April 5, 2023
Once upon a time, before the Cuisinart of advanced educational thinking reduced history, geography and civics to the tasteless gruel of “social studies,” humanity’s story was taught in a linear fashion, and under chapter headings that went something like this: Ancient Civilizations, Greece and Rome, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, the Age of Reason, the Age of Revolution, the Age of Democracy, the Space Age and so forth. These headings were not without their defects: the so-called “Dark Ages” were anything but “dark”; there were multiple “Reformations,” not just one; the “Age of Reason” was often unreasonable about the breadth of the human capacity to know things; the “Age of Democracy” had to contend with totalitarianisms of one sort or another, one of which grew out of a misbegotten democracy, Weimar Germany.
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