
We Should Teach Music History Backwards - jeffreyrogers
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-we-should-teach-music-history-backwards-180955053/?no-ist
======
bambax
Not just music history, but history in general.

History told forwards is superstition: trying to show that what came after was
inevitable, when in fact it was one future among an infinite number of
different possible futures.

History told backwards makes sense: look for the seeds of post events, in the
past.

However the human mind loves nothing more than causation; we see cause and
effect everywhere even where it's not, we like "stories", we don't understand,
don't believe in, and outright reject chance.

~~~
c3534l
There was a great essay a while back that I can no longer find that summarized
Guns, Germs, and Steel by continually asking the question "why?" It start with
"Why is Western Europe and America so dominant culturally and economically?"
Then regressed back to questions like "why did Europeans colonize the Americas
instead of the other way around" to "why did the Europeans have steel,
disease, and gunpowder but the Native Americans didn't?" down to "Why did
agriculture develop in the fertile crescent and spread to Europe earlier than
corn spread to the Americas?"

It's a wonderful rhetorical device. Human nature is to pay attention to
conflict and we like to see how it's resolved. By asking a series of "why" you
broadly expand a person's view and they understand why you're talking about,
at some point, the minutia of zoological diversity in the middle east. I never
did well in school because I always want to know the "why are we talking about
this" up front, and teacher's answers were always just "it's in the syllabus."
I like programming because it asks the problem first, then I have to solve it.

~~~
jcranmer
The problem with that approach is that you can end up begging the question and
not realizing that your proposed answers start to deviate wildly from
evidence.

For Jared Diamond, the answer to the question of European domination is solely
that Eurasia won the agricultural jackpot [1] and the Americas lost it, and
anything that happened in the intervening 10,000 years doesn't factor into it.
But... the Americas won the agricultural jackpot (there's a reason why
potatoes became a staple crop in much of the world). And the European conquest
of the Americas was anything but preordained: the Spanish only conquered
Tenochtitlan (which was a larger city, it should be noted, than likely any of
the Spanish had ever seen before) with the help of their 20,000 Tlaxcala
allies.

[1] The astute will notice that there's a related question that Diamond 100%
completely ignores... why didn't China dominate?

~~~
o_____________o
> For Jared Diamond, the answer to the question of European domination is
> solely that Eurasia won the agricultural jackpot

This is oversimplified to the point of either being disingenuous or
misinformed, and China was discussed in the book. There are valid issues with
the work, including environmental determinism[1], but it was a wide ranging
pop sci book and as such has many surfaces and incentives for attack.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_determinism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_determinism)

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _including environmental determinism[1]_

Why is this considered an issue? Is there a good discussion of this that you
could recommend?

~~~
michaelt
[https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/guns-
ger...](https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/guns-germs-and-
steel-jared-diamond/)

    
    
      I argue that although Diamond makes interesting points,
      his work from Guns Germs and Steel to Collapse is a
      distorting disservice to the real historical record.
      Diamond claims that the differential success of the
      world’s nations is due to the accidents of agriculture,
      except when societies “choose to fail.” This claim does
      not withstand scrutiny. [...] Unfortunately his 
      story-telling abilities are so compelling that he has
      seduced a generation of college-educated readers.

------
JasonFruit
I'm going to disagree with everyone! You should learn history — or any subject
— by starting with the things that interest you and working outward from
there. Studied that way, nothing is dry, because your motivation to learn
stems from what you're passionate about. For example, I learned 20th-century
world history based on its relation to aviation, and in the process gained a
real, abiding interest in history; I learned medieval history based on my
interests in the music and religion of the time. I'm weak in the
Enlightenment, but I'm sure I'll get there. I strongly recommend this
approach, not because it is systematic or comprehensive, but because it
encourages you to _actually learn_ , not just bone up for tests.

Being old and curmudgeonly is fun, too.

~~~
inimino
This is the best answer, but it raises a difficult question, which is what do
you do with a classroom of thirty students?

