Do you think history is being taught well in schools? What are you experiences with studying the subject. Is it too focussed on names and dates rather than how and why the world develops?

Some say it's the boring way it's taught stifles motivation to learn about the subject. So the really critical questions is how do we teach it in an interesting way that gets kids involved? What's been your experience in history class?

i think history depends heavily on the teacher

my early history classes were mostly date memorizing and things that did not matter that much

a few years later i had a history teacher that focused on relating the things that happened, knowing how these events triggered eachother and why they happened. he would often ask us to draw a mind map of the various historical "happenings" that we studied and relate them to eachother, explaining how they lead to eachother. i really liked history that year

The classical way of teaching students by standing in front of a blackboard and noting down important points of an era is archaic. It is far more efficient to use modern technology privately to absorb those information.
I think it would be easier to learn those things by using those technologies and teaching students how to use them. Students could use parts of their school time, as well as their homework time, to learn the things they need for the class, not the other way around.
That's my experience anyway. I don't really learn a lot in history class itself because I find it far easier to learn those things before going to class, abusing that to get an advantage over other students, thus getting the best grades.

Completely agree, Oracle.


But isn't history the most interesting subject in the world? It's the story about how we got to where we are today and about what forces and great people shaped governed it. The story of us. Better than any fiction.

History class can definitely be interesting because history is the most interesting story in the world.

Also, motivation is largely determined by interest, so, I think if you teach it in an interesting way, you'll generate motivation naturally.

There's something that Napoleon (and supposedly Alexander) said that sums up this point, "History is a set of lies agreed upon".


Mmm. History is a dialogue between the past and the present.

@OP
It depends on you and your teacher 50/50.
If the teacher can present the topic in an interesting fashion while you give enough of a damn about the class to memorize important details and make the connections necessary to form a coherent view of how the world came into being the thing it is today, then yes, it's awesome.
I'd ditch everything pre-19th century not directly related to major events in recent history, though. I couldn't give less of a crap about Qin Shi Huangdi and what he did (I'm Hungarian, China is pretty darn far away.).
For you Americans: History taught around the world is more than 10 wars, a genocide and an economic depression, so it can and will get overwhelming sometimes when the teacher expects you to learn the name of every Polish resistance fighter pre-Soviet occupation. (Just an arbitrary example, but reflects how it's done sometimes.)


Yes, History is censored. But it's not a subject where your or others' opinion matters. You have the material presented to you, describing what happened and what were the repercussions. That material may or may not be accurate, it may be told subjectively and could contain outright false information. But strip it all down and you'll understand what's went down and what is going on.

History is a powerful propaganda tool. Just an example: it puts a heavy emphasis on how fascists and communists put people in camps and worked them to death/straight up murdered them. It puts less emphasis on how the Germans and Russians took the idea of concentration camps from the British. Guess who won WW2 AND the Cold War.
Anyways, just question what you hear. There's truth behind the lies.

Exactly this. All of you saying it depends on the teacher, yeah the teacher can make it a little more entertaining, but you can't teach history to someone who has absolutely no interest in it.

I fully agree with Oracle. The complete over-emphasis on dates was a huge turn off for me ever giving a damn about it. It was my least favorite subject in school, and as I grew distaste for it, so did my level of apathy towards how well I performed or prepared in the class.

The merit of history should be what can be learned from the successes and mistakes of nations and leaders of the past. I've spent nearly 10 minutes trying to write this post and tell you about all the boring useless things I had to study during my Sophomore and Junior year of high school and I can't simply because of just how bland it all was. If they just had said "Hey, here's ____ civilization, they were around in ___ time period, they were successful because they tried this stuff with their social rules, policies, laws, etc and they ultimately failed ___ many years later because they didn't have _____. This is why we, ____, decided to place special emphasis on ____ to not repeat what they fucked up." If I had just gotten a lot of that, I'd know a lot more about what political party I should be affiliated with, what's wrong with certain policies my government tries to push forward (and or what's right and should be appreciated), and I'd be an informed citizen with a decent understanding of social science.

I couldn't care less about what year a bill was signed, and if I have a child I sincerely hope his time isn't wasted studying these types of things when he or she could be learning more valuable lessons.

No of course not, we can't literally change the content of the subject, just the content of the material we focus on. The OP's thread is "How to make history class interesting", and I think the answer is have engaging debate and conversation about policies and ideologies both socially and legally which made nations in the past fail or thrive. We also highlighted how it'd be preferential to omit info on date specific questions.