Let\'s start with two truths about our era that are so inescapable as to have become cliches: We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before.
But its fate rests in our hands..
The future of the past may rest on our screens.
Wineburg is here to tell us it doesn\'t have to be that way.
Wineburg draws on surprising discoveries from an array of research and experiments-including surveys of students, recent attempts to update History curricula, and analyses of how historians, students, and even fact checkers approach online sources-to paint a picture of a dangerously mine-filled landscape, but one that, with care, attention, and awareness, we can all Learn to navigate.
It\'s easy to look around at the public consequences of historical ignorance and despair.
Instead, it\'s an orientation to the world that we can cultivate, one that encourages reasoned skepticism, discourages haste, and counters our tendency to confirm our biases.
Historical thinking, Wineburg shows us in Why Learn History (When it\'s Already on Your Phone), has nothing to do with test prep-style ability to memorize facts.
If we want to educate citizens who can sift through the mass of information around them and separate fact from fake, we have to explicitly work to give them the necessary critical thinking tools.
All of it is pernicious.
With the internet always at our fingertips, what\'s a teacher of History to do? Sam Wineburg has answers, beginning with this: We definitely can\'t stick to the same old read-the-chapter-answer-the-questions-at-the-back snoozefest we\'ve subjected students to for decades.
Some of it is deliberately deceptive.
Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant.
And a huge percentage of it is inaccurate.
Let\'s start with two truths about our era that are so inescapable as to have become cliches: We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before
