Ada Palmer on Learning From the Past and the Future

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast, where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host Jessica, and today we’re talking with Dr. Ada Palmer, a history professor at the University of Chicago on learning from the past and future. In this interview, Ada talks to Tom about historical pandemics and her study of how societies change. She’s also an award-winning science fiction writer and believes that sci-fi

helps societies interrogate new ethical frameworks. Let’s listen in as she talks about how investigating the past and the future can help us navigate the complex here and now. Dr. Ada Palmer, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. Thank you for having me. Dr. Palmer, you’re a historian at Chicago, and I wonder to start with what can history teach us about a country, about a world that’s in pandemic, not to mention uprising from 400 years of racial

oppression, and that situation has nested inside this global pandemic. What do you see in history that offers any parallels and lessons for the present? So short answer, I see a lot of things that make me optimistic. I look at the Renaissance, which means looking at the Black Death’s aftermath, not the famous pandemic of 1348 that we all learn about in school. But what we often don’t learn about

1348 is that the plague didn’t leave. We talk about it as if it swept through and then happened once it was gone. But the plague remained endemic in Europe. It came back every year, the way we’re used to there being flu season or chickenpox being a normal endemic experience that happens all the time. So I study people who are in the 1400s and in the 1500s, and yet still every one of them, when you look through their life, there’s a point to which they flee their city

because of a plague epidemic, or they lose a parent or a sibling because of a plague outbreak. And it’s that same plague. So sometimes we hear people discussing the question of herd immunity. And the answer is yes. After a while, the population does become immune. In the case of Yersinia pestis, that while was 350 years, the plague doesn’t go away in Europe until the 18th century. So we’re talking 1348 to 1720. As 14 generations literally allowed Europeans to evolve

a slightly different immune system that responds more fiercely to the Black Death. And that’s why we still have lots more deaths from Yersinia pestis today in Sub-Saharan Africa or East Asia, where that evolution didn’t happen. Whereas in Europe, it’s still not a happy ending because there’s some recent research that suggests the heightened frequency of autoimmune disorders among people of European ancestry is quite probably because of that adaptation. Europeans

adapted to have a heightened immune reaction to give Black Death resistance as a result of which Europeans are dying of autoimmune conditions. So it’s still killing us by the changes it made to our DNA. That’s how pandemics were pre-modern science. But the amazing thing to me watching COVID is this is the first pandemic in the history of the earth when we’ve understood what a pandemic is and how they work, how diseases are transmitted, how hand washing works. If you look at 1918, our

last major global pandemic, hand washing was still new and weird and controversial. People were still uncertain how exactly it worked. We didn’t even have conversations about the idea that there’s a mental health crisis associated with pandemic and the toll it takes on the psyche because mental health wasn’t a term yet. We were still debating whether electroshock should replace lobotomies and in a controversy about deinstitutionalization and whether it might be a good idea to have out

patients like dietary. So we have gone so far and we’re, for example, having conversations about elections. How do we change them to make them safe? They didn’t have that conversation in 1918. They didn’t know enough about how influenza worked to make any change that would help. They didn’t know how to sanitize a voting machine. They didn’t have the infrastructure for vote by mail. So there are a thousand things that are being handled badly in COVID that we rightly should be watching for and

calling out. But to me as a historian who’s studied so many past epidemics and outbreaks, it’s just an amazing triumph to see our society have something we can do and do it. The social distancing, the masks, the hygiene, we aren’t doing it perfectly, but we’re doing it and that itself is amazing. We also understand that the mental health crisis that this causes or the stress points that it’s focusing on everyone are also a big part of why right now people are speaking

out about oppression acutely. When you’re already stressed and near breaking point, you become a lot less willing to let things slide and not a lot readyer to say, you know what, no, this isn’t okay. I’m going to stop and speak out. It’s funny because we often think of ourselves as being at our worst when we’re tired and exhausted and scared and born out. And everyone on earth is tired and exhausted and scared and worn out right now. I keep telling my PhD students when they’re worried

about their work going slowly. No one on earth is producing at 100% right now. We’re all producing at 75% at best. But one of the strangely good things about being at your last straw is that it often is what will drive people to then act at speak and demand things. And so these demands have been needing to come for a long time and they’re coming and the fact that they’ve come is good. Ada, Niall Ferguson said that historians study crisis. Do you think about history that way as

