Making it simple

Our tutor ponders the trade-off between accuracy and simplicity in teaching.

When dealing with subjects like History, probably the most difficult thing for our tutor consultant is to work out what the teachers expect the students to know, as we’ve mentioned before.  For this reason he has recently been reading through commercial test-prep books for AP History exams.  In one of them he found the statement, paraphrased slightly, “The sixteenth century in Europe was a time of rapidly rising prices.  This was caused by the import of large quantities of silver from the Americas by Spain.”  It was indeed true that inflation struck the continent in those years.  The phenomenon was especially troubling because it came after a time of relatively stable prices, and few people then had any clear idea of how economies worked.  And it was true that an enormous amount of silver was shipped to Spain, most to be coined and used to run the Spanish Empire, from which it circulated to other countries.  Here amidst the tangles and ambiguities of history we have a clear cause and effect, easy to remember, and even useful in getting across some classic Economics: an increase in the money supply leads to inflation.

Except that it isn’t true.  Prices began rising in France and Germany well before 1500, and in Central Europe before Columbus sailed.  Inflation was well under way before silver imports were significant, about mid-century.  The real causes are more likely to be sought in the greatly expanded cost of wars and government in general, an increase in population, and overall economic expansion.  American silver at best was a contributor in the second half of the century.

So our tutor is faced with a dilemma: should he point out the inaccuracy to his students, and risk their getting questions marked wrong (“The main cause of sixteenth century inflation was: A.  The Bubonic Plague; B. The import of American silver; C. . .”), or accept that history at this level has to be simplified?

Of course a commercial test-prep book is going to be simpler and more distilled than a class textbook, and economics is complicated subject in its own right.  Perhaps it does the students no harm for our tutor to point out complications now and then.  It might even help them in the essay-writing part of the course, as they demonstrate deeper knowledge and a better grasp of interactions.

There is no such ambiguity, however, in the statement (again paraphrased), “The Catholic Church opposed the Copernican doctrine because it removed the Earth, and by implication Man and the Church itself, from its privileged position at the center of the universe.”  This has never been true, not even as a contributing cause.  Medieval cosmology held that the Earth was inferior to the heavens, a place of corruption; Dante placed the deepest circle of Hell at the center of the Earth.  The “privileged position” statement was a fiction that surfaced among the Church’s enemies much later.  Again we have something simple, plausible, easy to remember, and wrong.

Our tutor is still working out how to approach these kinds of things.  But mostly he has developed a distaste for multiple-choice questions in History.