Sam Weinburg argues in Why Learn History? that the importance of a historical education comes (or at least should come) from the critical thinking and analysis skills it helps to develop rather than presenting detached “facts” as absolute truth. Weinburg attacks the notion of learning by textbook, pointing out that it presents a particular view of history to students without drawing attention to other interpretations, primary sources, or contextual data or events. The key to historical thinking is understanding people and events in the context in which they lived or occured, not from our present point of view. By relying on a textbook for most of their educational career, students come into college not only with a narrow understanding of history, but also without the framework needed to think historically. Teaching history teaches critical thinking and allows students to move past the idea that history is just about memorization and knowledge and to develop an understanding of the importance of context.

Weinburg uses examples effectively to communicate his ideas. The experience of the elementary school principal, Colleen, was especially powerful to me in showing how difficult it can be to break out of the textbook mindset. Even after attending a seminar about teaching skills and having her historical knowledge changed as a result of learning a new point of view, Colleen made the exact same mistake in her own writing that the textbook authors made. Her passage, rather than assessing the context of the topic, presented her own point of view in the same third-person style that the textbook she now disagreed with did. Although Colleen’s view of the individual topic developed, her intellectual framework was not truly changed. This is a trap that teachers of history must be careful to avoid.

The other example I found most interesting was the comparison between the evaluation of online sources between academics and fact checkers. Initially, I thought that the historians would certainly be at least as good (if not better) than the fact checkers in evaluating online sources, but the results were the complete opposite. As Weinburg notes, this indicates that the way we interpret digital sources and information is fundamentally different from how we interpret physical data. Additionally, it calls to attention how important verifying source is and shows how influential online gateways like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit can be in deciding what information and source is prioritized. Context is more than merely temporal; where the information about an event or person comes from is just as important as the information itself.

Weinburg’s answer to his own question is that we teach history to not only educate students about our past, but to educate them about how to think about the past. The most important lesson I learned in philosophy was that metathought was as important as thought itself, and that is absolutely true in history as well.