A stoush™ has broken out in WA over the Education Minister’s claim that students could just “Google� dates and places.
Ms Ravlich said the advent of Google meant important dates were at students’ fingertips. It was more important that students knew the context in which events took place.
“I think you can overplay the importance of dates, it’s important to understand the context in which history was made,� she said.
“I’m one of these people who have also recognised that time has moved on and any young person, if you ask them to find something, it will probably be at their fingertips.�
The West, and the local ABC talkback show (transcript not available online yet) host are appalled at the Education Minister’s suggestion, appearing to think that Googling is the easy way out. For once, I was pleased with Kim Beazley’s response to the issue, when he explained that, actually, Googling was no better or worse than looking up books in a library; in the same way, the trick is to teach students to use the internet effectively and to ensure everyone has access to this important learning tool.
The Morning Show host said afterwards that he still thinks Kim was joking.
The History Wars™ are fast becoming a joke, and commentators on the issue are demonstrating that they really have no clue about how our children are learning. The journos from The West also demonstrated that they really don’t understand the significance of asking trick questions about naming explorers:
And when asked about the significance of the date 1788 — the year the First Fleet landed — she replied, “I am not getting into that�, and hung up the phone.
It isn’t a good question when you’re asking it of someone who doesn’t believe that facts and figures are the be-all and end-all. It just makes you look like a smart-arse for no good reason. My response (and this is possibly the reason I will never be a Minister of anything) would have been “just bloody Google it, dickhead�.
This whole saga really demonstrated one thing: the History Wars™ are having their desired effect. Today a State Education Minister made the comment that the internet is a valuable tool. The Federal Opposition Leader responded that this is true, and that is why access to broadband is the number one nation-building issue that we need to address – and was accused of avoiding the issue.
No! That’s the whole issue, and for a change, Kim, you’re on the right side of it*. Stay on it, please.
*Just please stop trying to link it back to the skills shortage. It isn’t relevant, nor are the subjects mutually exclusive.
Update (transcript of yesterday’s interview):
BEAZLEY: I love the Gen-X-type response that we got from the West Australian Education Minister today that you see on the front page of the West Australian.
HUTCHISON: Tell me what you thought of that: don’t look it up Google it.
BEAZLEY: Look I tell you what, the Internet is a powerful tool for education. It’s one of the reasons why we need more high-speed broadband – it’s a very powerful tool for education.
HUTCHISON: True but do you really like an Education Minister say: “don’t look it up –Google it�. I’m a parent, that’s an easy option.
BEAZLEY: Well Googling it is also a way of looking it up and there’s enormously useful amount of material on there.
HUTCHISON: There’s a lot of rubbish too.
BEAZLEY: With an awful lot of decent dates in it too I might say. Look, I used to be effectively a teacher of History, it was actually Politics but basically it was International History that I was teaching so I have all the time in the world for history and all the time in the world for people who want to know the why of history, why things happen as well as the dates. But you do need to know the dates as well.
HUTCHISON: So is that a yes, is that a yes or no answer?
BEAZLEY: Look I think Julie Bishop is focused frankly on the wrong thing. I mean I agree with the view that you’ve got know your dates in your history, you’ve got to know the why in history.
Quite frankly the biggest weakness in the education system at the moment is that we’re not turning out enough people who are interested in doing trades and we’re not turning out enough people interested in being engineers. And we’ve got to start to look seriously at things like Trade Taster programs. We’ve got to start looking seriously at maths and sciences, the education there and the attraction for kids to do those courses. We need those scientists; we need those engineers; we need those plumbers; we need those electricians.
HUTCHISON: So in answer to Julie Bishop’s question.
BEAZLEY: It’s a complex answer
HUTCHISON: Mr Beazley with the greatest respect all your answers seem to be complex answers and I can’t help that that’s a perception you constantly have to deal with and can I just bring something to your attention?
[snip: rant about Beazley’s ability to answer questions]
HUTCHISON: I asked a simple question on Australian history and you took two minutes to answer it.
BEAZLEY: Yeah but the simple fact of the matter is, that particular issue requires a bit more sensible consideration and just dismissing out of hand as you did, the idea that you can’t pick up decent amounts of history off the Internet is part of the problem. Why we need high-speed broadband, and when we’re talking about high-speed broadband we’re talking about a speed that’s about 25 times what we have now. It’s not particularly innovative, that will get us up to the level of Slovenia. We need that, because our kids need to have the best possible study tools. And the best possible study tools include the Internet, as well as text books. You can’t just simply drag out a 50 year old text book and say you’ve done your job. These days, kids have to be able to use their computers effectively. I think that frankly, Ljiljanna Ravlich is a little bit more in touch with contemporary education tools than Julie Bishop.
yeah, good.
