As I was reading a post about The Misuse of the Napoleon Complex at Matthew Tabor’s site, a line under the first point on Napoleon jumped out at me. The line is:
“About 3 minutes into any responsible History 101 course, you’ll hear something about the fallacy of evaluating people/events in history by today’s standards - committing that fallacy perpetuates dumb myths like this one.”
These statements are all too true regarding responsible History. However, the key word is responsible in that line. But what about how the children are taught to perceive topics?
In the first grade curriculum, children are taught to believe in what has not been proven. For example, it is taught nomads of an unknown origin came to the Mesopotamian region and formed the first city. The omissions are where these people came from and the rest of the world. Furthermore, this is a concept and not a proven fact as the supposed events took place before the recorded past or history. Which means there is no observational data to confirm these beliefs and no method of validation or corroboration as it rests outside of the recorded past or outside of History. So History is not necessarily truly History from the onset. It is a set of beliefs about the past being asserted.
But where is the curriculum crossover? Quite simply, we get it from the Science curriculum. In particular, I am talking about the concept of Uniformitarianism. This concept in Science is largely attributed to James Hutton from his book Theory of the Earth. His book gave rise to the concept of the earth being millions of years old and uniformitarianism. Big word but it has a meaning strikingly similar to Matthew’s responsible History 101 line. Quite simply it is the assumption that the natural processes operating in the past are the same as those that can be observed operating in the present.
Let me break it down. In Science many branches took on the concept of Uniformitarianism as an assumed basis by which to form a bias or view of the world and the past. Assumptions are rarely correct and prone to error. But this is pumped into children starting as soon as they read a few Dr. Seuss books. It is drilled into the children that we are to view the past in terms of what we see and experience today. It of no coincidence that this concept has quietly seeped into the study of History as the same methods of studying history are identical to the empirical scientific method. A bias is forced and both subjects are then distorted both from the viewpoint of the students and those who desire to study History or Science.
The crucial issue to remember is the children are not like adults. They do not specialize in one subject as they are taught all of the subjects simultaneously. If one subject is off or promoting a fallacy, the fallacy will extend into the other subjects.
With this in mind, is it a surprise assumptions and a belief in fallacy rule the day when the true data is distorted or omitted?
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