“Does Anybody Really Know What Time, er Truth Is?”
Part of the context in which learning takes place is the culture to which the students belong. From our culture, students derive a number of fundamental misunderstandings about historical truth.
Probably the most common misconception among my students is that there is in fact some agreed-upon set of historical “facts” that constitute objective history. This stems from the way history is taught in most public schools, and from the limited exposure most students have to history books, as opposed to school texts. Very few students understand that historical scholarship consists mainly of reviewing surviving documents and artifacts in an attempt to write a (hopefully) more accurate, but still inconclusive version of the past. No doubt they’d be disappointed, if they only knew!
A second misconception has to do with the purposes of history. Virtually no one remembers what Herodotus and Thucydides, who wrote the first attempts at historical research, set out to [...]
Original post by urbansocrates
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