And good work beazer! that is the first thing he has ever said that is actually worthy of him being PM.
It is about time the reactionaries realised that ‘knowledge’ as such as always been 1) a conduit a power and 2) reliant on technologies of access and distribution. The internet as allowed for other conduits (or teh pipes) as a new form of distribution with relatively greater, more ubiquitous access.
Didn’t these people see Rainman? he knew lots of ‘facts’…
I think this should be used by Labor to capitalise on the difference between them and Liberals. Focusing on facts alone is like a societal form of autism. The capacity to find and put facts together in relevant ways is more important in these new ecologies of knowledge.
Howard and the Liberals are so out of touch with reality.
Good response in my view would be to ask the know-all
No, I don’t know myself, but I believe the substantive fact (that we’ve all but wiped them out) is more important than being able to reel off endless dates and figures without context or analysis.
More telling, Armaniac, would be
One could also ask what is the significance of the date 13th May, 1787. I’m betting the journos at The Worst don’t know without googling/wikipediaing for it.
Similarly you can also google for the context in which events took place (from various points of view). So maybe we could just replace most subjects with one that teaches students how to google(TM) well!
I’d suggest that the conservative and progressive forces can reach a compromise on this issue. What the conservatives really want is good old-fashioned rote-learning; of what hardly matters, since it’s the ability to memorise facts without context that matters in education. The progressives reckon you can get it all with research tools like Google.
Solution: make kids rote-learn a lot of useful Google searches, the Dewey decimal numbers for all areas of Aussie history, the names of at least 50 academic and non-academic historians (to match US students ability to name their presidents) and maybe a few other things of that kind. Problem solved, controversy over. Now can we move on?
chris, your point is not so silly. Internet searching requires the same abilities as other forms of knowledge searching.
What is at stake in these history wars is the importance of importance. Conservative ideologues would like a certain type of ‘importance’ to be important. This ‘importance’ is derived from a configuration of the past that produces the histroy they want everyone to share and have. However, we should be teaching kids to engage with the present in terms of the future. The future involves more forms of knowledge that will be aggregated into databases. Albeit more informal than the internet, but not much different either.
For example, something like wikipedia is actually an act of translation mediated by people between two ways of organising knowledge. From the old book/library model to the newer online expandable and searchable knowledge database. The knowledge itself is largely irrelevant to the everyday lives of those who use it.
I also just sent beaszley congratulating him on his comment.
Everyone forgets Beazley’s profession before entering politics: historian. I’d expect nothing less!
…
Do we get royalties of some sort for the mentions of stoush™?
oh that should read ‘more formal’ not ‘more informal’
“sent beazley an email” ffs!
I’m proud of propagandizing for post-left anarchism where anyone can be a hunter-and-collector on the web and a significant day for me is April 13 1918. The day Marxist’s began systematically killing people is as important as 300 AD when the xtian Constantine also began maiming and killing in the name of ideology. I also remember a time before Google when dinosaurs roamed the land but thats another grand narrative.
If we can leave history alone for a minute, and think about how we learn ‘Science’ as an example. After we do lots of experiments with falling objects, (the fact is when we let many objects go they fall and of course some do rise), and if we are well taught, we develop the concept of ‘gravity’. Over time we may forget those little instances of what fell and when (experiments) because they are a means to an end – the development of the concept of ‘gravity’.
While we might learn heaps of facts in Science, the real purpose is to develop concepts such as ‘energy’, ‘force’, ‘acceleration’, ‘friction’. to name but a few.
Back to History. Do we need facts? Of course we do, because we won’t develop concepts such as Democracy, Justice, Change, Despotism, Fascism, Imperialism, Racism, Lying Rodents and the like unless we have experienced it in some form or other.
I can’t, for example, remember all the lies (facts) the Rodent has told, but I remember some and I now have a concept of the Lying Rodent Well you get the drift, I hope.
Le mot juste, Glen.
When the present looks dodgy, nostalgia is a convenient refuge.
These sincere Tories, aided by much less sincere neo-liberals, are constructing a notional monument to their own childhood, when milk came warm in crates, punishment came in the form of the strap, and ink wells were filled on Monday mornings. Facts were facts, we were all poor but honest, we loved God and our Country, and the Queen occasionally drove past in a Land Rover.