~~~
JasonFruit
I don't have the slightest idea — that's why I teach my own kids.

~~~
inimino
Which is a great answer too, though our modern life puts it out of reach for
most.

------
jancsika
> We don’t start our investigations at some arbitrarily chosen point in the
> past; we begin where we are, from our current burning passion.

That reveals a problem with learning backwards-- rampant epicism in which
students would rarely choose to learn about, say, dead ideas like sonata form.

Rather than requiring the student to learn linearly through time, the
professor ought to select a handful of musical periods and/or case studies and
then randomize the order in which they are taught. Make a big spectacle of
picking numbered ping pong balls from a bingo machine in the lecture hall. In
the U.S. these are usually elective classes so they are essentially an
institutional form of entertainment, anyway.

In other words-- it shouldn't matter how you pick a period/style/composer.
What should matter is that students improve their ability to use their ears
and their growing knowledge to investigate any music, no matter its origin or
time period.

Publicly using randomness to select from possible periods/cases would show
good faith that the professor is skilled enough to leave the chosen topic up
to fate. That would make it harder for profs who aren't fully comfortable with
all the material, which is probably why nobody teaches this way. :)

Edit: clarification

------
nautilus12
I disagree whole heartedly. This will end up putting an overemphasis on
contemporary work, and not enough on classic works. Think about how often
cirriculum never gets to the end of, when such seminal and formative composers
such as Bach are fit into the last weeks you will inevietably gloss over them.
We already make Gods out of our contemporary world view at the expense of
downplaying the brilliance of past thinkers. I dont think we need to fan this
flame. We will end up with an aesthetic that is so devoid of the basics that
it barely comprehends itself, and if ever hits a dry spell will never be able
to recreate its former greatness. The net effect will be to gradually turn our
backs on the collective insights of the greats of the past

~~~
developer2
Why is it _always_ Bach? Every single time I hear the entirety of recorded
music's history being dissected, Bach is the first - often the only - example
brought to attention. Have this many people subjectively decided for
themselves that Bach deserves this credit? Or do schools of music have a habit
of teaching that Bach is objectively the best, as if it's a fact grounded in
science?

Bach is to music as Shakespeare is to literature - if you don't nod your head
in agreement like a brainwashed zombie when either of these men are stated to
be the best in their respective fields, you're automatically dismissed by the
crowd of "elitist snobs", for lack of a better redundant phrasing.

I don't side with contemporary works either. The current era (90s+) is so
disgustingly cookie-cutter, superficially manufactured by record labels to
shovel down our throats in bulk. The 50s through the 80s fared somewhat
better; the studios still heavily controlled every aspect of the artists they
signed, again following an (as-of-yet unperfected) recipe. At least back then,
_some_ of the music managed to weave a story capable of evoking emotion and
meaningful thought. I would agree that something has largely been lost over
the past century: music no longer being composed, instead being "arranged"(?)
to fit specific molds.

tldr; I suppose: a) Fuck record labels; and b) Stop with the "Bach is best"
culture.

~~~
nxie
> "Or do schools of music have a habit of teaching that Bach is objectively
> the best, as if it's a fact grounded in science?"

I don't think you're entirely accurate on why Bach is such a big name when it
comes to classical music. It's not because he is viewed as some objective
"best" as you seem to be so convinced of.

Western classical music as we know it today didn't really begin until Bach
came around (the only exception that comes to mind immediately is Corelli who
came a few decades prior). Music historians today recognize that Bach laid out
the technical foundations on what Western music is itself. His development of
the counterpoint is a major distinction between medieval music and the
classical period that followed. As well, his Partitas for Solo Violin and Well
Tempered Clavier for Piano have became and remain to this day, foundational
parts of learning and improving violin/piano because they train and benchmark
almost every technical ability of their instruments (at least in Western
music) to such precision. To analogize to programming, it would be like a set
of problems that ranged from basic recursion to debugging memory leaks and
everything in between and beyond. There are of course other resources such as
Kreutzer's etudes for violin but Bach is one of the first and one of the only
to do so to such detail. There are numerous of other music elements such as
figured bass and dance forms that Bach contributed heavily to, but I think you
get my point.

So to summarize, no, I don't think most music historians "nod their head in
agreement like a brainwashed zombie". It's not that they hail Bach as some
"objective best", it's because they can recognize and respect the formative
effects his work had Western Classical music. He is a father of his field much
like Turing of Knuth are and that deserves his praise.

------
emilga
"As a great Swiss historian once pointed out in another connection, history is
the one subject where you cannot begin at the beginning." \- J. M. Roberts

~~~
panic
Bill Wurtz tried:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs)

------
linkmotif
This is part of an enormous cultural trend in the US that has determined that
people need to be tricked or somehow otherwise eased into learning, because
otherwise learning is too boring! This trend is responding to a real issue,
because capitalism has so successfully neutered the common man into a
entertainment/carbohydrate consuming machine that the desire or need to learn
is only associated with the need to earn an income, if at all.

