Nevertheless Jefferson signed legislation decreeing a “Corps of Engineers,” and thus West Point was to become “one of the premier science and engineering schools, producing generations of technically skilled graduates who populated the growing ranks of military and civilian engineers.”It is almost as though, according to how some folks tell it, computers suddenly emerged in the classroom, unencumbered by the past or by ideology – like Athena springing out of Zeus’s skull, fully armored, supernaturally intelligent, a god of wisdom and warfare.“The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people,” its opening paragraph pronounced. Dropping History as a universal subject will only increase rootlessness among young people. That great truth cannot be repeated too often. The would-be travellers who learn French have not appeared out of the void but are themselves historical beings. Here are the main ones: • At least for large-scale political processes, explanations always make implicit or explicit assumptions concerning historical origins of the phenomenon and time-place scope conditions for the claimed explanation. “I’m beginning to suspect,” he tweeted, that history is “less and less relevant in understanding the near (and far) future.”Again, I don’t say this to suggest that “nothing has changed.” I don’t say this to suggest that ClassDojo is inevitable.Why bells? History will never be irrelevant (even if our leaders and musical guest stars on Saturday Night Live appear to be ignorant of it).I’ll skip the history of the school bell (although I’d add that with the increased focus lately on school shootings and on “school safety” and the adoption of more and more surveillance technologies, you should, as education technologists, know a bit about when and why bells and alarms came to be, and how that’s changed the culture and the environment of a school. Which classrooms, whose classrooms have sunlight? 'I did not say it [History] was bunk', he elaborated: 'It was bunk Later in life, Henry Ford himself became a keen collector of early American antique furniture, as well as of classic automobiles. the answer is that History is inescapable. In this way, he paid tribute both to his cultural ancestry and to the cumulative as well as revolutionary transformations in human transportation to which he had so notably contributed.Learning the French language is a valuable human enterprise, and not just for people who live in France or who intend to travel to France. But it is still worth thinking about the blackboard as a disciplinary technology – one that molds and constrains what happens in the classroom, one that (ostensibly) makes visible the mind and the character of the person at the board, whether that’s a student or a teacher. Which doors have locks? He had spent the previous All people and peoples are living histories. Such pedagogic styles are best outlawed, although the information that they intended to convey is far from irrelevant.People need mental frameworks that are primed to understand and to assess the available data and – as often happens – to challenge and update both the frameworks and the details too. Increasingly, I suppose, it’s a whiteboard, perhaps one with a touchscreen computer attached. Legacies from the past are preserved but also adapted, as each generation transmits them to the following one. What kinds of windows? In other words, if History is not meaningless As living creatures, humans have an instinctive Noting two weak arguments in favour of studying HistoryWell, then, what is the use of History, if it is only Such educational processes are a long, long way from memorising lists of facts. Why history matters. We talk about how these machines might augment human intelligence, might even display an intelligence of their own, without really considering the history – the ugly history – of intelligence quotients and intelligence testing, for starters.These are powerful, influential people shaping education policy, and they have no idea what they’re talking about.“Technology is changing faster than ever” – this is a related, repeated claim. Take a specific case. However, since no-one can travel back in time to live in an earlier era, it might appear – following the logic of 'immediate application' – that studying anything other than the present-day would be 'useless'.Historians are often asked: what is the use or relevance of studying History (the capital letter signalling the academic field of study)? The blackboard and the “West Point method” attracted a fair amount of attention, as influential educators, including Horace Mann, visited and observed the instructional practices at the academy – and it’s worth noting that the method puts both the teacher and the student on display. Above all, History students expect to study for themselves some of the original sources from the past; and, for their own independent projects, they are asked to find new sources and new arguments or to think of new ways of re-evaluating known sources to generate new arguments.The study of the past is essential for 'rooting' people in time. And the converse is also true. )Why windows? Now it’s more likely to be a device used by a teacher (a female teacher, a shift facilitated by Horace Mann’s normal schools) and not the student. Recognize, I’d say too, that the stakes always have been.Crozet taught descriptive geometry, believing, as did his own instructors in France, that mathematical understanding was central to military education, that military education was about engineering, and that descriptive geometry in particular was practical, socially and politically useful, and as such deeply republican. It’s another historically dubious claim (and another topic And when I say we rush through history to get to the part about computers, I really mean we rush to get to the bit about We have science, sure, But we also have history.The use of writing slates dates back centuries; their origin, unclear. The past/present of the globe is studied by geographers and geologists; the biological past/present by biologists and zoologists; the astronomical past/present by astrophysicists; and so forth.Or, better again, students can examine critically the views and sources that underpin these historians' big arguments, as well as debate all of this material (facts and ideas) with others.