Today’s challenge is meant to give you practice in using history to learn critical thinking skills and examine context around situations and events. Pick a current event, situation or issue and ask, “How did we get here? How did this event, situation or issue arise?” Dig around and do some research to see if you can find one instigating event or a series of events that led to what is happening today. Use “The Ultimate…
The Google definition of critical thinking is “the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment.” (If you enter “define critical thinking” into Google Chrome, this is the definition that pops up on top of the page.) We seem to have a shortage of critical thinking in society today. There are plenty of judgments flying around, but they are based more on emotion, propaganda and tribalisim than objective analysis and…
As I’ve been working through History’s Hierarchy of Purpose, I’ve been thinking more deeply about all the skills that practicing history can teach us. As I continue to unpack that, I’ve come across a couple of articles that mention some of those skills. Fernande Raine discusses some of these skills in her Medium article, “Why History is Good for You [https://medium.com/@fernande/why-history-is-good-for-you-353d393776df].” I wholeheartedly agree with her assessment that history is cool, but that it suffers…
This is a post I’ve been waiting to write for a couple of weeks, ever since I saw Amy Siskind’s smack-in-the-face tweet: When I was studying the Holocaust as part of a World War I & II class in high school, this is exactly the thought that kept going through my mind. What would I have done? Would I have gone along with the Third Reich’s activities and had to live with my cowardice and…
As we move to the middle of History’s Hierarchy of Purpose, we come to Connection & Empathy. History can be used to create a connection to other people, to our past, and to ourselves. By developing these connections, history can help us develop empathy for others. Empathy is the ability to put oneself in the experiences of another, to feel what they feel. This is especially important when it comes to people who seem to…