studying crisis has proved the points? So happily, historians today study a huge range of different things. I think to say historians study crisis might be a thing you could use to interestingly characterize history as practice in the 19th century and some earlier parts of the 20th century. But historians today study, you know, hats and domesticity and the history of silverware and how it came to be the way it is and the importation of exotic animals into Europe. And some of these things do

connect with crisis, but some of these things are just about learning about another way the world has worked, another way people have lived, what the mindset of a period was like and how it’s different from our own to learn about our differences and to teach ourselves what parts of our world view are not universal, but in fact, very historically contingent. I think one of the luscious and most vibrant things about recent years of history is that we also study a lot of things that aren’t

crisis. Now, I personally definitely study a lot of crisis and reaction to crisis. And in particular, which is not quite the same thing as study crisis, I study people who believe themselves to be in a crisis, the reaction to a crisis, because in the Renaissance, there’s a very strong sense of crisis. You get this rhetoric over and over in the Italian Renaissance and rhetoric most people don’t expect because we think of the Renaissance as a golden age. But when you’re on the ground and read the

documents, there’s this amazing letter from Ercovalle Ventivoglio, who was a mercenary captain, to Machiavelli. This is 1506. And Machiavelli had been writing a history of that decade of the events that happened in Italy in that decade. And his friend wrote to him, having read part of it and said, Machiavelli, you must continue your history. Because without a good history of this period, future generations will never believe how bad it was. And they will never forgive us for losing

so much so quickly. That’s such an interesting point, because we usually think of the Renaissance as this golden age of discovery. Exactly. He’s talking about the decade in which Michelangelo made the David and Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa, the exact decade. And one of the funny things about the idea of a golden age is when we say golden age, we really mean two different things. We mean an age that left us wonders, right? An age that we marvel at, which fills our museums with impressive

deeds, which fills our libraries with amazing epics, a period we look back on and say that that period left us things that are glittering and amazing. But we separately tend to also assume that that will also mean a good period to live, a period when life expectancies went up, a period when there was less famine and less chaos, a period of stability, a period when people have the opportunity to work hard and rise in social status and other such things that we associate

with a golden age. And so sometimes I’ve seen people recently on Twitter, for example, asking the question, you know, the Black Death came and then the Renaissance, does that mean the Black Death caused the Renaissance? If so, does it mean COVID will cause a golden age? And one of the problems with that question is, okay, the Renaissance is a golden age in as much as it fills our museums. But Petrarch writing who lived through the Black Death, writing about the beginning of the Renaissance,

wrote, here’s an important point, before the Black Death, a couple of years before the Black Death, he wrote about his period as being in crisis. He wrote in a poem, about wounded Italy being covered with mortal blows inflicted in cruel wars for late causes, which are factually waged by all the different city states. Think of the Montagues and Capulets in Romeo and Juliet for this, right? The feuds and small scale conquests of the Italian city states. He’s writing about this crisis.

Machiavelli is writing about this crisis. Machiavelli’s history that the letter I quoted was about is as far in time from Petrarch’s poem as Yuri Grygaren’s spaceflight is from the development of the steam engine and the rise of Napoleon. It’s a long time for there to be this cycling through constant perception of crisis on the part of the people and separate from studying the actual events of that period. It’s fascinating to study what does it feel like to believe that

you live in this kind of crisis, whether that crisis is real or not. How do these people describe the crisis? What do they think are the causes of the crisis, which might not be what we at a distance with our economic and sociological studies would say is the source of the crisis? And then how does somebody who’s living in that crisis, how does somebody who feels that he lives in a decade so terrible that all you can do is write a history to apologize to future generations

and preserve a memory of how bad it was? How does that person respond and try to take action in the midst of that level of fear and despair? That’s what I study. And I think that’s a very valuable thing to study right now because the Renaissance really isn’t a golden age to live in. It’s a terrible age to live in. The life expectancy plummets from the European life expectancy in the Middle Ages. It actually goes down, not up, which is not what we expect when we think of a golden age.