> We don’t start our investigations at some arbitrarily chosen point in the
> past; we begin where we are, from our current burning passion.

Who said anything about choosing an _arbitrary_ point in the past? What the
author tries to do here is to make the past arbitrary, not interesting,
perhaps less relevant than it ought to be. But that's not the problem.

The problem is that this article talks about music history being taught in the
first place. In what percent of schools is music history taught in any serious
manner by a serious instructor? I honestly am fundamentally perplexed by this
article because I would expect first it would establish that music history
should be taught in schools at all. Then the author could get into
implementation specifics.

But the United States hasn't been interested in music history since Leonard
Bernstein's Omnibus[0] lectures aired in the 50s, if it was even then. Today,
"Classical Music" isn't for old people anymore, it's for keeping vagrants away
from your property[1].

So what the author is really attacking here is the past, because more than
ever the past has been deemed too boring on a massive cultural scale. This is
just one example of people attempting to make palatable "the past" or whatever
else is now too boring, too nerdy or too impossible for regular people to
approach.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Omnibus-Leonard-
Bernstein/dp/B002OVB9...](https://www.amazon.com/Omnibus-Leonard-
Bernstein/dp/B002OVB9Z8)

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/blasting-
moza...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/blasting-mozart-to-
drive-criminals-
away/2011/10/11/gIQAgDqPEQ_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6e475a06f4cd)

~~~
bredren
>The problem is that this article talks about music history being taught in
the first place.

Music history is an elective required for music majors in US liberal arts
colleges. For example, at Colorado College[0]: MU150 Music in Western Culture,
MU212 Mozart and his Age, MU284 Beethoven, MU285 Music of the Baroque &
Classical Eras, MU286 Romantic and Early Modernist Eras. [0]
[https://www.coloradocollege.edu/academics/curriculum/catalog...](https://www.coloradocollege.edu/academics/curriculum/catalog/20172018/departmental/music)

~~~
linkmotif
If your first introduction to music history is in college, that's not a rich
cultural upbringing.

------
YouAreGreat
The author observes that _self-driven_ students of _very selective parts_ of
Music History are "driven by emotion rather than obligation" and usually start
from a passion for some current music. This seems true enough. The next step,
however, is a giant leap:

> shouldn’t music history writing and teaching be done in the same backwards
> direction?

No, that doesn't follow, because we are now talking about _obligatory_
learning of _the rest of_ Music History, which will be what I just experienced
for most of the author's text: An endless litany of names, names, names,
names, names, some arrows drawn between them, some dates and places attached.

It doesn't matter which order you teach me _all the rest_ of Music History. It
doesn't get better that way, although it probably doesn't get worse, either.

~~~
resu_nimda
Exactly. It seems like this author got really into Sam Smith, did a deep
Wikipedia dive, then somehow extrapolated that into a wide-sweeping theory of
pedagogy, with bold assertions like "That’s how we learn about music:
backwards, always backwards."

There are so many counter-examples. I am instantly reminded of a childhood
friend who was really into classical music. I don't think he arrived there
working all the way back from present. I started listening to The Who because
my dad had a CD of theirs in his car, which led to other classic rock. It had
nothing to do with a backward time travel from whatever contemporary music I
was hearing at the time. I think a lot of music learning happens more
serendipitously like that, through friends, random encounters, etc. The
historical research is definitely a part of it but this article way overstates
it.

~~~
ljw1001
As someone who learned young to love Charlie Parker, & co., I suspect your
friend loved what he grew up listening to at home. Classical music _was_ the
contemporary context for your friend, just like your context included the Who.