Lefties against facts. How hilarious.
Beazley should show the youngsters how it’s done by googling up some intell on “Reserve Bank Governor”.
And why is it the left has now decided to join pedagogical forces with the fact-averse proponents of intelligent design?
An interesting convergence.
Another quality piece of “Journalism” from the Herdsman Lakes sub-branch of the Liberal Party, aka The West. This sad sorry piece of an excuse of a paper has been running a long standing attack on Ravlich over Outcomes Based Education and frankly, no-one except talk-back hosts and TV Journos take it seriously.
THe “Paper” has a history of bagging the ALP and really it is no surprise that they tried to make the minister look like a goose (she is actually a former teacher herself).
Ahh, the joys of being in a one newspaper town.
skribe: “…One could also ask what is the significance of the date 13th May, 1787…”
Why, its significance lies in the fact that it was 12 days before the opening of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on 5/25/1787.
There’s history, muh boy, and then there’s history…
Hmmmm, given travel times of yore, was it when the First Fleet – laden with Scrotes, Toerags and Blackeyed Susans – embarked from Portsmouth dock for Ostraya?
The funny thing is – when you go to Tasmania – its the same gene pool as you see on that famous portait of the huddled convicts.
“And why is it the left has now decided to join pedagogical forces with the fact-averse proponents of intelligent design?
An interesting convergence.”
No, a boring lie. Get stuffed, troll.
Sorry wpd, but that accumulation of empiric observation ain’t the way we get to the concept of “gravity” at all – and very little of the scientific pedagogy I remember approached scientific theory in that manner.
Taking HSC chemistry as I remember it as an example, you might take it as a fact that Lithium (element 3 if I remember correctly) has 2 1s electrons and 1 2p electron making it the first of the rare earth metals – but there’s already a hell of a lot of theory embedded in that statement of “fact”. There’s a relationship between theory and fact that philosophers of science have been scratching their heads over for quite a while now. While they do, chemists just get on with doing chemistry.
Learning historical events by rote without any analysis of why they happened as they did is like learning the periodic table by rote. Good for passing exams, but unless you have a grasp of why Mendelyev put the table together the way he did, you’ve missed something pretty basic in Chemistry. Proponents of the “history is just a string of events to be memorised” – the ultimate reduction of the Government’s demand that history curricula ensure that students know these landmarks – make the same mistake in respect to history.
Learning historical events by rote without any analysis of why they happened as they did is like learning the periodic table by rote.
Which is why no-one is suggesting any such policy.
Come come, FDB. As you demonstrated yesterday – your lament was “Fuck I’m ignorant” – historical facts can be very handy for anyone wanting to participate in Australian democratic life.
Of all people, you should know how dangerous and tragic is the left’s new pedagogical alliance with creationists.
Why, JPZ! I detect a slight shift in the tone of your comments!
As one Great Satan to another, do say more.
It is always amusing, Armaniac, to be profiled. I, however, am marked for death once I am identified and unable to travel where I will.
Tell me how it feels? I know already.
I am a white American female and feel the hate when I travel..even in Australia where I was last year.
Tell me more about “profiling” wouldja?
”Great Satan”? Bah. This is the same federation of States that enacted the Eighteenth Amendment? You don’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as “Satan”!
I laugh in your national faces.
I hear that mobs of dyslexic ragheads are even now burning the Great Santa in effigy in the streets of Teheran.
They profile fat, bearded, sleigh-driving white men furiously in that Islamic hell-hole.
That’s why they never know it’s Christmas, poor little proto-Islamic tykes.
Who’d want to be anything like them?
They’d never know it’s Christmas unless Bob Geldof got another wank fest on and told em so.
Devil Drink, you must allow me to show you how far, so very far, we have the eighteenth behind.
Or maybe you can’t have one with Satan.
Oh for fuck’s sake, CL. You seem determined to make a liar out of me for claiming that you are capable of better. I take it back, I was wrong.
Chris – to address the comment you made: Ravlich did not in fact say that facts were unimportant, or that we should just leave students to look up Google. That is my entire problem with the way the article is written. It misrepresented her view, and even when I quoted Ravlich directly, people here are still misrepresenting her view. Oh the irony that these are the people up in arms about the importance of “facts�.
