Bill Gates is a cultural icon for innovation and philanthropy. As co-founder and former chairman of Microsoft, Gates changed the way the world interacted with computers, through software platforms that greatly increased user-friendliness. As co-founder and co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he has revolutionized philanthropy, giving vast sums to global-health initiatives and extraordinary – though far lesser – amounts to education initiatives. With an endowment of $40 billion, and $3.6 billion in grants made in 2013, the Gates Foundation and its famous front man are heavy hitters. When Gates gets interested in something, people pay attention – for a variety of reasons.
The foundation has long invested in improving education in the United States, as well as boosting access to technology. As the Sept. 7 New York Times Magazine recounted, Gates has taken a personal interest in a particular approach to teaching history, and is investing heavily – in money and time – to spreading the model in U.S. high schools. It is an intriguing one, developed by an Australian professor of history, that presents world history as an interdisciplinary study of biology, geology, evolution, anthropology and economics to name a few.
The notion that history is far more than just a recounting of events, and that innumerable factors connect and complicate them is well worth exploring. Doing so places history in its far larger context than what is traditionally studied, and creates an excellent environment in which students can develop cognitive skills that will serve them far beyond passing the history final. Developing structural knowledge, the ability to integrate different, perhaps conflicting, ideas and learning how to broaden and deepen one’s perspective are among the invaluable benefits of interdisciplinary studies. Offering such things to high school students could serve them incredibly well in their future endeavors – educational and otherwise. Gates’ passion for and investment in his Big History Project, then, is admirable.
But Gates’ philanthropy is not without politics. His is an incredibly involved model of giving that has been criticized by some for its heavy-handedness. In typical Gates fashion, the foundation as well as Gates’ private charitable activity, are clear and aggressive in their goals and bold in pursuing them. This can make grantees uncomfortable in that the support Gates offers comes with many strings attached – some of which can strip organizations of their autonomy.
In the Big History Project, Gates is partnering with individual schools to implement the curriculum. That is by design on his part: He had hoped to avoid the major bureaucratic hurdles associated with a district-wide introduction. But isolated introductions of a curriculum so divergent from traditional pedagogy require a broader contextual consideration – similar to that embodied by the curriculum itself. Fitting the Big History Project into school- or district-wide goals is a bigger question than simply adding a new course curriculum. Further, Gates’ own significant presence in the process is, at the very least, a distraction.
That presence, though, serves to initiate and drive conversations that lead to meaningful and necessary results.
That has long been true for Gates in all his endeavors, and his dedication to – and ideas for – moving education into a more effective and equitable future deserve a spot on the agenda: at the policy level, as well as the practical.