Bill Gates wants to change how students learn history. As a recent feature in The New York Times Magazine details, the Microsoft founder and current richest man in the world went on a mission to change history curricula in the US after he became enamored with “Big History” — a series of DVD lectures from Australian professor David Christian. The DVD series “put forward a synthesis of history, biology, chemistry, astronomy and other disparate fields, which Christian wove together into nothing less than a unifying narrative of life on earth,” writes The Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin. In short, it’s a holistic approach to history, rather than a strictly chronological one. A lesson on the Big Bang theory, for example, “offered a complete history of cosmology, starting with the ancient God-centered view of the universe and proceeding through Ptolemy’s Earth-based model, through the heliocentric versions advanced by thinkers from Copernicus to Galileo and eventually arriving at Hubble’s idea of an expanding universe,” Sorkin writes.