When you have a limited amount of time available in which to teach students, then a better education will teach students how to think, how to interpret the world, and obviously – because knowledge doesn’t exist in a vacuum – teaching facts within this framework. But when it comes to doing exams now, you will get more marks for showing that you understand the significance of various events despite getting a couple of dates wrong, than if you got every single date correct but had no idea why they were important enough to be taught in the first place.
If you forget a date you can just look it up – but you can’t quickly Google up the ability to think.
If Bob Geldof looked less like Osama bin Laden, those ragheads would burn him in effigy too.
Lucky for Sir Bob there are so few music lovers in Teheran.
(it’s a jest AW.)
Actually, there are many great people in Iran with satellite dishes.
Many interesting times ahead.
Oh, don’t worry, I respect the great lengths to which current North Americans are going to make up for the shame of Prohibition (except for your beer manufacturers—what an abomination most of them are*). Still, though, ‘The Great Satan’? Come on. The cheese-eating surrender monkeys have done infinitely more for the cause of grog, but where’s their recognition? Pourquoi est-ce q’on peut pas dire ‘Le Grand Satan’?
They do say you can find God everywhere, AK, even at the bottom of a bottle.
Too flambé right you can. It’s the diligent work of My servants like you who clear the space for Him.
*Sam Adams an honourable mention.
And many of these people are music lovers?
Sir Bob had better watch out.
Who said I was looking for God? Though I have emptied a few this evening and saw Allah in one. Thank you baby Jebus..for humanists, not living under Sharia and our good enough beer.
You will make me so upset that no further rational discourse is possible if you insult my choice of drinks. Or possible drinks,
Sayin!
Katz, do not make me agree with you on anything, ok?
That would like, ruin my day.
In the blue corner: CL and Civilisation as we know it.
And in the Red Corner: The Left, Islamic Fundamentalism, Saddam Hussein, the Intelligent Design mob. Oh and the Feminist Hive Mind.
Blimey! Civilisation as we know it is really in trouble.
Agreed AK.
You’ve already agreed with me at least once on this blog! I don’t think it gets worse than that, does it?
There’s a good Katz!
And there are many things we agree on. Quite sure. At least some. Well, perhaps one or two.
Don’t be a hater, at least.
Blew your cover purposefully, did you Anna?
Damn! Should have liked a few more stoushes all anonymously.
You ruined that bit of fun!
I hope I’m not being immodest when I say that I regard myself as one of the more agreeable commenters in cyberspace.
As for hating. It’s one of my least favourite pastimes. (But not as bad as doing my tax.)
Hate is a destructive, self-consuming emotion.
Have I agreed with you twice AW? I wish it were more than twice. I accept your count as correct.
But where, and how?
Gummo, I am well aware that my earlier comment on this blog is simplistic in the extreme.
I know that you can’t get ‘the facts’ until you have ‘the theory’; broadly defined to include ‘concept’, ‘idea’, ‘notion’, ‘assumptions’, etc. For example, you can’t count the number of red objects in a room unless you have an understanding (theory) of what ‘red’ is; what an ‘object’ is; and what constitutes a ‘room’. It would seem that one can never do ‘atheoretical’ research. ETC. Not only does ‘theory’ determine ‘fact’, it also determines the meaning{s} which will then be attributed to those ‘facts’.
I don’t think that this blog is the place to have an epistemological debate and besides those days are now behind me,
My intention was to stress the need to move away from history as ‘Trivial Pursuit’. The ‘facts’ that historians identify are never ‘value free’ and in isolation they are pointless.
I meant Another Kim, Katz. You’ve probably agreed with me far more often, because you seem very intelligent!
C.L.:
“Of all people, you should know how dangerous and tragic is the left’s new pedagogical alliance with creationists.”
Of all people? Do I know you?
Those who don’t agree with you are not intelligent, eh Anna?
You’re getting there…
*runs away before Another Kim can slap her*
Shit shit shit shit.
Do not feed the troll.
No AW, I seem intelligent only because I’m so agreeable.
*Coyly draws little figures with toe in the sand*
Anna, not that I would, but you can’t run that far sistah woman.
No. You get real.
*she shouts a gin and tonic*
The Morning Show host’s name is Geoff Hutchison, and he certainly made a goose (or maybe a dinosaur) of himself.
As usual, Ljiljanna didn’t exactly cover herself in glory either, especially when she made this rather odd comparison:
Yes, andy, that was a bizarre analogy.
As for Hutchison, I think dinosaur. I liked Geraldine.