And it’s because of that crisis that the desperate time births a desperate measure and people in the Renaissance try lots of radical and different things. This is an oversimplification. There are many reasons that that new things happen in the Renaissance. But a big part of a big animating force within the Renaissance is crisis and perceived crisis. Many parallels to modern life where the stock market hits record highs but for 90% of the population,

they’re experiencing dramatic inequalities in life, sort of masked by headlines and stock market records. Yeah. I mean, I’m a big space exploration group. I write science fiction. I’ve got a song about the space program that makes everybody cry. And I always loved watching space launches. But the space actually launched a few days ago was the first one I’ve watched in a long time where I didn’t personally tear up because watching us launching a rocket into space and carrying on this

amazing tradition of innovation and exploration while cops and protesters were literally clashing outside my window by a looted store. Was the first time I’ve ever felt that the present reminds me of the Renaissance? It’s so true. I want to shift and talk about how social change happens because it’s this is all related. You said that the problem with these teleological narratives, the sort of directional way we think about history is that they often ignore the fact that a huge portion of

real change is made by people who didn’t intend that change to happen. Right. Could you say more about what you’ve learned about how social change actually happens? So there’s there are two answers to that. And you’re partly referring to an essay I have on my blog on progress and historical change, which which looks at this question. But we have a tendency, which is a residue from old fashioned ways of writing history, which we refer to as great man history, where the theory was big changes

in history happened when nature throws a hero into the mix and then that heroic person does great things and that causes a change. And so history books would be about Napoleon. What about him was so special that he could cause these changes or Voltaire was so special about him that he could cause these changes or Queen Elizabeth was supposed special about her. She could cause these changes and a residue of that is the focus on notice how much we care about who gets credit for being the

first figure to have an idea, right? We care a lot about it as if the dissemination and popularization of the idea is guaranteed after some genius has had it. And one of the things I study are ideas where the idea is around for centuries before the moment it was the idea becomes popular. You know belief in the existence of vacuum, for example, we have discussions of this in 300 BC and it then sits there being everybody thinks it’s stupid for more than a millennium and then we

finally have serious discussions of it in the 17th century. And at that point, belief in vacuum becomes controversial and then popular and then there’s experimentation about it. It had to last that long. The changes that make the difference between an idea existing and an idea being able to gain the momentum for society to engage in it is a very different and more complex question. And relates to the fact as you hinted that a lot of my work looks at how ideas tend to be disseminated

often inadvertently and figures who are trying to make changes in society will work toward a change but not the world that they end up creating. You know I very frequently talk to people who and read essays and so on who have an idea that because one of the characteristics that developed in the course of modern thought was secular thought, right, beginning to evaluate the world more by itself without Christianity involved in it in the western thinking world. The assumption is that

that secularization, that move toward let’s do science without worrying about angels being part of it, was advanced by atheists, that the key figures in this must have themselves been atheists who wanted to advance this and that if said key figures in their writings don’t say that they’re atheists, that the reason they don’t say that they’re atheists must be because of being position, because of oppression, because they’re afraid to say that they’re atheists, but that they must

secretly be atheists. One of the problems with this of course being you can’t prove or disprove a claim that somebody secretly believed something but would never say so, but a lot of people very powerfully believe that the figures responsible for the dissemination of secular thought must themselves have been atheists who are working hard to try to move the world toward atheism and secularization, had a vision of the future in which there would be separation of church and state

and in which the role of religion would diminish and a beautiful utopian rationalist scientific modernity would develop. The more I and other scholars and the great mentor for me on this is Alan Kors who has a wonderful book on atheism in France, but the more we look at it the clearer it is that the arguments around atheism for example or the first articulations of secular ethics don’t arise in the works of the figures we associate with this, they often are as in very unexpected places.

Kors for example observed that for a long time in the 16th and 17th centuries if you’re a priest and you’re taking your theology exam you have to write a pretend dialogue where you’re debating with a pretend atheist to prove that you understand theology and not to argue with them and you have to do a good job for the atheists too, so you have these thousands of pages of fictitious dialogues between the priest and the imagined atheist in which the priest is also stating the arguments of

the imagined atheist who’s going to make and these arguments then are the ones that when we have out of the box real definite people who say they’re an atheist later in the 18th century they make these arguments they’re not getting them from earlier atheists they’re actually getting them from priests who have been imagining what the argument of an atheist might be. None of those priests wanted to advance atheism but they were making the arguments for their own purposes.

