This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 28, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

History from the top down versus bottom up. The methods of history give us wildly different stories about how our predecessors lived and what mattered to them.

That is history especially of the top downdown variety something that young students should

actually grapple with in school. Anthony comegna of Libertarianism.org comments.

There is a book called Lies My Teacher told me, which is one of, I think, probably several books that essentially

go through popular history texts aimed at young people and just pointing out how many problems they are and how significant a lot of these

problems are. If I understand your view correctly, there are big problems with how history is taught to young people and more so that maybe

history is not the kind of subject that young people ought to even have to grapple with. Why do you think that?

Well, so I've been starting to think about this lately because of a couple conversations

I've had with a few people, especially historian Mike Dauma and reading his

latest book, Creative Historical Thinking. We have this very deeply held built-in

cultural assumption that very deeply

held, that history is hugely important, a bedrock subject like reading and

writing and you know a couple other things basic math numeracy we should also have some

kind of historical literacy some kind of geographical literacy and I don't

necessarily dispute that but I think that we should do it in other ways.

Now I'm not an expert on education, so I'm not really going to talk about how we should

educate and the different you know methods of educating especially young

people but talking as a historian history provides an especially difficult

problem here because it is not a set of information,

it's a set of skills, it's something you have to do yourself.

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