture, but much of eastern philosophy does not share the same sentiment about causality. It's often both, a sort of 'yes-no', the individual self being neither the controller nor the controlled.
Forwards, backwards, I don't think it matters. People fill in the gaps regardless. People see what they want to see, until that gets boring. Then they do something different, wait and see if that changes things. Does it? Maybe.
No, that's completely wrong.
For one thing, any good history book will include numerous accidents that could well have happened differently, and sent history off on an entirely different direction. I am surprised you were unaware that is how good history books are written.
As to an infinite number of possible futures, there are a far larger number one might imagine that are in fact impossible, like humans decided a thousand years ago to walk to Mars, and doing it. They are impossible because of basic realities, and history is a key way you discover and teach them. And that is important because many of these basic realities are of the greatest importance for intelligent decision making today.
While history forwards is..."here's some stuff, it'll all make sense in a few years if you keep studying".
Understanding how we've arrived here, and all the connections going backwards can be profoundly enlightening, allowing you to try to project events forwards, because cause and effect are laid out for you.
Memorizing books full of facts just turns you into an encyclopedia and don't really let you try to understand how to break the present down to get at what the driving forces are behind the now.
In more general history, it leads you to founding myths and connecting largely unconnected things like modern France to Charlemagne's Frankish empire.
Since then I was learning about the history the other way round: I kind of know what happened during my lifetime, I have an vague idea of what followed from what. What people thought, what people did etc.
I can get further back by asking my parents or reading press from. say, sixties. Books written by folks at the time help as well.
I can get as far back as WWII by remembering what my grandparents said.
Going even further back is hard as there's not a lot of survivors anymore, but you still have contemporary press and books.
Even further back... I've moved to Switzerland few years ago and I've started to understand how European culture worked before WWI. Switzerland, not taking part in the wars of XX. century preserved that past to some extent.
Going even further back is hard. The documents are starting to get scarce. Also, the world is getting more alien in XIX. century. There was an article discussed on HN about a message from 1880. The world there is strange on not one you can easily relate to: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-44265475
But with enough trying, I think I can cover at least second half of XIX. century in next few decades, meaning that I will be able to think about it as if I was living at the time.
I've definitely discovered a lot of music from digging into the influences of groups I like, but this seems like a kind of survivorship bias to only focus on the ones that have direct lineage to what's popular at the moment you're engaging in study.
If you were designing a course in either chronological order or in reverse, niether one might ever touch on groups like the Residents, Young Marble Giants, Donovan or Charles Ives--but what if you couldn't even get back to Mozart, Charlie Parker or Woody Guthrie from your current starting point?
Don't take it too literally. E.g. don't assume you'd start at a single leaf and trace a graph only backwards, but looking at "here is this set of music trends that are common now. Why do this subset over here have X in common? Lets backtrack... " and then don't be afraid to take steps to the side as well.
The point of the article I took was that when we're exploring music (and other art forts) we tend to be exposed to current trends, and then we tend to explore backwards to something similar but not quite the same.
But we don't go strictly backwards. We may very well e.g. trace an influence back to a wider genre and start exploring to the sides, and even then forwards again. started with.
I think the more important point is to aim to start with something that students are likely to be immersed in and follow threads that hopefully retain their interest because it retains their connection to something they enjoy, rather than e.g. jumping 500 years back in time and taking ages tracing things forwards before you've reconnected it to something they care about.
To take a very contrived example: If you like German electronic artist Zombie Nation, what's the odds you'll find starting with 40's easy listening interesting?
But go backwards: In 1999 they sampled Lazy Jones for Kernkraft 400 [1]. Lazy Jones was a 1984 game with a very memorable main track [2].
If you start poking around in mid 80's chip tunes, you'll pretty much have to cover Monty on The Run [3] - one of the big things that MOTR brought, was a much more ambitious orchestral inspired score with heavy use of rapid transitions and vibrato to get closer to simulate real instruments despite only having three voices to play with. Compare Lazy Jones and MOTR with Kernkraft 400 - while Kernkraft 400 copies the tune, MOTR is at places surprisingly close to having a sound you might expect in modern electronic music.
