http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/magazine/so-bill-gates-has-this-idea-for-a-history-class.html?_r=0
So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class ...
Photo
Bill Gates, right, with David Christian, a professor from Australia with a new
approach to teaching history. Credit Mark Peterson/Redux, for The New York Times
In 2008, shortly after Bill Gates stepped down from his executive role at
Microsoft, he often awoke in his 66,000-square-foot home on the eastern bank of
Lake Washington and walked downstairs to his private gym in a baggy T-shirt,
shorts, sneakers and black socks yanked up to the midcalf. Then, during an hour
on the treadmill, Gates, a self-described nerd, would pass the time by watching
DVDs from the Teaching Company's "Great Courses" series. On some mornings, he
would learn about geology or meteorology; on others, it would be oceanography
or U.S. history.
As Gates was working his way through the series, he stumbled upon a set of DVDs
titled "Big History" -- an unusual college course taught by a jovial,
gesticulating professor from Australia named David Christian. Unlike the
previous DVDs, "Big History" did not confine itself to any particular topic, or
even to a single academic discipline. Instead, it put forward a synthesis of
history, biology, chemistry, astronomy and other disparate fields, which
Christian wove together into nothing less than a unifying narrative of life on
earth. Standing inside a small "Mr. Rogers"-style set, flanked by an imitation
ivy-covered brick wall, Christian explained to the camera that he was
influenced by the Annales School, a group of early-20th-century French
historians who insisted that history be explored on multiple scales of time and
space. Christian had subsequently divided the history of the world into eight
separate "thresholds," beginning with the Big Bang, 13 billion years ago
(Threshold 1), moving through to the origin of Homo sapiens (Threshold 6), the
appearance of agriculture (Threshold 7) and, finally, the forces that gave
birth to our modern world (Threshold 8).
Continue reading the main story
Threshold 1: The Big Bang Big History Project
Christian's aim was not to offer discrete accounts of each period so much as to
integrate them all into vertiginous conceptual narratives, sweeping through
billions of years in the span of a single semester. A lecture on the Big Bang,
for instance, offered a complete history of cosmology, starting with the
ancient God-centered view of the universe and proceeding through Ptolemy's
Earth-based model, through the heliocentric versions advanced by thinkers from
Copernicus to Galileo and eventually arriving at Hubble's idea of an expanding
universe. In the worldview of "Big History," a discussion about the formation
of stars cannot help including Einstein and the hydrogen bomb; a lesson on the
rise of life will find its way to Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey. "I hope by the
end of this course, you will also have a much better sense of the underlying
unity of modern knowledge," Christian said at the close of the first lecture.
"There is a unified account."
As Gates sweated away on his treadmill, he found himself marveling at the
class's ability to connect complex concepts. "I just loved it," he said. "It
was very clarifying for me. I thought, God, everybody should watch this thing!"
At the time, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had donated hundreds of
millions of dollars to educational initiatives, but many of these were
high-level policy projects, like the Common Core Standards Initiative, which
the foundation was instrumental in pushing through. And Gates, who had recently
decided to become a full-time philanthropist, seemed to pine for a project that
was a little more tangible. He was frustrated with the state of interactive
coursework and classroom technology since before he dropped out of Harvard in
the mid-1970s; he yearned to experiment with entirely new approaches. "I wanted
to explore how you did digital things," he told me. "That was a big issue for
me in terms of where education was going -- taking my previous skills and
applying them to education." Soon after getting off the treadmill, he asked an
assistant to set a meeting with Christian.
Continue reading the main story
A few days later, the professor, who was lecturing at San Diego State
University, found himself in the lobby of a hotel, waiting to meet with the
billionaire. "I was scared," Christian recalled. "Someone took me along the
corridor, knocks on a door, Bill opens it, invites me in. All I remember is
that within five minutes, he had so put me at my ease. I thought, I'm a nerd,
he's a nerd and this is fun!" After a bit of small talk, Gates got down to
business. He told Christian that he wanted to introduce "Big History" as a
course in high schools all across America. He was prepared to fund the project
personally, outside his foundation, and he wanted to be personally involved.
