Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History PART-5 FINAL
One morning, I entered a second-floor classroom at the Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies, a public school in Carroll Gardens not far from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Brooklyn Collaborative Studies adopted the Big History Project as a pilot two years ago after Scott Henstrand, a longtime science teacher, watched Christian’s TED Talk. He pitched the idea to the school’s principal, Alyce Barr, and won her over.
As class came to order and 30 or so teenagers scurried to drop their bags and take their seats, Henstrand introduced the day’s topic: “extinction events,” or why and how various life-forms have died out. He asked his students to contemplate their own extinction event — a somewhat heady question for the teenage mind. As they pondered their eventual nonbeing, Henstrand put on a short video lecture by Christian and took a seat among the students, whom he had clustered in groups of four. Afterward, they were handed iPads with which to generate facts to support their various arguments about human extinction, based on how other species had expired. “I felt that it was great to be able to have your own opinions and then share it with everyone and take in other people’s opinions and use everything that you compile to create new theories and new ideas, and in a way create your own sense of your own belief system,” said Benjamin Campbell, a senior. One of his classmates, a junior, overheard him and chimed in: “At first I hated it, because I was like, ‘I hate science.’ But it actually just opened my perspective that I never knew about. I wasn’t looking forward to it at all, and then I grew to love the class.”
Not all educators are so enthusiastic. Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford, told me that although he sees Big History as “an important intellectual movement,” he did not consider the class to be a suitable replacement for an actual history course. “At certain points, it becomes less history and more of a kind of evolutionary biology or quantum physics. It loses the compelling aspect that is at the heart of the word ‘history.’ ”
Wineburg’s deepest concern about the approach was its failure to impart a methodology to students. “What is most pressing for American high-school students right now, in the history-social-studies curriculum, is: How do we read a text? How do we connect our ability to sharpen our intellectual capabilities when we’re evaluating sources and trying to understand human motivation?” he asked. “When we think about history, what are the primary sources of Big History? The original scientific reports of the Big Bang?” Wineburg, who also has developed an electronic history curriculum, scoffed.
Barr, the principal in Brooklyn, however, came to feel that Gates’s course was better than the existing alternative. “If you were to interview many, many progressive social-studies teachers, they would tell you that World History is a completely flawed course. It’s spotty. It’s like fact soup. Kids don’t come out of it really having a sense of global history,” she told me. “So I said, ‘Why are we doing this?’ ” Last year, Barr allowed the Big History Project to replace World History, which is known as Global Studies in New York, as a required course.
At the end of class, after Henstrand announced the homework assignment, he chatted for a few minutes about the future of the course. He was cautiously optimistic that it would catch on, but he also seemed to recognize how hard it is to innovate in the educational system. “I think many are driven by it, but there are also some that are like: ‘Oh, God, how do we fit this into the requirements of the day? How do we fit this and that?’ ” he said. “This course is a fundamental shift in how you deliver something. But there’s so many factors in American education that work against it.”
In many ways, education is a lousy business. Teachers are not normal economic actors; almost all of them work for less money than they might fetch in some other industry, given their skills and advanced degrees. Students are even weirder economic animals: Most of them would rather do something else with their time than sit in a room and learn algebra, even though the investment is well documented to pay off. By the same token, attempts to paint Bill Gates as a self-interested actor in his education projects don’t make much sense. Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, who charged Microsoft with being a monopoly while a lawyer at the Justice Department, laughed off the idea that Gates had an ulterior fiscal motive. “The notion that he has an agenda other than trying to improve education is just embarrassing,” said Klein, describing how Gates continued to contribute — and even increased his contributions — to New York City public schools during Klein’s tenure. “I can’t think there is a malevolent bone in his body.”
As I walked to the subway, I thought back to my conversations with Gates. Big History may one day become an heir to Western Civ or World History, but that didn’t seem to be Gates’s goal; it was more personal. Really, Big History just seems like a class that he wished he could have taken in high school. But he wasn’t a billionaire then. Now, a flash of inspiration on the treadmill might just lead to something very big.
