Perhaps two different kinds of courses should be taught. Past forward and present backwards. If the kids managed to learn from just one of them that'd be better than what usually happens now.

I don't see why teaching history backwards implies that history moves in a straight line. In fact, that is the way that much of science works

Going backwards is good for discovery, which is what you are talking about in your science examples. But explaining something requires starting at an earlier point and moving forward.

The goal I think Kevin Drum was trying for, that is, making history captivating by highlighting current events, is a good one. His process, making that the starting point, is where I think his argument falls apart. Rather, I think a specific event should be chosen as the target event to be explained, and then start from as far back as you want, moving forward until you have covered the events leading up to your target event. This lets you evaluate independent historical details while maintaining an overall objective of compiling them all into an understanding of the one chosen event.

For example, I once traced the series of events centered around Germany from Napoleon to WW2, which gave much more incite into WW2 than I ever got out of a history class in school.

Teaching history backwards would seem more prone to the post hoc ergo propter hoc type of error than conventional approaches. It might also generate more problems of the nature of those usually resolved by the application of Occam's Razor, given that our minds automatically construct models and there is little context offered for events until well after the fact. I'd also think that there might be some professional embarrassment at proudly announcing that, pedogogically speaking, you are doing things backwards.

As to your final paragraph, might it be that it is probably much easier for professors and TAs to answer questions based on objective arts and sciences than on subjective ones?

Oh and, Alex's last name is Massie, not Massey. [So it is. I had it right in the link but subsequently reverted to the standard American spelling. Corrected now. -ed.]

My history teachers were mostly coaches, too. They were the most intellectually uncurious teachers I ever knew.

However, there was one prominent exception: A 9th-grade history teacher who liked to focus on German and Russian history. He was an ex-Marine captain and Vietnam veteran who believed we needed to "know the enemy," and he had his Russian history down cold. Also fluent in both languages (he taught the German class.) He taught a very interesting class -- first history class I took that wasn't a boring toss-off.

I don't recall that he felt he had to teach history backwards.

Curiously, he was also a coach, but it was clear that it was coaching that was the secondary career, not the history teaching.

Years later I began to wonder why he had retired as a Marine captain and gone into teaching. The only hint was a remark he made one time to the effect that any officer who lost more than 10% of his men in an engagement in Vietnam was automatically sacked.

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I sometimes wonder if education-as-sorting-mechanism doesn't seriously interfere with education-as-teaching-mechanism.

But that's how you teach it, to high schoolers at least.

I mean, come on -- if you're teaching algebra, are you going to digress into Godel's theorems? If you're teaching English, are you going to deconstruct everything?

You can't teach history as an academic subject without making causal assertions, which are going to be more or less blatant at the secondary level.

[C]urrent events are intrinsically interesting…

This no doubt explains the intense interest on the part of most teenagers in the United States in history, world geography, and politics.

Was Kevin Drum ever a teenager? It's been quite a while since I was one but my recollection and observation of more recent teenagers is that they're mostly interested in themselves and what's being sold on TV and in the magazines. Perhaps that what he means by “curent events”.

In much of science, we start with the effect, and seek to understand the causes. For example, we ask why a person develops cancer, and go "backwards" from there. That does not mean the causes are simple or linear. The examples that Massie highlights are not weaknesses but simply mistakes that can be caused by going in either direction. There is nothing inherent about going backwards that caauses these mistakes to be inevitable.