I’ve recently looked at the question of where deism comes from or more broadly the idea that you can derive an ethics without divine revelation, you can derive an ethics from observation of nature which is another important idea for secularization because one of the old arguments for religion was that without religion you would have no morality, no anarchy, no citizenship. This is why even a radical as radical as Thomas Paine at the foundation of the US wanted religious education

to be mandatory in schools he didn’t care which religion it could be any religion so there was some religious education because he thought that if citizens were atheists they wouldn’t fear punishment and therefore wouldn’t obey the law. So the interesting question is where do the ideas that you can have ethics independent of religion come from and I was looking at one of the most tedious possible sources editors prefaces in classroom editions of the stoic philosopher epic Titus.

This is a bunch of moral maxims very popular in classrooms and these editors are trying to outsell the editions of rival editors by making more hyperbolic claims about how great epic Titus is and the earlier editions these are in the 1600s and 1500s and a little bit into the 1700s. The earlier editions say things like oh epic Titus was so wise that even though he was a pagan ancient Roman he nonetheless came up with ideas almost as good as Christianity. Later

editions say he even though he wasn’t a Christian he came up with ideas that are almost as good as Christianity and in fact many Christians don’t live as well as he did and should feel shame at being exceeded by a pagan and the later editions say oh it’s not that it’s almost as good as Christianity it’s as good as Christianity he’s as good as Christian prophets like Saint Paul at teaching ethics until by the time you get to 1700 there are editions that say in the preface epic Titus by the

light of reason and observing nature alone came to understand ethics of the nature of divinity even better than Saint Paul it is better at teaching it than scripture is and that’s the edition that little Voltaire owns when he’s a kid right the the editor of this epic Titus volume was not part of an underground of rationalizing atheists who are trying to move the world toward a specific vision of a secular future he was trying to sell a volume of epic Titus for a very

mundane and normal everyday kind of ethical education but the arguments that he makes end up shaping young Voltaire young Joel Bogg young Montesquieu young Deedereau and that’s the way we need to think about historical change especially changing in ideas happening it isn’t that the one genius writes the book it’s that the new idea comes in and then thousands of people talk about that idea in classrooms in letters in private discussions in church meetings in the modern

world on twitter on social media with friends with family and it’s those thousands and thousands of conversations that chew on mature and popularize the idea in which often it takes on a very different function from what the original creator of the idea could ever have imagined in other words in contrast with great man history which used to be the dominant model we shifted largely toward Marxist type history or class history or economic history where we

would look at the giant factors things like how big is the wealth gap in a society how oppressed is the working class in a society how stably entrenched are the elites of a society we look at these large social factors and we say okay when the equation reaches this crisis then there will be a tipping point and grinding on like an unstoppable machine history will reach its crisis when these factors come as if no human being plays a role in that what we need is something in between it’s

not the individual genius who creates the tipping point it’s also not a vast inhuman machine in which we’re all trapped and it’s purely the economic and social numbers that determine what’s going to happen it’s plural agency it’s thousands of people each of whose small action small conversation small opinion shared with a particular social sphere has that large impact and the cumulative force of many many people rather than the genius of special individuals is over and over provably

where changes happen one of the keys to that being there isn’t some cabal of geniuses that know what the future is going to look like and work toward making it and every time I see a cover of some tech magazine that has a new tech genius and is like is this man or woman though the true shape of the future I’m like no I neither did Machiavelli and neither did Voltaire and none of their future building projects produced the future they imagined all of their future building projects

stimulated thousands of people to do different kinds of things which created the future we got which doesn’t necessarily resemble the future they imagined although it’s also a future that shares and discusses and digested and produced their values and is different both from what they wanted and from the past that they wanted to change long answer but it’s a good question right now at Getting Smart both through understanding history and listening to our peers

and network we are learning how we collectively can work towards dismantling systemic injustices with the help of some essential voices curated in our equity work campaign you can visit gettingsmart.com slash equity work to learn more about the resources that are currently available we welcome additions that would add to the conversation please email your stories and ideas to editor at gettingsmart.com now back to Ada and Tom’s conversation about how history may