"He actually gave me his email address and said, 'Just think about it,' "
Christian continued. " 'Email me if you think this is a good idea.' "
Christian emailed to say that he thought it was a pretty good idea. The two men
began tinkering, adapting Christian's college course into a high-school
curriculum, with modules flexible enough to teach to freshmen and seniors
alike. Gates, who insisted that the course include a strong digital component,
hired a team of engineers and designers to develop a website that would serve
as an electronic textbook, brimming with interactive graphics and videos. Gates
was particularly insistent on the idea of digital timelines, which may have
been vestige of an earlier passion project, Microsoft Encarta, the electronic
encyclopedia that was eventually overtaken by the growth of Wikipedia. Now he
wanted to offer a multifaceted historical account of any given subject through
a friendly user interface. The site, which is open to the public, would also
feature a password-protected forum for teachers to trade notes and update and,
in some cases, rewrite lesson plans based on their experiences in the classroom.
Photo
Credit Dan Winters for The New York Times
Gates, who had already learned about the limitations of large bureaucracies
through his foundation, insisted that the course be pitched to individual
schools, rather than to entire districts; that way, he reasoned, it could grow
organically and improve as it did so, just like a start-up company. In 2011,
the Big History Project debuted in five high schools, but in the three years
since, Gates and Christian -- along with a team of educational consultants,
executives and teachers, mostly based in Seattle -- have quietly accelerated
its growth. This fall, the project will be offered free to more than 15,000
students in some 1,200 schools, from the Brooklyn School for Collaborative
Studies in New York to Greenhills School in Ann Arbor, Mich., to Gates's alma
mater, Lakeside Upper School in Seattle. And if all goes well, the Big History
Project will be introduced in hundreds of more classrooms by next year and
hundreds, if not thousands, more the year after that, scaling along toward the
vision Gates first experienced on that treadmill. Last month, the University of
California system announced that a version of the Big History Project course
could be counted in place of a more traditional World History class, paving the
way for the state's 1,300 high schools to offer it.
Continue reading the main story
"We didn't know when the last time was that somebody introduced a new course
into high school," Gates told me. "How does one go about it? What did the guy
who liked biology -- who did he call and say, 'Hey, we should have biology in
high school?' It was pretty uncharted territory. But it was pretty cool."
The American high school experience, at least as we now know it, is a
relatively recent invention. Attendance did not start to become mandatory until
the 1850s, and the notion of a nationwide standardized curriculum didn't emerge
until the turn of the century. But by the early 1900s, most children were
taking the same list of classes that remains recognizable to this day: English,
math, science and some form of history. For much of the 20th century, this last
requirement would usually take the form of Western Civilization, a survey
course that focused on European countries from around the rise of Rome through
modernity.
But by the early '70s, as the Vietnam War heightened interest in nations
outside Europe, Western Civ was on the decline. In pedagogical circles, a book
called "The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community," by William
Hardy McNeill, a historian at the University of Chicago, persuasively argued
that Western Civ was not merely biased against other cultures but also failed
to account for the enormous influence that cultures had on one another over the
millenniums. In 1976, McNeill told a roomful of teachers at an American
Historical Association meeting, "I find the apathy truly amazing; suicidal;
absurd."
In the wake of McNeill's rebuke, Western Civ was slowly replaced by World
History, a more comparative class that stressed broad themes across cultures
and disciplines. Over the past 30 years, World History has produced its own
formidable academic institutions and journals; these days, three-quarters of
all American students take World History. The course was just beginning its
ascent as David Christian, then a young professor at Macquarie University in
Sydney, was incubating his own form of cross-disciplinary scholarship.
Christian, who was teaching a course on Russian history, liked to examine his
subjects from a number of unconventional angles. In the 19th century, "on
average, 40 percent of Russia's revenues came from vodka sales, so what I
realized is that if Russians stopped drinking vodka, you can't pay for the
army, and the superpower collapses," he told me. "So I thought, Here's a modern
government building its power by selling a mind-altering substance. I was
looking at it at the fiscal level, at the treasury level -- but also in the
village and also in the tavern."