If you didn't ever go back further than the Who, btw, I'm not sure you
'learned history' in the usual sense of the phrase, and I'm not sure you can
teach a history class based on random encounters.

~~~
resu_nimda
I guess I was thinking more along the lines of learning about the diversity of
musical styles and cultures than specifically "music history" in a more
academic sense. Random encounters can expose you to music you were not
familiar with, in a way that a history lesson might not, and then you go and
start digging into it.

------
dghughes
As a terrible programmer my trick is to read statements backwards. Maybe
programming should be taught that way too not just reading of it but the
history of it all the way back to Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace and even
weaving looms.

~~~
tpurves
As a product manager, I have often found it beneficial to write requirements
backwards. Start first with the desired result of a feature or flow and work
backwards to the necessary steps, options, preconditions, actors,
setup/enrollment steps etc. that would have been required required to get
there.

~~~
breakall
Personally I have to be careful of this....it’s easy for me to focus so much
on the solution that the problem is never even clearly articulated to the
developers (who may have a better solution that I came up with once they grasp
the problem).

I ran across an interesting essay on Medium recently on this topic, advocating
a new approach to roadmaps focused on the problems: the problem roadmap.
Instead of saying what new features the team will be working on in the future,
map out what problems they’ll be working on.

------
oraknabo
Wouldn't this limit your study to only musicians that influenced current
trends?

I've definitely discovered a lot of music from digging into the influences of
groups I like, but this seems like a kind of survivorship bias to only focus
on the ones that have direct lineage to what's popular at the moment you're
engaging in study.

~~~
falcor84
I don't understand how it could be different. There has obviously been way too
much music in the past to teach in it's entirety. We have to decide what to
teach based on what we currently think is "important". And though we can try
to fool ourselves that there is some measure of objective importance, at the
end of the day, I'm pretty sure it always boils down to popularity within some
milieu.

~~~
oraknabo
Of course there have to be criteria for any course of study that leaves out
plenty of artists that have to be considered not significant enough to cover.

If you were designing a course in either chronological order or in reverse,
niether one might ever touch on groups like the Residents, Young Marble
Giants, Donovan or Charles Ives--but what if you couldn't even get back to
Mozart, Charlie Parker or Woody Guthrie from your current starting point?

~~~
vidarh
The your current starting point is exceedingly narrow.

Don't take it too literally. E.g. don't assume you'd start at a single leaf
and trace a graph only backwards, but looking at "here is this set of music
trends that are common now. Why do this subset over here have X in common?
Lets backtrack... " and then don't be afraid to take steps to the side as
well.

The point of the article I took was that when we're exploring music (and other
art forts) we tend to be exposed to current trends, and then we tend to
explore backwards to something similar but not quite the same.

But we don't go _strictly_ backwards. We may very well e.g. trace an influence
back to a wider genre and start exploring to the sides, and even then forwards
again. started with.

I think the more important point is to aim to start with something that
students are likely to be immersed in and follow threads that hopefully retain
their interest because it retains their connection to something they enjoy,
rather than e.g. jumping 500 years back in time and taking ages tracing things
forwards before you've reconnected it to something they care about.

To take a very contrived example: If you like German electronic artist Zombie
Nation, what's the odds you'll find starting with 40's easy listening
interesting?

But go backwards: In 1999 they sampled Lazy Jones for Kernkraft 400 [1]. Lazy
Jones was a 1984 game with a very memorable main track [2].

If you start poking around in mid 80's chip tunes, you'll pretty much _have
to_ cover Monty on The Run [3] - one of the big things that MOTR brought, was
a much more ambitious orchestral inspired score with heavy use of rapid
transitions and vibrato to get closer to simulate real instruments despite
only having three voices to play with. Compare Lazy Jones and MOTR with
Kernkraft 400 - while Kernkraft 400 copies the tune, MOTR is at places
surprisingly close to having a sound you might expect in modern electronic
music.

As it happens, among many other references to earlier styles of music, the
immediate influence on MOTR was the Dick Barton theme tune [4] from the late
40's.

If you dig deeper, you'll find many additional influences and threads to
unravel in between.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraft_400](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraft_400)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWxlYYA8yrg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWxlYYA8yrg)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIA_0cvS2gQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIA_0cvS2gQ)

[4]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2eqX93umXo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2eqX93umXo)

------
WhompingWindows
I think music history should be taught thematically. Rather than going Bach,
Mozart, Beethoven, etc. in chronological order, use music theory to make
connections across all time periods in each lecture. For instance, one could
teach about open chords, those containing 1 and 5 only. That might be
illustrated in both 2001: A Space Odyssey or monastic music from medieval
churches. One could examine how melodies are shaped, what makes music sing.
Harmonic analysis could be the aim, looking at how dissonance was increasingly
used to create tension and drama. There's also storytelling in music, whether
through words or not.

