The idea for the Big History project – currently being piloted in the US and funded by Bill Gates – apparently came to the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft in 2008 while exercising on his treadmill. He was watching a series of lectures by David Christian, an Australian professor whose interdisciplinary approach integrates physics, geology, biology and many other subjects with history to offer a single coherent narrative – “a framework for all knowledge”. Judging by the number of viewings Christian’s TED Talk on the subject has received, Gates was not alone in thinking, “God, everybody should watch this thing!”. But in an age where money is increasingly driving public education policy, the difference is that he may not be far off from making this happen.
It is easy to admire the commitment Gates has to education and to empathise with his excitement at an imaginative and intellectually ambitious vision that promises to “go beyond specialised and self-contained fields of study to grasp history as a whole”. Most teachers would agree that it is inspiring and motivating to break down the traditional fences we put around different school subjects; my colleagues and I have long aimed to encourage “cross-curricular links” to spur lateral thinking.
But Christian’s approach goes further. He was inspired by the Annales school of French historians who sought to write “histoire totale”, avoiding the usual tunnel vision created by separating economic, political, social and other forms of history.
The concept of “total history” has long been debated by academics. While the idea has led to some interesting experiments in historical writing, the general consensus among historians is that history without any form of tunnel vision is a utopian impossibility. It may be possible to integrate the study of society, religion, economics and demography, say, when concentrating on a small microcosm of life, like a single medieval village, but here the inherent restrictions of geography and time are themselves a form of tunnel vision. To make sense of the past we have to impose categories upon it and split it into themes while accepting that these are necessarily artificial and provisional.
The Big History course offers nothing new in this respect. It simply divides history into eight “thresholds”, from the Big Bang to the birth of our modern world via themes such as the origin of Homo sapiens and the beginning of agriculture. Big History’s claims to a dramatic new departure seem, in fact, to amount to a superficial re-labelling of most school subjects as “history” in an attempt to link them.
On a conceptual level, it looks rather like a mixture of Herbert Spencer and Fernand Braudel, both influential in their day but hardly cutting edge nowadays. It is also hard to imagine how this chronological framework allows for age-appropriate content – most of the physics, for example, happens early in the course.
However, the most alarming aspect of this is not the substance of what Gates and Christian are proposing, it is the fact that someone with no background in history or in education can happen to chance upon an idea one morning while on his treadmill and before long the education of thousands of children is disrupted to align with his latest fad – all because of the enormous economic power he wields.
In the UK, state education is rapidly following the US model, becoming ever more commercialised and divorced from democratic accountability. Local authority schools are being offered bribes by brokers to become academies and the Department for Education has refused to rule out for-profit state schools. We have recently endured an education secretary who drafted the history curriculum on a whim. Perhaps next time it will be an unelected billionaire.