Christian began wondering if he could apply this everything-is-connected idea
to a larger scale: "I began thinking, Could I teach a course not of Russia but
of humanity?" He soon became infatuated with the concept. "I remember the chain
of thought," he said. "I had to do prehistory, so I have to do some
archaeology. But to do it seriously, I'm going to talk about how humans
evolved, so, yikes, I'm in biology now. I thought: To do it seriously, I have
to talk about how mammals evolved, how primates evolved. I have to go back to
multicelled organisms, I have to go back to primeval slime. And then I thought:
I have to talk about how life was created, how life appeared on earth! I have
to talk geology, the history of the planet. And so you can see, this is pushing
me back and back and back, until I realized there's a stopping point -- which
is the Big Bang." He paused. "I thought, Boy, would that be exciting to teach a
course like this!"
Continue reading the main story
His interest in transcending borders perhaps derived from his own peripatetic
childhood. Born in Brooklyn to an American mother and a British father,
Christian spent the first seven years of his life in Nigeria and then was
shipped off to an English boarding school. (To this day, his accent -- a
bewildering mix of Colonial English, Eton and Jackie Gleason -- reflects this
unusual provenance.) Sitting along a wooden table in a Midtown Manhattan hotel,
Christian delighted in recounting the first year he taught his
history-of-everything course, in 1989, at Macquarie. Perhaps unwisely, he had
committed to teaching it to incoming freshmen, some 300 students. "We didn't
know what we were doing, but the really magical thing, and I think it's what
still drives me today, was the reaction of the students," he said. "What this
course can do, however it's taught, is validate big questions" -- How did we
get here? for instance, or Where are we going? -- "that are impossible to even
ask within a more silo-ized education."
The Macquarie course quickly became oversubscribed, and within a few years,
Christian was receiving calls from other universities, asking for advice on how
they might offer something similar. In 2005, he received an invitation to speak
at a conference in Boothbay Harbor, Me., where he was spotted by a scout for
the Teaching Company, who asked him to tape the class in their studios just
outside Washington. The 48-lecture DVD set was released in early 2008. Gates
was one of his first viewers.
Christian, who is 67, now travels the world as something of an evangelist for
the spread of the Big History Project. (His TED Talk, "The History of Our World
in 18 Minutes," has been viewed more than four million times online.) Since
introducing the course to high-school students, he and Gates realized that they
needed to make a few adjustments to help it catch on. They have monitored
teacher feedback closely and decreased the course in size, from 20 units to 10.
True to Christian's original style, however, the high-school course links
insights across subjects into wildly ambitious narratives. The units begin with
the Big Bang and shift to lesson plans on the solar system, trade and
communications, globalization and, finally, the future. A class on the
emergence of life might start with photosynthesis before moving on to
eukaryotes and multicellular organisms and the genius of Charles Darwin and
James Watson. A lecture on the slave trade might include the history of coffee
beans in Ethiopia.
"Most kids experience school as one damn course after another; there's nothing
to build connections between the courses that they take," says Bob Bain, a
professor of history and education at the University of Michigan and an adviser
to the Big History Project, who has helped devise much of the curriculum. "The
average kid has no way to make sense between what happens with their
first-period World History class and their second-period algebra class,
third-period gym class, fourth-period literature -- it's all disconnected. It's
like if I were to give you a jigsaw puzzle and throw 500 pieces on the table
and say, 'Oh, by the way, I'm not going to show you the box top as to how they
fit together.' "
Continue reading the main story
One muggy and overcast afternoon last fall, I met with Gates and Christian in a
conference room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Gates, who
operates a bit like an unofficial head of state, is managed down to the precise
minute by an innumerable team of handlers and schedulers and assistants. The
table before him was filled with strewn papers and gadgets, a handful of
folders with old-fashioned Brother P-Touch labels and two Microsoft Surface
tablet computers. A plainclothes security detail stood watch in the hallway.