influence the future no I I appreciate that that’s a beautiful answer and an important one to think about it’s really a collective impact answer that small changes can make a big difference I want to I want to shift and talk about your role as a teacher and get you to reflect on how you think about learning maybe an entry point for that would be you teach about the Italian Renaissance why do you have your students your college students reenact the papal conclave of 1492

ah yes my my signature on campus the two weeks every spring when students are wandering around with with fake spears and and bright red robes and Renaissance gowns on yes every year for two weeks we do the papal election of 1492 and it’s not a direct reenactment um each student is a unique real historical figure who is part of this they receive a packet of information about 15 to 20 pages with their background their motivations their resources that they can trade with each other to

try to accomplish their goals some of them are the cardinals competing to become pope some of them are the crown heads of europe isabella of castile maximillian hapsburg uh henry d seventh of england who are trying to manipulate the election some of them are the minor officials the clerks whose job it is to cook the meals and count the votes who are trying to influence the election in small subtle ways to help make sure that their small hometown prospers for example or that they get

erased uh and there isn’t a preset outcome the outcome is different every year and every year they elect a pope and they also then have a war because the thing that happened in 1492 was a crisis it was a moment when there were a lot of very ambitious and bellicose factions both within and outside idly all of which were poised for war and effectively waiting to see who would control the new pope and therefore be in a better dominant position to then dictate the shape of the war and

whoever gets elected and not just which one candidate is elected but which people manage to become his inner circle which people manage to get close to him uh will have an enormous impact so even if it’s the same pope in two different years that the students elect he might be elected with the support of france in one iteration and elected with the support of the german empire in another election and that will completely change the shape of the war at the end uh the reason we do this and

that it’s different from a reenactment where you’re trying to make the same thing that happened in history happened we always make a different thing from what happened in history happened uh is that we then sit down and talk about why it happened and all the little choices everybody made and inevitably every year there’s a point at which you know the actual outcome of not only the election but whether there was a war in spain or whether there was instead a war in northern Italy will be

determined by one particular little clerk uh having a favor done for him by you know a cardinal gave him a good tip and as a result he gave that cardinal some secret information which passed on another direction which passed on another direction which changed the shape of the war and in turn the face of Italy it’s about showing the students how these tiny tiny actions uh moments when somebody asks for a favor and someone else says yes or no uh accumulate to come together to say the shape uh

to determine the shape of what’s going to happen a way i often describe 1492 is it’s like when there’s a dam and there’s flood waters and there’s too much and the dam is going to break nothing in 1492 is going to make them not be war nothing and in every year my students try there’s always a peace faction it always almost feels like it’s going to succeed but it never works there’s going to be war but which war that is determined by the small individual actions and so just as when a dam is

going to break if you dig a channel to direct those flood waters you can determine what gets destroyed do they destroy this village or that village do they destroy neither village and instead does the flood water go into the woods those are what the little human actions are like yes there’s going to be an explosion of war after 1492 but whether a particular part of your or a different part of Europe is devastated by it whether your particular city burns that’s up to the

tiny individual choices and actions of the small people on the ground and similarly right now in the middle of covid with everybody on earth being at their last straw the camel’s back was going to break and there was going to be unrest this summer the fact that it took the shape of these incredibly powerful and beautifully articulated race protests combined with these toxic police responses and escalations of violence and infiltrations by white supremacist groups and the

vast dialogue that that has shaped that didn’t have to be what this summer’s unrest was about this summer’s unrest could have taken a very different shape it could have been vented about something very different the fact that it’s been channeled toward that a thing that will hopefully be a major productive turning point in addressing systemic injustice is the kind of space where the individual small actions of individual people

determine where those floodwaters go when the dam breaks sounds like a uh uh phone and valuable class uh i’d love the modeling and simulation the amazing thing about it too as a teaching technique uh the students get to know each other so much so quickly and they learn the material so much look so quickly they have memorized every power and coat of arms in Europe within two days of this like a lecture on it for a month and they