Andrew Ross Sorkin is a financial columnist for The Times and a co-anchor of CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
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One morning, I entered a second-floor classroom at the Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies, a public school in Carroll Gardens not far from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Brooklyn Collaborative Studies adopted the Big History Project as a pilot two years ago after Scott Henstrand, a longtime science teacher, watched Christian’s TED Talk. He pitched the idea to the school’s principal, Alyce Barr, and won her over.
As class came to order and 30 or so teenagers scurried to drop their bags and take their seats, Henstrand introduced the day’s topic: “extinction events,” or why and how various life-forms have died out. He asked his students to contemplate their own extinction event — a somewhat heady question for the teenage mind. As they pondered their eventual nonbeing, Henstrand put on a short video lecture by Christian and took a seat among the students, whom he had clustered in groups of four. Afterward, they were handed iPads with which to generate facts to support their various arguments about human extinction, based on how other species had expired. “I felt that it was great to be able to have your own opinions and then share it with everyone and take in other people’s opinions and use everything that you compile to create new theories and new ideas, and in a way create your own sense of your own belief system,” said Benjamin Campbell, a senior. One of his classmates, a junior, overheard him and chimed in: “At first I hated it, because I was like, ‘I hate science.’ But it actually just opened my perspective that I never knew about. I wasn’t looking forward to it at all, and then I grew to love the class.”
Not all educators are so enthusiastic. Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford, told me that although he sees Big History as “an important intellectual movement,” he did not consider the class to be a suitable replacement for an actual history course. “At certain points, it becomes less history and more of a kind of evolutionary biology or quantum physics. It loses the compelling aspect that is at the heart of the word ‘history.’ ”
Wineburg’s deepest concern about the approach was its failure to impart a methodology to students. “What is most pressing for American high-school students right now, in the history-social-studies curriculum, is: How do we read a text? How do we connect our ability to sharpen our intellectual capabilities when we’re evaluating sources and trying to understand human motivation?” he asked. “When we think about history, what are the primary sources of Big History? The original scientific reports of the Big Bang?” Wineburg, who also has developed an electronic history curriculum, scoffed.
Barr, the principal in Brooklyn, however, came to feel that Gates’s course was better than the existing alternative. “If you were to interview many, many progressive social-studies teachers, they would tell you that World History is a completely flawed course. It’s spotty. It’s like fact soup. Kids don’t come out of it really having a sense of global history,” she told me. “So I said, ‘Why are we doing this?’ ” Last year, Barr allowed the Big History Project to replace World History, which is known as Global Studies in New York, as a required course.
At the end of class, after Henstrand announced the homework assignment, he chatted for a few minutes about the future of the course. He was cautiously optimistic that it would catch on, but he also seemed to recognize how hard it is to innovate in the educational system. “I think many are driven by it, but there are also some that are like: ‘Oh, God, how do we fit this into the requirements of the day? How do we fit this and that?’ ” he said. “This course is a fundamental shift in how you deliver something. But there’s so many factors in American education that work against it.”
In many ways, education is a lousy business. Teachers are not normal economic actors; almost all of them work for less money than they might fetch in some other industry, given their skills and advanced degrees. Students are even weirder economic animals: Most of them would rather do something else with their time than sit in a room and learn algebra, even though the investment is well documented to pay off. By the same token, attempts to paint Bill Gates as a self-interested actor in his education projects don’t make much sense. Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, who charged Microsoft with being a monopoly while a lawyer at the Justice Department, laughed off the idea that Gates had an ulterior fiscal motive. “The notion that he has an agenda other than trying to improve education is just embarrassing,” said Klein, describing how Gates continued to contribute — and even increased his contributions — to New York City public schools during Klein’s tenure. “I can’t think there is a malevolent bone in his body.”
As I walked to the subway, I thought back to my conversations with Gates. Big History may one day become an heir to Western Civ or World History, but that didn’t seem to be Gates’s goal; it was more personal. Really, Big History just seems like a class that he wished he could have taken in high school. But he wasn’t a billionaire then. Now, a flash of inspiration on the treadmill might just lead to something very big.
Andrew Ross Sorkin is a financial columnist for The Times and a co-anchor of CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
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