Photo
Christian and Gates at the Four Seasons in New York. Credit Mark
Peterson/Redux, for The New York Times
Gates, who is 58, was wearing a rumpled blue monogrammed shirt. He is slim and
speaks in a sort of nasal staccato, often adding exclamation to sentences that
might not seem to require them. But his curiosity about education is innate and
at times obsessive. Without prompting, he recounted getting a bad grade in an
eighth-grade geography course ("They paired me up with a moron, and I realized
these people thought I was stupid, and it really pissed me off!") and the only
C-plus he ever received, in organic chemistry, at Harvard ("I'm pretty sure.
I'd have to double-check my transcript. I think I never ever got a B ever at
Harvard. I got a C-plus, and I got A's!").
Since starting his foundation in 2000, Gates has donated about $30 billion to
organizations focusing largely on global health and development. The Gates
Foundation has spent more than half a billion on educational causes, which
provides some context for the comparatively modest $10 million that he has
personally invested in the Big History Project. Nevertheless, Gates has
insisted on tracking this venture as he would any Microsoft product or
foundation project. The Big History Project produces reams of data -- students
and teachers are regularly surveyed, and teachers submit the results from
classes, all of which allows his team to track what's working and what isn't as
the course grows. "Our priority," he told me from across the table, "was to get
it into a form where ambitious teachers could latch onto it."
In our conversation, Gates was forthright about the challenges the project has
faced, particularly early on. Few schools had teachers who were willing or able
to instruct a hybrid course; some schools wound up requiring that two teachers
lead the class together. Gates, who had hoped to avoid bureaucracy, found
himself mired in it. "You've got to get a teacher in the history department and
the science department -- they have to be very serious about it, and they have
to get their administrative staff to agree. And then you have to get it on the
course schedule so kids can sign up," he said. "So they have to decide, kind of
in the spring or earlier, and those teachers have to spend a lot of that summer
getting themselves ready for the thing." He sighed.
Perhaps the largest challenge facing the Big History Project, however, is Gates
himself, or at least the specter of him. To his bafflement and frustration, he
has become a remarkably polarizing figure in the education world. This owes
largely to the fact that Gates, through his foundation, has spent more than
$200 million to advocate for the Common Core, something of a third rail in
education circles. He has financed an army of policy groups, think tanks and
teachers' unions to marshal support for the new rules and performance
measurements that have been adopted by 44 states. Many education experts, while
generally supportive of the new goals for reading and math skills, have been
critical of the seemingly unilateral way in which the policy appeared to be
rolled out. The standards have engendered public anger on both the right and
left, and some states, including Indiana and Oklahoma, have decided to repeal
the Common Core altogether.
Continue reading the main story
In March, the American Federation of Teachers announced that it would no longer
accept grants from the Gates Foundation for its innovation fund, which had
already received more than $5 million from the organization. As Randi
Weingarten, the A.F.T. president, told Politico, "I got convinced by the level
of distrust I was seeing -- not simply on Twitter, but in listening to members
and local leaders -- that it was important to find a way to replace Gates's
funding." When I spoke with Weingarten last month, she elaborated on her union
members' problem with Gates. "Instead of actually working with teachers and
listening to what teachers needed to make public eduction better," she said,
Gates's team "would work around teachers, and that created tremendous distrust."
Teachers, she continued, feared that his foundation was merely going to reduce
them to test scores. While Weingarten said that she tried to work with Gates to
"pierce" the animosity, she ultimately chose to part ways because "our members
perceived that we were doing things in our support of Common Core because of
the Gates Foundation, as opposed to because it was the right thing to do." It
was a difficult decision, Weingarten said. "Bill Gates has more money than God.
People just don't do what we did."
