American - Historian | June 30, 1946 -
Our goal is to see Big History become a normal part of high school curricula. I'd love to see it being taught in lots of languages. A global course.
David Christian
LoveHistorySchoolHigh SchoolGoal
When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table. If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion.
StarsMeGoldDieYouCreate
In literature classes, you don't learn about genes; in physics classes you don't learn about human evolution. So you get a fragmented view of the world. That makes it hard to find meaning in education.
EducationWorldLearnViewPhysics
Learning to domesticate the horse was a sort of energy revolution.
LearningEnergyRevolutionHorse
I think what I was after was a unifying story that could bring everything together, that could give me a sense of the whole of history.
HistoryTogetherMeStoryThink
Unfortunately, historians have become so absorbed in detailed research that they have tended to neglect the job of building larger-scale maps of the past.
JobPastResearchBuildingBecome
What we normally define as history doesn't interest me. It's a constraint.
HistoryMeDefineInterestNormally
If historians don't tell stories at the scales of creation myths, someone else will.
SomeoneCreationWillTellMyths
If, in schools, we keep teaching that history is divided into American history and Chinese history and Russian history and Australian history, we're teaching kids that they are divided into tribes. And we're failing to teach them that we also, as human beings, share problems that we need to work together with.
WorkHistoryTogetherProblemsTeach
I have this fantasy that in future negotiations over climate change - instead of going into that room and saying, 'I'm defending Chinese interests,' or 'I'm defending Australian interests' - there will also be an identity inside of each of the negotiators thinking, 'I'm also defending human interests.'
ChangeFutureIdentitySayingWill
Big History's not going to replace existing educational courses. It's not an attack on specialisation. It is simply the argument that specialisation needs to be complemented with an overview, which I think is scientific commonsense.
HistoryThinkArgumentBigGoing
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