wouldn’t learn it as well as they do when it’s a game but they also get to know each other and suddenly the students who are always quiet in the class start talking and the students start talking to each other more and less to me the whole dynamic for the rest of the quarter changes and everybody is talking and communicating and they stay in touch with each other after the class you know right now during covid as students have been isolated in their homes all over the

world the students who were in that simulation together are still using that community to keep powerfully in touch with each other this is one of the reasons that i’m working with the university now in terms of Falkwater where students are likely to still be isolated from each other to try to do more of this role-playing simulation because it’s both an incredibly fast and efficient way to get students to learn and an amazing way to get students to connect form relationships have

a sense of community form communities which can then take action right some of the students who got to know each other through this election are now organizing uh uh um political get-together speaking events and uh and and op-ed planning meetings and working with the newspaper and that kind of thing it forms the kind of community that makes students feel strong in a moment that students often don’t feel strong because we’re full of messages trying to tell us that we’re

powerless and we’re not uh and this kind of simulation where students see their own actions have a powerful consequence is the perfect antidote to get people to realize wait i am powerful and together we are even more powerful let’s organize let’s act i love that idea um why do you write science fiction and particularly you write a you write a particular type of science fiction that is big ideas science fiction dense and challenging it’s not for everybody actually tor always assumed

the novels would be super niche and were surprised that they sold uh better uh there were so many pre-orders that it sold out in pre-order because tor had made so few copies uh so a good reflection on there are a lot of people hungry for big ideas uh i always wanted to write science fiction and fantasy ever since i was a tiny kid i worked on it all through middle school high school i did you know summer rating camps my dad is a science fiction fan and i read it together uh from the

beginning it’s it’s not why are you a historian who’s writing science fiction novels it’s why are you a science fiction novelist who’s writing who’s also being a historian um the history came second and the reason is that there’s no better preparation for science fiction than history what is the future it’s a long period of time during which societies change and and evolve and have crises and have different cultures from our own by studying history and the far broader

variety of people and societies that have existed in the past and were aware of that’s where you learn how to think about where the future might go or how another world might be set up you know when you watch star trek episodes there is no alien that they ever met in star trek that is as alien from us as a person from 1340 uh in terms of the universe they think they live in in terms of how they think ethics works in terms of just what kind of argument they think is persuasive uh what they

think improves a point and doesn’t prove a point if you want aliens you go into the past and you find them and then you use that to craft your other worlds whether those are other worlds full of magic and dragons or other worlds full of uh you know planets of lava uh it’s getting the breadth and depth and weirdness that is history that opens up your mind to inventing worlds that are really different from our present uh adab you told the singularity a few weeks ago that you think

science fiction helps us fight our ethical battles before we have to fight them i’d love you to reflect on how science fiction can help us create new ethical frameworks dynamic frameworks for a changing world right well so think about cloning we before dolly the sheep and the cloned mice and the ethical questions about human cloning should it be legal or not we had already explored that question for decades and had numerous examples of here’s a way it could go here’s a way

it could go here’s a way it could go here’s a way people could legislate it here’s a way people could legislate it well here’s a way people could legislate it badly uh and when the discussions both in newspapers and among officials and scientists began they were using those speculations to inform their ideas about what this could or couldn’t lead to right now as we’re discussing artificial intelligence as we’re discussing drones and so on we already have laboratories dedicated

to developing legal frameworks to give ai civil rights once they’re sophisticated enough to need them it’s the first civil rights battle that’s ever begun before the people who needed it existed and the first artificial intelligence to be granted legal citizenship in a country happened 2003 the anniversary of osamu tesuka creating astro boy or the year in which osamu tesuka says astro boy is going to be created japan issued him a official birth certificate and part of this

is about celebrating a popular author but part of this is about saying yes when there are artificial intelligences like astro boy we will give them civil rights because the actual original astro boy story is about a civil rights battle it’s about him battling to get civil rights for robots and citizenship and voting rights for robots it’s an amazing work we’re talking about something that was written in the late 40s and 1950s there’s passages in which he travels to the us and meets

with african-american civil rights groups to learn about learn from them how they battle the kkk and then export that to his battle for civil rights for robots and these kinds of explorations let us try out and think about ways we could legislate ways things could go wrong ways life could change before we have to deal with them we’re now in a world where every time there’s a major new technological shift we immediately if not before it even happens have dozens of worlds in which we