Beginning with the Carnegies and the Rockefellers, billionaires have long seen
the nation's education as a willing cause for their philanthropy -- and, with
it, their own ideas about how students should learn. The latest crop of
billionaires, however, has tended to take the line that fixing our broken
educational system is the key to unlocking our stagnant economy. Whether it's
hedge-fund managers like Paul Tudor Jones (who has given tens of millions to
support charter schools) or industrialists like Eli Broad (who has backed
"blended learning" programs that feature enhanced technology), these
philanthropists have generally espoused the idea that education should operate
more like a business. (The Walton Foundation, backed by the family that founded
Walmart, has taken this idea to new heights: It has spent more than $1 billion
supporting various charter schools and voucher programs that seek to establish
alternatives to the current public-school system.) Often these patrons want to
restructure the system to make it more efficient, utilizing the latest
technology and management philosophies to turn out a new generation of
employable students.
For many teachers, Weingarten explained, this outside influence has become
off-putting, if not downright scary. "We have a really polarized environment in
terms of education, which we didn't have 10 years ago," she said. "Public
education was a bipartisan or multipartisan enterprise -- it didn't matter if
you were a Republican or Democrat or elite or not elite. People viewed public
education as an anchor of democracy and a propeller of the economy in the
country." Now, she said, "there are people that have been far away from
classrooms who have an outsize influence on what happens inside classrooms.
Beforehand, the philanthropies were viewed as one of many voices in education.
Now they are viewed -- and the market reformers and the tech folks -- as the
dominant forces, and as dissonant to those who work in schools every day. She
took a deep breath and softened her tone: "In some ways, I give Bill Gates huge
credit. Bill Gates took a risk to get engaged. The fact that he was willing to
step up and say, 'Public education is important,' is very different than
foundations like the Walton Foundation, who basically try to undermine public
education at every opportunity."
Continue reading the main story
Gates appears to have been chastened by his experience with the A.F.T. When he
speaks about his broader educational initiatives, he is careful to mention that
the change he supports comes from the teachers, too. "When Melinda and I go on
the road and talk to teachers, it's just so clear there is a real hunger for
this," he said. "If you can take a teacher and give him or her the help to
become a great teacher, everyone benefits: the kids, the teacher, the
community, the unions. Everyone."
Gates resists any suggestion that Big History is some sort of curio or vanity
project. But some of this earlier antipathy has raised skepticism about his
support of the Big History Project. "I just finished reading William Easterly's
'The Tyranny of Experts,' " says Scott L. Thomas, dean of the School of
Educational Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California. "It's about
philanthropists and their effect on the poor globally. It's this exact idea
that here you have this 'expert' in the middle" -- that is, Gates -- "enabling
the pursuit of this project. And frankly, in the eyes of the critics, he's
really not an expert. He just happens to be a guy that watched a DVD and
thought it was a good idea and had a bunch of money to fund it."
Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University who has been a
vocal critic of Gates, put even it more starkly: "When I think about history, I
think about different perspectives, clashing points of view. I wonder how Bill
Gates would treat the robber barons. I wonder how Bill Gates would deal with
issues of extremes of wealth and poverty." (The Big History Project doesn't
mention robber barons, but it does briefly address unequal distribution of
resources.) Ravitch continued: "It begins to be a question of: Is this Bill
Gates's history? And should it be labeled 'Bill Gates's History'? Because Bill
Gates's history would be very different from somebody else's who wasn't worth
$50-60 billion." (Gates's estimated net worth is approximately $80 billion.)
On some level, Gates's experience in pushing through the Common Core seems to
be a large part of what so excites him about the Big History Project: This
small initiative, largely unburdened by bureaucracy, relies on technology and
teachers who are willingly submitting to all matter of data analytics. He is
pleased, he said, that the course has more than doubled in each of its first
three years, and he expects that growth to follow in the future. One day,
perhaps, Big History might even become a successor to Western Civ and World
History. "The current thought is that in another three years, the quality of
the material, the tools that let people add in new chapters and things, the
broad awareness will be such that the community takes it over, and it achieves
whatever natural level it's going to get to," he said. But he also noted that
Big History -- which is already being offered in South Korea, the Netherlands
and, of course, Australia -- had significant global potential. "It would be
nice to find both educators and philanthropists[in foreign countries] that want
to carry the torch -- which actually, in some countries, I can think of people
who would do it."
Continue reading the main story
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.
Continue reading the main story
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.
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