All of this to say, I'd rather not use chronological time as the axis of any
musical study. We love music for its beauty and power, which is not a function
of time but of the intricate neurological systems devoted to hearing and
musical thought.

------
Bud
Geoffrey Himes comes at this from a popular-music perspective which doesn't
really contemplate the reasons why music history is taught the way it is, but
this is still an interesting idea. I say this as a classically-trained singer
who studied music history at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

For Himes, the history of music doesn't seem to go back more than about 80
years or so. But the real history of course goes back many centuries further,
even for notated "western" art music. So it would have been more interesting
if he extended his idea further and tried to justify it based on an 800-year
perspective, rather than 80 years or so.

------
breakall
This reminds me of the hours I spend poring over the Allmusic Guide to Rock I
had borrowed from the local library, tracing backwards from Van Halen,
Nirvana, and Beastie Boys to discover their influences. I had taken piano
lessons for several years and had learned Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Debussy
— sometimes tracing back led me to what I had learned on piano.

I agree that working backwards can lead to wonderful discoveries. What can be
difficult to grasp as you go back is what the music sounded like at the
time—how an album sounded because it was the first time musicians had made
that sound.

------
sbilstein
If you start taking music lessons, you might learn some simple pop songs first
and move your way backwards to older, often complex pieces that have stood the
test of time. I don’t think everyone just starts learning music playing Bach
or medieval music. It’s far far less of a straight path than this article
suggests.

------
sailfast
Counterpoint: learning in this way is a good method of keeping attention ("you
should learn this because your favorite artists liked these artist!") but if
you actually listen to the old stuff first, you can also appreciate it in the
RIGHT order of things. It is, however, pretty difficult to listen to much of
what's come before. I think a healthy appreciation in both directions, digging
into whatever node you happen to traverse is the preferred method.

~~~
JasonFruit
What do you think is difficult to listen to about earlier music? I can't say
that music of the past was difficult for me, except for music written before
leading tones became almost obligatory, i.e. before the advent of functional
harmony — and that was a pretty rapid adjustment. I suppose some of the
medieval music that uses parallel fifths between raised 4/7 and 5/1 at
cadences took a little getting used to, as well.

~~~
sailfast
It’s not the listening - it is the sheer volume. If you track backward you
know there will be a connection. If, however, you attempt to start with the
past you’ll need to go pretty wide to get to all the things heavily
influencing modern work.

I guess you could recommend a list. Start with medieval madrigals and then
work your way to Stax records anthology? Haha

------
pishpash
Clickbait title. This is not teaching backwards, it is teaching it forwards
but via recursion towards the causal factor. Good luck with that when the
stack gets deep.

Same cautionary tale with the use of recursion.

There is a certain way that history progressed (the motivic force, so to
speak) and it would make no sense to reverse the order. And given the stack
issue, better not be faddish and just pick a time and go forward from there.

------
summerdown2
Also playwriting. There's a really good book explaining that if you read a
play backwards you can work out the causality much better and get a far
greater understanding of the play:

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Backwards-Forwards-Technical-
Manual...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Backwards-Forwards-Technical-Manual-
Reading/dp/0809311100)

------
8bitsrule
That's an interesting theory, but it ain't the way I learned music history.
When the music store in my home town was closing out 78 records, my dad went
in and bought a big stack, a couple of hundred 78s with mostly classical music
on 'em. At closeout prices.

As a little kid I was allowed to play those records any time I wanted to. And
I listened a lot. Listening to that early music helped me, right away, to pick
out what was good pop music on the radio, and what was bad. Cuz, I mean, the
music on those records had stood the test of time for _two centuries_.

