{"id":240,"date":"2014-10-18T00:04:00","date_gmt":"2014-10-18T06:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/10\/the-spartans-and-history.html"},"modified":"2015-02-26T23:14:56","modified_gmt":"2015-02-27T05:14:56","slug":"the-spartans-and-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/10\/the-spartans-and-history.html","title":{"rendered":"The Spartans and History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Last Friday, my kids had the day off school due to a teacher in-service day, and \u2014 how he ended up with this I don\u2019t know \u2014 my middle son spent quite some time watching a youtube video<\/a> of the Battle of Thermopylae from the History Channel, and spent the greater part of our walk to Noodles & Co., and the dinner itself, and the walk home, retelling the story to my husband. \u00a0He announced that he wanted to be a historian \u2014 one of those guys that appeared in the History Channel documentaries (yes, now more readily found on youtube than on the TV) \u2014 and when we discussed the job market, conceded that he could consider something more pedestrian such as being a high school history teacher. <\/p>\n

And a couple days ago, collegeinsurrection.com<\/a> linked to the Wall Street Journal,<\/a> which summarized the results of the What Will They Learn<\/a> study on the strength or weakness of core education requirements at universities, giving universities an \u201cA\u201d if they require at least six of the seven core subjects of composition, literature, foreign language (3 semesters), US government or history (survey course), economics, math, and science, vs. an F if one or none of these subjects is required.<\/p>\n

(My Alma Mater Michigan State earned a C, for requiring math, science, and composition; the flagship University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign earned an F, with its only requirement of the 7 being foreign language; Notre Dame earned a B for requiring math, science, composition, and foreign language. \u00a0Looking at their ratings more generally, it seems to be exceedingly rare for a US history class to be required, though, to be sure, in principle, the rating is based on the narrow requirement of US history so conceivably a class in European or World history could be required at some of these schools and still fail to satisfy the criteria.)<\/p>\n

Anyway, this all led me to think about the bigger-picture question of \u201cwhy study history?\u201d remembering my days of thinking about how to communicate exactly this, as I adjunct-taught <\/a>for a semester before leaving the Academy for a job that would actually pay real money. <\/p>\n

Of course, there\u2019s the dictum about not knowing and repeating history, but it\u2019s not really that. \u00a0Most of the time, when we think we understand the \u201clessons\u201d of history, we\u2019re wrong, because whatever situation we think we\u2019re comparing the present to, isn\u2019t really comparable. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear that a decent understanding of the recent past is fairly important for understanding the world today. \u00a0How does the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and the War on Poverty impact African-Americans today? \u00a0How did World War II and the Cold War create our modern world? \u00a0How did China come out of seemingly nowhere to have such a dominant spot in manufacturing? \u00a0Why is the Middle East such a gigantic mess? \u00a0etc. \u00a0But how far back can you take this \u201cunderstand how the world got where it is today\u201d approach to the \u201cwhy\u201d of history? \u00a0Certainly it doesn\u2019t give you a reason for studying the ancient Greeks, except to the extent that you just want to for fun.<\/p>\n

But here are two other reasons:<\/p>\n

First of all, studying history, even of the fairly distant past, teaches that decisions have consequences, sometimes quite unintended consequences that couldn\u2019t have been at all foreseen at the time. \u00a0The Persian War, the cause of all the trouble at Themopylae, was, as described in this documentary, the consequence of Darius, and then his son Xerxes seeking revenge for the Athenians having aided rebellious Greek cities at the edge of the Persian Empire. \u00a0Oops. \u00a0It\u2019s reasonably well-known that the Romans invited various Germanic tribes to serve as mercenary soldiers, who then got it in their head that they should make themselves at home. \u00a0Sometimes, the \u201cunintended consequences\u201d were truly unknowable and extraordinarily far-reaching, such as the deadly spread of Old World diseases in the New World, or (this came from a History Channel documentary back in the days when the History Channel featured history) the tale that when the Vikings travelled to the coast of North America, they met with seemingly-friendly natives, offered them their food and drink, and the next day those natives weren\u2019t so friendly any longer \u2014 because, the speculation goes, the drink was milk or milk-based, the indigenous Americans had no dairying culture, and were lactose intolerant, and all got sick and thought the Vikings were poisoning them. \u00a0Had this not happened, the speculation goes, the First Contact between the hemispheres could have been peaceful and permanent, and would have made for a radically different course of events. <\/p>\n

The point is that studying history means learning about Cause and Effect with illustrations from some concrete time period or another.<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s the second reason: \u00a0history = multiculturalism. \u00a0Oh, I don\u2019t mean that you can study the history of the Oppressed Group of your choice. \u00a0I mean that, if multiculturalism is about learning that there are other cultures out there in the world which are different than your own (rather than learning about this history of \u201cunderrepresented minorities\u201d in the United States), then pretty much every era of history except our own recent past qualifies. <\/p>\n

I mean, it\u2019s the Spartans! \u00a0\u2014 exposing your child if the elders deemed him unfit. \u00a0A harsh life of military training beginning in childhood, in order to, first, obtain slaves to farm the fields, and, second, keep those slaves from rebelling, and, incidentally, to gain honor as the 300 did. \u00a0A young man, being presented with his shield, is told, \u201cwith it or on it\u201d \u2014 that is, come home from battle with your shield intact, successful in battle, or be carried home, dead. \u00a0How much more foreign can you get?<\/p>\n

Or perhaps the middle ages, with your future largely dictated by your birth \u2014 as the child of a knight or a peasant \u2014 or perhaps with the exciting possibilities of the emerging cities, or perhaps cut short by plague or raiders or war, but with so many unknowns about the world that they sought out supernatural explanations.<\/p>\n

So three cheers for history!<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Friday, my kids had the day off school due to a teacher in-service day, and \u2014 how he ended up with this I don\u2019t know \u2014 my middle son spent quite some time watching a youtube video of the Battle of Thermopylae from the History Channel, and spent the greater part of our walk […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[182,181],"class_list":["post-240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-history","tag-sparta"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Spartans and History<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Last Friday, my kids had the day off school due to a teacher in-service day, and -- how he ended up with this I don't know -- my middle son spent quite\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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