Simple can be hard

We try to learn a lesson from the Holy Roman Empire.

Our tutoring consultant is now just about finished with helping students with their World History courses.  And none too soon, he says.  Ranging over six thousand years and six continents can be breathtaking, but also highly confusing, and his task is to reduce confusion.  In this course, it seems to be a harder one than in others.

Consider a basic fact of memory: it is much easier to remember something, a fact or date or name, when it can be connected to something we already know.  And it’s easier to remember a raft of facts when there is some structure, some organization relating one to another, instead of a list of separate words.  It’s more effective to connect the dots.

We’ve already noted that Chemistry, at the High School level, tends to be a list of names and rules-of-thumb; the underlying order comes at a much higher level of scientific sophistication.  It has to be simplified in order to be learned at all, and the simplifications will be removed in later classes (however unsettling that might be).  With History, the simplifications mean that the material to be learned is much more disconnected.  The students learn a little about the classic Roman Empire and normally make a connection from that to the Byzantine Empire.  But somehow, a thousand years later there is something called the Holy Roman Empire, located for mysterious reasons in Germany and not containing Rome at all.

To link them you’d have to follow the evolution of the idea of the Roman Emperor from its revival under Charlemagne, through a transformation to an elective and Saxon position, its Medieval conflicts with the Papacy, its height of power and weakness under Charles V, its reduction to irrelevance by the Thirty Years’ War and its extinction by Napoleon.  See how much history connects to this one thread!  You could even explain why there is a Duke of Burgundy in France and a separate Count of Burgundy across the river to the east.  And with this thread firmly fixed, many others lead off from it.  This, we think, is a much more effective way to learn history.

But it would take you a very long time to go from here to, say, the Han Dynasty in China, and it would be difficult to get to Hammurabi’s Code at all.  And World History students should know something about these things.  So the simplifications of the World History course seem to be unavoidable.

But as in another context, simplifying makes things harder.