Happy father's day, pop. Thanks for the memories.

~~~
simonask
Just a nitpick: Classical music from 200 years ago is definitely not "early
music" by any cultural tradition. Western music 200 years ago was a highly
developed art form, and this is even more true for other classical traditions
that exist today, such as Chinese classical music and Indian classical music.

200 years ago, the symphonic form was already highly developed, which most
would argue is the most advanced form of Western classical music.

I don't think music from this period necessarily gives you any pointers for
gauging the quality of modern pop music, but it might influence your tastes in
a positive way. Just keep in mind that very advanced music is still being
written, and it mostly doesn't sound anything like what was written 200 years
ago.

------
anoncoward111
Just like with programming, I start with the end result that I have in my head
and then teach myself everything backwards thats needed to produce the end
result

------
acjohnson55
I'm skeptical of this as a way of gaining a holistic understanding of music
history, although it may be a helpful technique in the toolkit.

------
ant6n
That's how you should teach games. Start when the game ends, and the winning
conditions.

~~~
saghm
Whenever I'm being taught a game, my first question is always "What's the
goal?" I find that without knowing what I'm supposed to be trying to achieve,
it's extremely difficult for me to remember all the rules explained to me
beforehand because I have no context as to why they're important.

------
Mikhail_Edoshin
This is a very strange idea; I'd say everything should be taught based on how
it has developed historically. (For example, I'd argue math should be taught
this way.) This gives you a real notion of things (as opposed to a mere
definition). A notion is a minimal working model of a thing in question and
the best place to find those minimal models is to look at the beginning.
Imagine you want to understand radio. Where would you start: with a minimal
radio receiver that has like five parts or with a modern state-of-art radio
station?

------
NVRM
[https://soundcloud.com/krazhtest-3/banhmi15nico15krazhtest](https://soundcloud.com/krazhtest-3/banhmi15nico15krazhtest)

------
the_cat_kittles
more simply, start by teaching things that people are currently interested in,
and work back from them. if you like something, you are curious about where it
came from

~~~
slx26
I couldn't agree more. It's very difficult, but in my opinion the most
complicated part in teaching is getting the attention and grabbing the
interest of students. If you have that, as long as you do it ok, people will
learn. First, find the connections between the subjects and the students.
Then, you can start teaching.

Of course, teaching some things in order might be important or useful, and
students have some decent degree of attention too. And sometimes you need to
explain boring things. Ok, but people learn the most when they want to learn.
Curiosity can be induced.

------
ddingus
I don't agree at all.

First, people do learn and process differently. No one size fits all here.

Adding this to the forms we have developed makes great sense. No argument.

I personally prefer to take it in mixed mode. If I'm wanting to do something,
understanding related history helps. Maybe that's a backward progression back
to roots.

But, it can be a chain of forward influences too. Who built on what and how,
why?

In a more general sense, maybe narrative makes the best learning. What
happened?

------
em3rgent0rdr
This works fine until you reach back to early 20th century. That's when 20th-
century classical music comes in and where the rock/blues goes away.

------
jradd
Wouldn't we need to understand history forwards before teaching history
backwards anyways, effectively nullifying this idea?

This idea reminds me of how artificial intelligence might conceptualize a
subject, but doesn't make sense for the corpus of history.

------
tenaciousDaniel
History - directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Guy Pearce

------
ddebernardy
Not just music. This applies to all of history.

~~~
foob
It depends a lot on the specific field that you're talking about. I studied
both music and physics in college, and I think that teaching the history
backwards would work for music, but not for physics. You can understand modern
harmonic theory without knowing the details of how it evolved out of
contrapuntal theory. It would be easy to learn about the current state of
music theory as is, and then extend your understanding afterwards by learning
about the context and history which led to the current state. Physics isn't
really like that. There's no way that you're going to understand general
relativity first, and then learn afterwards that the theory evolved from
Newton's laws. Some fields successively build on top of their own histories
while others morph and change in such a way that knowledge of their histories
is nonessential for understanding their current state.

~~~
ddebernardy
Well, I suppose OK, fair enough. Maybe for the likes of technical history,
Newtonian mechanics is easier to understand than Relativistic mechanics, and
the same holds for a variety of other scientific theories. Though I'd put
forward that in teaching the old ones before the most recent ones, we end up
with lots of people who end up not studying the latter at all and not grokking
how or why, insofar as we understand things at least, light speed is a speed
limit in our universe.

But then, as you correctly point out, some fields change in such a way that
knowledge of their histories is nonessential for understanding their current
state.

As to history proper, explaining the cold-war era proxy wars warrants a dive
into WW2 and the onset of the cold war at some point; which then naturally
leads you to dive into GD and WW1 as to why there was a WW2 in the first
place; and why there was a WW1 to begin with; and why there was so much
German-French animosity then; and why Europe was a powder keg at the time;
etc. One can go on and on all the way back to the Roman Empire and Classical
Greek history.

I'm admittedly an armchair historian at best, but methinks reversing the arrow
of time in history books might yield a very interesting take on the topic that
is a lot more approachable to kids and teenagers.

------
newsbinator
This makes sense. I've always been an advocate of teaching the majority of
things backwards.