explore the ways it can go well and badly not in which are intended to be a prediction right science fiction is not about predicting how the future will go it’s about discussing dozens of ways the future could go so that we can look at those dozens of possible worlds and say let’s avoid the things that led to the bad ones and let’s do the things that led to the good ones what’s your take on the rise of synthetic content and deep fakes over the last two years

i think they’re a problem and i think they’re part of our larger crisis of information management and journalism uh because the traditional solution for that kind of fake is you have a journalist investigate and expose it and people read the trusted journalism and see it but we’ve had this assault on journalism and the collapse of hundreds per year of local papers for example which do exactly the kind of journalistic work that could have done that i don’t think the solution to deep

fakes is a technological wonder thing that will let us make a computer scan for deep fakes because as soon as you develop that deep fakers will develop something that works around it the solution to deep fakes is having journalists investigate it say that it’s wrong and then having a channel by which that journalism disseminates every time there’s an information revolution there’s also a crisis like this the printing press after 1450 has much of the same problem where the old

techniques that were used to control information and police information and verify information couldn’t keep up with the speed with which information moved with the new technology this is why every information revolution brings after it a legislation and censorship revolution as people attempt to deal with the fact that so many new and unusual voices are suddenly allowed in this new technology and journalism has been a robust and central tool to combating

misinformation in the newspaper era right but it’s struggling to transition its funding model to the modern to the digital era and there’s a brilliant book on this called who owns the news by a friend of mine will slaughter which is a history of news and especially how news has been funded that really shows the core of our crisis is we need to develop a new method for journalism to be funded so that it can just stably pay the salary of a journalist so the journalism will

then be there to powerfully develop the tools that we need to expose cover-ups and to expose fakes data what should what would an ideal high school curriculum look like what are some of the topics and learning experiences that you’d want to see more of so the thing i want to see more of isn’t a specific topic or a specific learning experience it’s a different kind of mentoring at a different time of kind of talking to students about the path to the future so when a kid is in kindergarten

you ask the kid what do you want to be when i when you grow up and the kid says i want to be astronaut or i want to be a rocket scientist or i want to be a doctor in care cancer and and you encouragingly say great that’s great go for it go for your dreams and then the kid enters many years of rote here are the classes you by default take and then enters a period where you’re choosing colleges and you’re choosing colleges based on colleges sort of bombarding you with pamphlets

and part of your parents with pamphlets and and and money and economic factors and how much financial aid you can get at the dominating forces and then you get into college and you are being bombarded by the different departments trying to get you to major in the thing and you pick one in a state of sort of overwhelmed option paralysis and then you get to senior year and you realize that you took all the wrong courses to get to be an astronaut because nobody along the

way had that conversation of oh are you serious about being an astronaut if so here are the steps are you serious about being a historian if so here are the steps you know i was lucky in that i took latin in high school i took latin because i liked topology and thought it’d be fun uh and when i was then in college and interested in history i discovered oh if i want to do renaissance history i have to have latin already i wouldn’t be able to start this phd if i didn’t have latin already

what a lucky coincidence that i did and every year when i get applications from students who want to do a phd two-thirds of them i have to say i’m sorry you don’t have the languages necessary to do this because you didn’t take the courses in high school that you did here are you know here’s an ma program you can go to do intensive languages but ma programs are expensive and don’t have to kind of financially college does not every kid knows what they want to do in in high school right

lots of kids don’t not everybody knows what they want to do in college that’s fine uh for that kind of person you have a great broad curriculum where you explore different things and that person moves forward but there is a real robust slice of kids who have an idea i want to work on the mars rover i i have a story that i tell about a friend right um and he always loved planets and planetary science and he was always interested in going to space stuff but he didn’t know really how to go

about it and he trucked along and ended up in college and in college he majored in oceanography because oceanography at that particular school was a direct pipeline into getting a job with the oil industry so sort of like majoring in computer science or pre-law or pre-med it’s one of the there’s a direct pipeline to a job at the end things but it also let him do a little bit of planetary science so it was his way of consoling himself with a little bit of what he was excited