I’m pretty sure the ABC Employed Hutchison as a Liam Wannabe. Shame the ABC is trying to compete against 6Perth Rednecks with the likes of Sattler and Co.
I know it was a silly analagy by Ravlich, but the West’s “coverage” didn’t help.
I like Liam a lot more now that’s he’s at risk of being hurt in a warzone
It’s called Karma, cos he crossed the picket line when the ABC Journos last went on strike
“When the present looks dodgy, nostalgia is a convenient refuge.”
Ah yes Katz, the whine of the eternally restless liberal progressive, to which the conservative rejoins-
“When the present looks dodgy because of ignorance of past wisdom, the future is a convenient escape.”
I am worried about this.
The truth is getting anything sensible out of Google demands very high levels of critical research and reading skills. In fact you basically have to know what you’re looking for in advance. Don’t forget, you guys are exceptionally internet literate. Most people are not internet literate at all. My first-years this year were astonished to be told that anyone can edit Wikipedia.
Libraries are far, far more expensive to create and maintain than internet connections, so it is expedient to boost google as an equivalent learning resource. This is what is happening at regional universities. Has anyone else here tried to carry out education without a book library backing you up, just the internet? It’s very, very hard. I think the habit of googling actually has a negative effect on people’s ability to think things through. Instead they tend to present work which is pieced together from fragments that aren’t compatible with each other.
I absolutely agree that the generic skills of critical thinking and investigating are the most important things people must learn from their humanities educations, but I don’t think you can learn these effectively without long term exposure to the kind of developed, consistent care and reasoning which is contained in a long work of scholarship and enquiry.
Good one, Obs. “Past wisdom and past experience“, maybe.
I completely agree, Laura, but I thought that her point, while clumsily expressed or reported wasn’t that books were unnecessary, but that in this age access to technology meant that rote learning and recall of dates and names wasn’t so necessary (given of course that we teach students who to be discerning with information on the net).
Obviously while you’re learning the subject – especially if you’re interested in it – you’ll start to absorb a lot of the facts as you go. But it’s more important to retain critical thinking skills than it is to retain dates and names.
But I’m open to being convinced that that isn’t what she meant.
Anna said:
I agree, but thats really no different to how I was marked in history exams a decade or so ago. You were expected to know the facts, but also to understand the significance and meaning of the events.
When it comes to after-school life though, getting basic facts wrong will lead other people to dismiss what might otherwise be quite good interpretations. Perhaps the situation is analagous to the use of calculators at school. The use of them was kind of frowned upon them in the earlier years of school but out in the real world no one does long division by hand. (Scary is seeing shop assistants needing to do very simple maths with calculators though)
No, but you can learn an amazing amount from googling, and not just plain facts, but about different interpretations of events.
Glen said:
Oh I agree, it was a rather flippant remark as well
I’d even go as far as to say that for most people these days who have access to the internet being able to use search tools like google intelligently (and with a healthy dose of skepticism!) is more important than knowing how to look stuff up in library.
All students should also spend time lurking in the USENet newsgroups best known for insisting on rigorous citation standards (any sci.* group, talk.origins, alt.skeptic, alt.folklore.urban etc). A most effective way of learning just how valuable (or not) different types of information sources are.
Agree about the Beazer finally talking sense.
But as with most things in the education wars, I suspect the truth lies in between both positions. Facts without interpretation are not even facts, and if they’re just memorised to regurgitate in exams they won’t be recalled a day afterwards, let alone form a great new breed (or race, pick your throwback to the 19th century term) of Australians.
But being able to locate information requires an existing familiarity with contexts, which then suggests further contexts, and so on.
I don’t know whether anyone else has had to teach or try to teach new tertiary students how to use search strings to locate articles in databases. It’s very much harder to grasp than “just google it” suggests. There’s a reason why librarians are specialists in finding stuff out on the nets. But there’s also a reason why librarians at tertiary institutions specialise in particular disciplines too.
Coming late to this thread, and I hadn’t read the comments and was just responding to the post.
I’ve scrolled up a little and see Laura has said much the same as I.
Also, there are some things libraries do well that the internets don’t do well.
When I first started using a uni library (when I was still in high school – by the time I got to uni I think there were dos based catalogue screens), I came in just in the days when card catalogues were still around. If people think the fight for a library terminal is vicious, they should have seen the fight for Pr-Pz in Undergrad Library at UQ.