~~~
matte_black
How would you teach mathematics or reading backwards?

~~~
gravypod
"Backwards" is relative to the original way a subject was taught. My from my
experience math is taught formula first rather than by starting with an
intuition based on physical representation.

Starting with developing an intuition like 3B1B and then deriving a formula
would be "backwards" to how I've been taught in the past.

~~~
tomjakubowski
Gilbert Strang's lectures on linear algebra work this way. He typically first
gives a simple example (like for least squares, fitting a line to three points
in two dimensions) and then over the course of the lecture susses out a
broader generalization / formula from the simple example.

Unfortunately, OCW seems to be having some kind of copyright issue with
YouTube, but here's a link to the video anyway.
[https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-
algebra...](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-
spring-2010/video-lectures/lecture-16-projection-matrices-and-least-squares/)

~~~
smallnamespace
I generally agree with this approach, but sometimes even the 'simple' example
isn't intuitive or motivating to someone; it highly depends on your audience.

E.g. a lot of math courses under my school's engineering curriculum would
start off with examples from physics, but if you don't have the proper physics
background or aren't interested in those applications, it's just another layer
of abstraction to slog through.

My high school stats textbook would use classic problems from medicine (e.g.
x/n people sampled are sick, what bounds can we put on the distribution of how
many people are sick in population?), but that might not be particularly
motivating to someone who has no interest in medicine or why an epidemiologist
might care to know the distribution.

The best starting point to teach anything is the point that is closest to what
the student understands and motivates them, but unfortunately that can vary a
lot from person to person.

~~~
newsbinator
What you're saying makes sense and is one viewpoint. I could see it the
opposite way too:

In school, it's good for someone who doesn't know or care about epidemiology
to get a slice of what would be useful to an epidemiologist. Likewise in
reverse.

The reason Macs have always had nice topography is because Steve Jobs happened
to audit a calligraphy class taught by a monk (who stopped being a monk
because he met a nice girl).

I'm not banging the interdisciplinary drum- we all already know learning
outside our interests is good. I'm saying it's probably a good educational
tool to force students to look at problems based on their utility to someone
else.

Sometimes the further a problem is away from being directly useful to you, the
wider your horizons will be once you understand how to solve it, and (more
importantly) why to bother.

------
BucketSort
"If we had tried to tell this story forward, we would have lost most of our
audience once they encountered Tharpe’s old-fashioned dresses, twangy guitar
and sanctified lyrics." This is an obnoxious piece.

------
airwebster
as an afrobeat devotee... who worshipped James Brown as a child... I would say
'f--k yeah' ... much later I learned that Fela Kuti hosted JB in Lagos... who
knew? but it all makes sense if you listen to the music

------
rullelito
This applies to cooking as well.

------
gyrgtyn
We should start with Black Sabbath and work forwards and back from there.

~~~
meggar
Monks -> Bach -> Mozart -> Beethoven -> Tchaikovsky -> Stravinsky -> Black
Sabbath -> Gangnam Style

------
adamnemecek
This is only tangentially related but I’ve been working on an ide for music.
Sign up if you are interested [https://www.ngrid.io](https://www.ngrid.io)

~~~
ljw1001
definitely tangential, but i was interested anyway until i got to the no-
detail, gimme-your-email web page. I think these prelaunch page things are
over, and if they're not, they should be.

~~~
adamnemecek
What would you like to know? Just FYI I set it up because people I talked
asked if there was a way to be notified.

------
samatman
Ah, but at what level of detail?

Should we start with the climax of the 9th symphony, then the Ode to Joy, then
the prelude?

Or should each piece be played as its own crab canon?

