Last week our friend economic historian Niall Ferguson wrote an impressive article in Newsweek, detailing the reasons behind the lack of achievement by Americans when it comes to learning history. Many are so deficient they would fail to pass the test required of immigrants seeking citizenship! According to Niall the fault lies less in the quality of the teachers than in the methods they are using, including textbooks, and more importantly what they represent.

It’s not that textbooks are badly written for the most part, writes Niall, but a typical textbook: ”...costs $106. It covers 1,264 pages. It’s almost a foot long. And it weighs 6.4 pounds. How much would you love history if you had to carry one of those to school every day?” Like the inevitability of a sore back from lugging around such a huge tome, so too is history itself taught with that same sense that history was inevitable. Most history students in high school and college come away thinking that history HAD to unfold just that way it did. Since there is no changing it, the subject becomes, literally, “old news”. Nothing more than a series of facts that occur one after the other. This is only reinforced when the subject is taught with reams of dry facts that to most students have no relevance. They don’t see, for example, the connection between the widespread violence that occurred following the demise of early 20th century empires and how it might relate to the current situation in the middle east.

In the article, Niall details how using web-based content and interactive games has been shown to improve learning, and is a strong advocate of including such methods to improve engagement and learning in today’s students. Through my role as the product manager for the Making History series that we developed with Niall I’ve had many chances to experience that engagement firsthand. I’ve also had frequent opportunities to play Muzzy Lane games such as Past/Present, the historical role-playing game where you get to experience both the labor and management sides of life in a turn-of-the-20th century textile mill. I’ve seen the results of these games used in the classroom, and the intense interest shown on the faces of the students playing them.

The struggle to engage students successfully is not new. I well remember my freshman year in college, when I had to take “History of World Civilization I and II”. At each class during my first semester the teacher stood unmoving at a lectern and talked for an entire hour while we scribbled away taking notes, then lugged our huge textbooks home for more study for the two major tests that made up our grade. Despite taking reams of notes, and studying more than most of my other classes combined, I got a “D” in that class. I remember being quite angry. The test was similar to answering random questions in a game show: “Alright Chris, for ten thousand dollars and your lounge suite, who was “The Sun King”? Meanwhile, I was playing the lead in a three hour stageplay where I had literally memorized the entire script. This wasn’t a memory issue. It was just an inability to memorize tons of unrelated, random facts and cough them back up on demand. Some people are quite good at that. Unfortunately I’m not one of them. At no time was it mentioned in this class that what we were studying was connected to present day events in any way. I remember nothing about that class except how much I loathed it.

Naturally, when the spring semester began I was dreading “World Civ II”. However, this class experience was dramatically different. The two women teaching the class assigned reading, then the next class we’d organize into groups. Working off a list of questions, each group would discuss and debate the relevance of the material covered while the teachers circulated among us. Later each group had to get together outside of school and create a multimedia presentation which would be presented to the rest of the class. It was a lot of work. It required us to really understand the material we studied, create a narrative worthy to be shared, and interact as a team. I aced the class, and it revived my interest in history. To this day I can still remember details about our subject, Galileo, that I learned in that class. Far from being inevitable, we learned that Galileo’s achievements were at risk of being derailed or prevented by outside forces on many occasions and that it was more than possible that things could have transpired very differently. At the time I remember wondering why all classes didn’t use similar methods. What surprises me even more is why now, decades after my college days ended, schools are still using 19th century teaching methods in so many classes.

When our first Making History game was introduced in classrooms, one unexpected result was how well students grasped geography. This spoke to exactly the experience I had in my history classes. It’s one thing to be in a geography class while a teacher points to odd-shaped blobs on a world map and attaches names to them. It’s quite different when you are playing France in a game taking place in 1939. You know exactly where Germany and Italy are, especially when you see tanks moving into Alsace-Lorraine! It’s the same in Past/Present. Once you’ve played the immigrant girl Anna trying to earn enough to feed her family, or the factory manager trying to control costs to keep the mill from closing, the time period becomes much more real. The events are no longer abstract. Once the student begins interacting with the subject being studied and attempts to achieve goals and objectives, the knowledge imprints itself in a very different--and far more effective--way.

Chris Parsons is Muzzy Lane's Product Manager. He can be contacted at chris@muzzylane.com