Professor David Christian’s “Big History” synthesizes “history, biology, chemistry, astronomy and other disparate fields” into “a unifying narrative of life on earth,” writes Andrew Ross Sorkin in the New York Times Magazine.
More than a thousand U.S. high schools are trying the 10-module course. Wait for the shoe . . . Bill Gates is funding Big History. He discovered Christian’s college course on video while walking on his treadmill. It’s what he would have loved to have taken in high school.
If Gates loves it, a lot of other people hate it, of course. But is it a useful way to make connections? Or a fad? I can’t tell from the description.
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.
. . . 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.
Gates hired engineers and designers to develop the web site, which has lots of graphics and videos.
This fall, Big History is being “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.”
I loved Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man when it was on TV, ages ago.