Is History the easiest or the hardest subject?
Somewhere, Aristotle argues that the only subject that can be taught to adolescents is mathematics because it is abstract: for all other knowledge, experience is requested, which young people (not their fault) do not possess.
This statement has always seemed very sensible to me. Mathematics is universally perceived by students as a “difficult” subject because it is the only one that, structurally, must always be known in its entirety and all at once. It is simply impossible to tackle a more complex topic (let’s say, to stay at the Italian high school level, second-degree equations) without knowing a less complex topic (let’s say, again, for example, the rules for forming polynomials).
Generally, in the practice of learning, students underestimate the need to confidently master the simpler structures of mathematics, and when they realize that these structures, addressed by teachers in previous years, are essential for operating on the more complex structures of the following years, it is often too late. Hence the continuous state of stress and breathlessness, which characterizes the experience of many students in high schools.
But this is a trend due to the behaviour of students, not to the subject itself. In mathematics, the canonical distinction is very evident, perhaps more than elsewhere:
- knowledge (pure information)
- skills (the application of knowledge in a context controlled by the teacher)
- competencies (the application of knowledge in a context NOT controlled by the teacher, or at least not completely controlled by the teacher)
Skills are essential to solving the exercises proposed by the textbook and the teacher, and these represent almost all of the experience that students have of “doing mathematics.” Applying mathematics to the “real” world (say, predicting how many students will enroll in medicine and engineering based on the known percentages of students who read science fiction and history books or how many scooters will be circulating on the streets of Milan next year, given the current numbers and sales rates), is not even discussed, as far as I know: precisely, it is an abstract and formalized subject, where the real point is to understand the algorithm, that is, the “logical mechanism” that governs its functioning. Once that is understood and how to apply it in exercises, the game (at school) is done.
History is the opposite. It is a bottomless pit of information that must be known to orient oneself and give substance to the long-term dynamics that support history. To paraphrase Kant:
Historical data without long-term dynamics are blind, and long-term dynamics without historical data are empty.
The problem is that the mass of data that one should know is immense, and, what is more serious, it is continually growing: time certainly does not stop to wait for history teachers to catch up to where it has arrived.
I can give you two pieces of data to reflect on:
- when I wrote my book on the explorations of the fifteenth century (a book of just 338 pages), I read at least 200 books (that’s how many are cited in the bibliography, but I know for sure, directly from the author, that many others did not have the privilege of being mentioned in the footnotes)
- more generally, it seems reasonable that on any event and any figure in history, at least one book has been written and that to be able to speak with authority on an event one should have read at least one book about it.
How many books should you read to master “History”? Every page of a textbook contains (at least) 10 to 20 citations of events or figures. A standard textbook of History, in Italy, sails above 600 pages (a figure that must be multiplied by three): the order of magnitude of the library that one should possess to truly know history is very considerable and de facto impossible to read too (we are talking about a minimum of 20,000 books: even reading one a week, it would take about 400 years to read them all).
Of course, no one thinks of studying or teaching history in this way: in the end, teachers of the last generations in Italy have turned to the opposite extreme, and according to ministry statistics, they are among those who assign the lowest percentage of exams in September.
Just to give a concrete example, here is the data from a prestigious Milanese high school, the Liceo Volta, where a commendable Statistical Commission operates: in the graph below, you can see the resits in this school.
As you can see, only Philosophy and Physical education assigned fewer resits than history.
In short, History as a subject is so hard that in the end, it has become too easy.
It’s really as if we teachers who teach it have thrown in the towel, admitting that the amount of work is so great that it cannot be demanded of students.
But is it so?