So I formed a habit, which I took with me when I started my arts degree – when I was studying Australian politics for instance of just hanging out around JQ in the stacks. What I got was a huge familiarity with every book that was in the UQ’s collection (then excellent – now not maintained very well even as a research library because it’s now a “Cybrary” – ie cutting corners and costs) on that broad topic. Nothing like flicking into and digging into books – much more revelatory of their contents than tags or title searches on the net. Similarly, with journals, you can look at one journal bound volume by bound volume and get a sense of the debates and theoretical developments happening in time that is much harder to get from a database.
There’s something about that which tends to make it easier to weigh up and follow debates – in a way the internet is a great equaliser but it also equalises context and history. If you’re interested in say 80s feminist debates on essentialism (which probably few are nowadays, and that’s my point) you can learn a lot from looking at all the articles in say AFS from 86 through to 89 rather than finding one that sits along others that may have been published elsewhere and ten years later through a database search. And since many journals have not gone to the great expense of scanning in their whole archive, much knowledge is now effectively lost to those without access to journals and books. There are classic articles in sociology published in the 40s which can still speak to us today but don’t because they’re gathering dust in a stack. Similarly, if you’re interested in Simone de Beauvoir, there’s nothing comparable to reading the actual magazines she published in. Because you get the world of ideas that she was working in. Plus you can justify a trip to Paris
I’d add that libraries themselves have been dumbed down. Cataloguing used to be an art. But now staff are few and far between and it’s “easier” to take the publisher’s online description and chuck it into your software. But publishers try and cover all their bases to sell books – hence “this book will be of great interest to students of politics, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and psychology”. That might end up being categorised arbitrarily as psychology by an overworked librarian. But really it’s just marketing, and you have to think about the influence of commerce and managerialism on the classification of knowledge as well as its production.
There ya go Obby. Rob thought your bon mot was so good he decided to improve it!
Which version to lampoon? Decisions, decisions.
OK Rob You’re it.
So I take it, my fine moss-backed interlocutors, you are implying that we have always had this wisdom and/or any attempt to improve upon it will just lead to Bad Things.
So it came to pass some time in the dim past someone said: “Maybe it isn’t a very useful thing to continue to throw virgins into the volcano. The crops don’t seem to improve no matter how many we chuck in. Maybe we’d get better crops if we set these virgins to hoeing the garden instead.”
The elders of the tribe would have shaken their shaggy locks and intoned: “Ah, you radicals, when the present looks dodgy because of ignorance of past wisdom and past experience (thanx Elder Rob) the future is a convenient escape.”
Obby and Rob, your tag-team cracker barrel philosophy allows for no escape from old ways.
But you’ve proven that things can get better. After all, didn’t Rob immensely improve Obby’s stumbling excursion into aphorism?
Kim said:
Do you think that Google’s approach of attemping to index the entire text of just about everything they can get their hands on (papers/books/journals etc) will adequately replace the art of cataloguing?
No.
Did someone mention teh university of teh Internets?
I agree with Laura — marking third year essays which only cite Wikipedia shows exactly why students need to be taught the framework of scholarship. History needs historiography, etc, and not just facts.
That said, I have an appalling memory for dates but a good understanding of context etc. I did very well at uni in history but I always used to have develop mnemonics and spend literally hours learning dates for exams because I just can’t keep numbers in my head. I always knew the facts, but not the years in which they occured.
Cataloguing is an extremely powerful tool when done well. Poor cataloguing might be equivalent to indexing, but good cataloguing saves time and is very useful.
Depends what level of education you’re talking about, Kate. History is about more than sequences, to be sure, but it’s still the best way to start. From there you go to connections, interpretations, meanings, and it gets more complex and demanding as you go. Finally, if you’re a Foucaudian, you have all the fun of working backwards — deconstructing meanings, interpretations and connections, and finally de-sequencing (“Historical events are irruptive in their specificity; all explanation is imposed by the exteriror discourse”). At which point you realise you have denuded the historical landscape of significance and have to start all over again. Wonderful discipline, history.
I googled “History Wars”. So while we’re talking dates when did this current war start?
*Confused*
Update: Partial transcript of interview with Beazley yesterday added to post.
As a reader of “The West Australian” wrote later: “After reading our Education Minister’s latest fatuous remarks, this time on the value of letting Google do the learning, I await, in fear and trepidation, her valuable tips on how to engage students so they will want to learn.” Marina Foster, Menora [Letter to the Editor of The West Australian, published 23 August 2006]