As it happens, among many other references to earlier styles of music, the immediate influence on MOTR was the Dick Barton theme tune [4] from the late 40's.
If you dig deeper, you'll find many additional influences and threads to unravel in between.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraft_400
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWxlYYA8yrg
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIA_0cvS2gQ
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2eqX93umXo
I would contrast this to languages, where we still study ancient languages, as well as preserve “dying” languages for future reference. Teaching music genres that didn’t ‘survive’ would have its benefits.
Of course, teaching some things in order might be important or useful, and students have some decent degree of attention too. And sometimes you need to explain boring things. Ok, but people learn the most when they want to learn. Curiosity can be induced.
Should we start with the climax of the 9th symphony, then the Ode to Joy, then the prelude?
Or should each piece be played as its own crab canon?
> We don’t start our investigations at some arbitrarily chosen point in the past; we begin where we are, from our current burning passion.
Who said anything about choosing an _arbitrary_ point in the past? What the author tries to do here is to make the past arbitrary, not interesting, perhaps less relevant than it ought to be. But that's not the problem.
The problem is that this article talks about music history being taught in the first place. In what percent of schools is music history taught in any serious manner by a serious instructor? I honestly am fundamentally perplexed by this article because I would expect first it would establish that music history should be taught in schools at all. Then the author could get into implementation specifics.
But the United States hasn't been interested in music history since Leonard Bernstein's Omnibus[0] lectures aired in the 50s, if it was even then. Today, "Classical Music" isn't for old people anymore, it's for keeping vagrants away from your property[1].
So what the author is really attacking here is the past, because more than ever the past has been deemed too boring on a massive cultural scale. This is just one example of people attempting to make palatable "the past" or whatever else is now too boring, too nerdy or too impossible for regular people to approach.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Omnibus-Leonard-Bernstein/dp/B002OVB9...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/blasting-moza...
Music history is an elective required for music majors in US liberal arts colleges. For example, at Colorado College[0]: MU150 Music in Western Culture, MU212 Mozart and his Age, MU284 Beethoven, MU285 Music of the Baroque & Classical Eras, MU286 Romantic and Early Modernist Eras. [0] https://www.coloradocollege.edu/academics/curriculum/catalog...
That reveals a problem with learning backwards-- rampant epicism in which students would rarely choose to learn about, say, dead ideas like sonata form.
Rather than requiring the student to learn linearly through time, the professor ought to select a handful of musical periods and/or case studies and then randomize the order in which they are taught. Make a big spectacle of picking numbered ping pong balls from a bingo machine in the lecture hall. In the U.S. these are usually elective classes so they are essentially an institutional form of entertainment, anyway.
In other words-- it shouldn't matter how you pick a period/style/composer. What should matter is that students improve their ability to use their ears and their growing knowledge to investigate any music, no matter its origin or time period.
Publicly using randomness to select from possible periods/cases would show good faith that the professor is skilled enough to leave the chosen topic up to fate. That would make it harder for profs who aren't fully comfortable with all the material, which is probably why nobody teaches this way. :)
Edit: clarification
This idea reminds me of how artificial intelligence might conceptualize a subject, but doesn't make sense for the corpus of history.
I agree that working backwards can lead to wonderful discoveries. What can be difficult to grasp as you go back is what the music sounded like at the time—how an album sounded because it was the first time musicians had made that sound.
First, people do learn and process differently. No one size fits all here.
Adding this to the forms we have developed makes great sense. No argument.
I personally prefer to take it in mixed mode. If I'm wanting to do something, understanding related history helps. Maybe that's a backward progression back to roots.
But, it can be a chain of forward influences too. Who built on what and how, why?
In a more general sense, maybe narrative makes the best learning. What happened?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Backwards-Forwards-Technical-Manual...
I guess you could recommend a list. Start with medieval madrigals and then work your way to Stax records anthology? Haha