I keep finding reasons why history is important – especially in unsuspecting endeavors
so why isn't it emphasized in (science) education
Some weeks ago, at Student Senate, someone asked me this: 'With all the things you say you’re up to, would taking this not be too much work?'
This was a newly-established committee, which I was vying for.
In response, I heaved a sigh of acceptance and offered a cheap rebuttal – that I had dropped some of the roles that previously occupied me hence was able to take up this new role.
That response seemed sufficient. It did not, at that time, seem to eviscerate the stacks of experience and motivations I had just shared with the council members that evening. After several minutes of pensive waiting, the thick wooden doors reopened and I was elected.
Yet, after settling back at my place that evening, I felt uneasy at the response I offered to that question. Specifically, I felt as though I had played down the importance of the roles I formerly held.
Those jobs were a lot of work and, at least while I did them, personally meaningful. I wanted to do them – and did.
Before I shut my eyes for the night, I opened my journal and scribbled, “I should have said, ‘There's always time for things you deem important.’”
It was on this same spirit I, with my friend, booked a trip to Houston, Texas, at the end of January: Rice University was hosting the American Soccer Insights Summit (ASI) and we simply had to be there.
A year ago to that date, I was at another conference of its kind – Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Sports Analytics Conference – where I met Sarah Rudd, CEO of SrcFtbl (pronounced ‘Source Football’) & Arsenal's former head of football data. You can imagine the buzz around her and the other professionals who were visiting. Yet, at the cusp of the night, during at her escape from the event venue, I managed to steal a word.
Now, I was in my first semester of college at that time. You – reader – likely know the lore and chaos that had, until then, accompanied my journey. But in that space in Pittsburg, surrounded by all those enthusiasts, hopefuls, and professionals, I was just Joel. I loved it.
I introduced myself to Sarah as a scout interested in analytics. Immediately after the courtesies, I barreled into queries about her work, and more pertinently, the future of the analytics industry.
At that point in the conference, we had heard about many technical projects and listened to broad advice about what to do to stand out – but I wasn't interested in any of these to be honest.
I wanted to get a broader scope of possibilities in the industry. To get a kiss of the larger targets and direction of sports or soccer analytics. To know what might be useful to work on. What kinds of problems clubs were needing solved. And how, if at all, to position myself to make an impact here.
Sarah obliged and discussed some challenges (hence opportunities) they were exploring. One year later, some of the mentioned items were tackled by presenters at ASI, which Sarah herself co-organized.
That evening, while Sarah spoke, I took particular note of the implicit importance in the history of innovation – more specifically how an understanding of what had been done, the outcomes, and what is being done was necessary to thinking precisely about the future.
This thread has been one gripe I’d carried about the pedagogy of sciences and Nigeria, the entity, which I was subjected to.
In either case, whenever I share an observation with friends or experts who have immersed themselves in their respective histories, they are quick to connect and reveal now-obvious canonical consequences about how similar situations played out before.
In engineering, we learn that the generation after generation of micro-processors were optimized for integration: Smaller, Pliable, Faster. Roughly speaking, you know don’t need a magician to tell you what comes next. Should you decide to build tomorrow’s chips, the background tells you what specifications it should have.
In Nigerian politics, archivi.ng hosts and releases flashback newspaper front-pages that, often ironically, echo whatever problems and challenges we face today.
In philosophy of mathematics, we learn how advancements in mathematics upended and often led to the re-assessment of long-standing pockets of philosophical truth.
Yet in the impressions of education I have had till this point, this historicity was secondary or, worse, entirely discarded.
While learning The Calculus for the first time, I was never intimated how or why society needed it – and the exact circumstance during which Leibniz and Newton developed it. I knew nothing of the controversy around its invention.
I only recently discovered that in October 1965, Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, was accused of seizing the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation studio in Ibadan at gun-point. He allegedly replaced a taped broadcast of the Western Region's Premier with his own message, challenging the election results. One recant of the story. You might also find it interesting to see how Soyinka discusses this case in subsequent interviews.
More personally, I never learnt about the nature love in mine: How my grandparents met? Where? The exact circumstance that led them to each other and, ultimately, gave air the very person writing these words.
There's no doubt that history is important. It carries with it the all-important whys and hows and chronology.
For a given game, history teaches why it was developed, how it’s been played, why it’s not been played a different way, and the exact circumstance that led us to whatever iteration I observe today. Broadly, studying history necessarily means learning how to interpret or contribute to a craft.
So why do most pedagogies – especially of the sciences – not include some history?
These days, I am finding it particularly difficult to imbibe engineering concepts without some complimentary historical epistemology (how knowledge evolves), which often leads me to other pools of seemingly fundamental science that I didn’t already know. Crazily, the professors occasionally bring up these topics – then ask us to ignore it as ‘engineers don’t need to know…’
I one-shotted this essay several weeks ago and forgot about it. Revisiting because I am trying to diagnose another issue I am facing with ‘university’, ‘education’, or whatever this is meant to be. Reply to this email if you have any comments or thoughts!
My sister wants to be a doctor when she grows up. She's in her first year of high school and being a science student according to her has it's 'moments of pure confusion.'
We were talking about school one day when she brought up that she didn't understand the atomic models class they had in school. I pressed her to explain more and she told me how the teacher rushed through it; listed and ran through each one and their associated breakthroughs and limitations before proceeding along with the scheme of work for the semester.
This was my chance to make things right for her and I felt obligated to do the best I could.
I started with Democritus claiming that we can't keep cutting up things indefinitely; that we'll definitely reach an end which he called atomos. Then off to John Dalton who suggested the shapes of these atoms be small, hard, unbreakable spheres. JJ Thompson discovered the electron and guessed that the atom was like a pie with the electrons scattered around it. His student, Ernest Rutherford, disproved this by messing around with gold and radioactive sources, making a model that was better, stronger but could only work for hydrogen. Neils Bohr put the icing on the cake by clearing up the theory behind it and suggesting a much more stable model which majority of us are familiar with today; the dense nucleus in the middle with electrons whizzing around it Jimmy Neutron style.
She was shocked and excited. She hadn't understood that these were real people, that made guesses and suggestions and mistakes along the way. Eyes wide open with questions bubbling out, she wanted to see if there was more to her topics that she was missing out on just because she didn't get the history behind it all.
We'd spent over an hour in the kitchen trying to understand the work of scientists that was done hundreds of years before us and yet it wasn't exhausting or redundant, it was quite the opposite. Of course when you learn the models with all this in mind it becomes much easier to recall the successes and failures of each one.
In my opinion, learning the history when it comes to science and engineering adds colour and context to the equations and models we face today. You no longer take the validity of the information we have available for granted anymore, seeing the giants on whose labor we base our knowledge on.
If not you could be in a classroom some 600 years b.c., being taught by Thales of Miletus that water is the fundamental particle that makes up everything.
It is good foundation to have as one journeys through life. #university #education