NY Times As Gates was working his way through the series, he stumbled upon a set of DVDs titled “Big History” — an unusual college course taught by a jovial, gesticulating professor from Australia named David Christian. Unlike the previous DVDs, “Big History” did not confine itself to any particular topic, or even to a single academic discipline. Instead, it put forward a synthesis of history, biology, chemistry, astronomy and other disparate fields, which Christian wove together into nothing less than a unifying narrative of life on earth. Standing inside a small “Mr. Rogers"-style set, flanked by an imitation ivy-covered brick wall, Christian explained to the camera that he was influenced by the Annales School, a group of early-20th-century French historians who insisted that history be explored on multiple scales of time and space. Christian had subsequently divided the history of the world into eight separate “thresholds,” beginning with the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago (Threshold 1), moving through to the origin of Homo sapiens (Threshold 6), the appearance of agriculture (Threshold 7) and, finally, the forces that gave birth to our modern world (Threshold 8).
Christian’s aim was not to offer discrete accounts of each period so much as to integrate them all into vertiginous conceptual narratives, sweeping through billions of years in the span of a single semester. A lecture on the Big Bang, for instance, offered a complete history of cosmology, starting with the ancient God-centered view of the universe and proceeding through Ptolemy’s Earth-based model, through the heliocentric versions advanced by thinkers from Copernicus to Galileo and eventually arriving at Hubble’s idea of an expanding universe. In the worldview of “Big History,” a discussion about the formation of stars cannot help including Einstein and the hydrogen bomb; a lesson on the rise of life will find its way to Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. “I hope by the end of this course, you will also have a much better sense of the underlying unity of modern knowledge,” Christian said at the close of the first lecture. “There is a unified account.”
As Gates sweated away on his treadmill, he found himself marveling at the class’s ability to connect complex concepts. “I just loved it,” he said. “It was very clarifying for me. I thought, God, everybody should watch this thing!” At the time, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had donated hundreds of millions of dollars to educational initiatives, but many of these were high-level policy projects, like the Common Core Standards Initiative, which the foundation was instrumental in pushing through. And Gates, who had recently decided to become a full-time philanthropist, seemed to pine for a project that was a little more tangible. He was frustrated with the state of interactive coursework and classroom technology since before he dropped out of Harvard in the mid-1970s; he yearned to experiment with entirely new approaches. “I wanted to explore how you did digital things,” he told me. “That was a big issue for me in terms of where education was going — taking my previous skills and applying them to education.” Soon after getting off the treadmill, he asked an assistant to set a meeting with Christian. [...]
Christian
began wondering if he could apply this everything-is-connected idea to a
larger scale: “I began thinking, Could I teach a course not of Russia
but of humanity?” He soon became infatuated with the concept. “I
remember the chain of thought,” he said. “I had to do prehistory, so I
have to do some archaeology. But to do it seriously, I’m going to talk
about how humans evolved, so, yikes, I’m in biology now. I thought: To
do it seriously, I have to talk about how mammals evolved, how primates
evolved. I have to go back to multicelled organisms, I have to go back
to primeval slime. And then I thought: I have to talk about how life was
created, how life appeared on earth! I have to talk geology, the
history of the planet. And so you can see, this is pushing me back and
back and back, until I realized there’s a stopping point — which is the
Big Bang.” He paused. “I thought, Boy, would that be exciting to teach a
course like this!” [...]
Thanks for sharing the article. Once again we see how Bill Gates with his infatuation with data and analysis can destroy any good ideas in education. As the Linda Darling Hammond said about the high stakes testing , common core and accountability policies that turn teaching into test prep , that tests measure what matters least in learning.
ReplyDeleteBack to the question – writing a
history of the world from a Jewish point of view maybe it has to do with the
Yom Kippur musaf tefilos and parashas Ha'azinu . Rabbi Wein says the following
'Rashi on Haazinu quotes the two opinions of Rabi Yehuda and Rabi
Nechemia regarding who is the main subject of the bulk of the middle part of
the parsha – is it the Jewish people or the nations of the world generally?
Like many apparent differences of opinion that appear in Talmud and Midrash,
here also it is possible to say that both opinions are correct and accurate.
History has shown us time and again that the Jewish people are the
canary in the mine and that the fate of other nations and even of the world as
a whole is tied to the Jewish story and its happenings. Europe was destroyed in
the twentieth century because of the story of the Jews. The Soviet Union
disappeared coincidentally and not accidentally because of Soviet Jewry, the
State of Israel and Jewish dissidents and refuseniks.
The troubles of the world are many and bitter, dangerous and
threatening. Yet they somehow seem to have a connection to the Jewish people,their problems and status in world events, no matter how forced and tenuous it may appear. So both opinions in Midrash are correct. Moshe’s song applies to Israel and to the nations of the world as well.
Their fate is bound up with our destiny and our challenges. And the eventual settling of accounts that Moshe describes at the end of his song of Haazinu affect the general world no less than they do the people of Israel.'
maybe that's why Israel gets so much attention