by even if he couldn’t figure out what path there might be from where he was to what he’d actually dreamed of but when he graduated he just couldn’t make himself take a job in the oil industry uh ethically and personally he just couldn’t so he stopped he had a job for a little while working in a used bookstore he started thinking no wait a minute all these steps all through high school through college i always wanted to do mars but nobody ever talked to me about one of the

right choices to do mars so he looked into it he realized what courses he would need to be ready for a phd he applied back to his undergraduate institution asking to take extra non-degree seeking courses to get those gaps filled in notice that this is time consuming and expensive uh they turned him down uh he asked the admit he made fudge for the admissions people went in or was it brown these are very which one i think it was fudge covered grounds um and brought it to

the admissions people and said will you please explain why you turned me down they said oh we always turned down non-degree seeking applicants always is a matter of policy because it’s almost always people who want to do pre-med but didn’t have a good enough gpa and are just trying to pad their gpa with easy courses and so he explained no i want to take these prerequisites for doing a planetary science degree and they said oh and let him in he did those prerequisites he

got into the ma program he did dma he applied to phd programs and he didn’t get in anywhere because he had this weird looking track record with an extra year after undergrad he didn’t give up uh he moved to a different city where there was more mars research he cold called the head of the mars lab and said do you need a minimum wage lab assistant here are my credentials got hired as a minimum wage lab assistant used that opportunity to learn more help publish an article apply to phd

again didn’t get in anywhere despite those credentials kept working for another year taught himself advanced programming taught himself how to create a neural network kind of thing that can map mars craters by itself did more publications etc applied got in uh got got courted by every program there is got a big funding package started the phd but at that point he was older than his dissertation in punts because that’s how many years it took to make up for what one conversation

in high school that had taken seriously i want to work on mars is there a path from here to there could have prevented and you know 90 of people who end up in the position he was in never make it to to from where they are to working on the mars rover because they don’t know what that path is so it’s not that i want to see high school curricula necessarily change i want to see high school of conversations change where somebody says i love history and somebody says great

you want to study history here are the things you should be doing in college starting freshman year if what you want to do long term is be a historian so that people know they have to start studying the language so that for those people who have a vocation they there’s a there’s a dotted line going from a to z instead of i’m at a z is out there and no one is explaining to me how to get from a to z that’s what needs to change and and the fact that we’re developing robust

distance learning options is going to make that even more valuable because let’s imagine that i had been that he had been in high school when he said to somebody i really want to work on mars what if a consortium of high school created a set of specialized classes that you can take as one of your few electives in junior and senior year where this course may be offered only once in the state but it would be a course on planetary science and those few students at each school who

really want that planetary science course can take it remotely and meanwhile another school will offer the ancient greek course and another school will offer the japanese literature course or the you want to be a translator of japanese or work in the anime manga industry that’s cool let’s do a japanese linguistics for translation course and maybe there’s only one student at each high school that wants that but if the whole state co collaborates on this then every student has some passion

project they really love to pursue can take that specialized class in high school already know a bit about what they’re doing when they’re choosing colleges and then choose a college wisely i had to transfer colleges midway after sophomore year because the college i had chosen didn’t have what i needed if i wanted to be a renaissance historian if i hadn’t figured that out as a sophomore if i waited until junior senior year there’s no way i could ever have gotten into the phd we can have

these conversations they just have to be real practical conversations where an adult sits down with you and says oh you want to be a person who opens a five-star restaurant let’s research together what the steps are between a and z and make a plan dr. aida palmer uh we appreciate your your guidance on high school high school ought to have more interest-based work and much better guidance we we certainly agree with that we appreciate your science fiction um particularly the the teret

ignata series and the way it’s informing the dialogue we should be having about our future together and we appreciate your your view on history uh and that everybody can make a difference in history so thanks for joining us on the getting smart podcast and add astra my pleasure thank you a big thanks to dr palmer for joining us on this week’s episode we appreciate her commitment to teaching and scholarship and the way she has applied both to her writing for more on all

things innovations and learning be sure to check out our blog at getting smart dot com where we publish new content daily and have resources available for just about anything you might be grappling with that’s it for this week listeners thanks for tuning in for the getting smart podcast this is jessica signing off