Uncle Eric’s Model of How the World Works Bundle

Models are how we think, they are how we understand how the world works. As we go through life we build these very complex pictures in our minds of how the world works, and we’re constantly referring back to them — matching incoming data against our models. That’s how we make sense of things.

One of the most important uses for models is in sorting incoming information to decide if it’s important or not.

In most schools, models are never mentioned because the teachers are unaware of them. One of the most dangerous weaknesses in traditional education is that it contains no model for political history. Teachers teach what they were taught — and no one ever mentioned models to them, so they don’t teach them to their students.

For the most part, children are just loaded down with collections of facts that they are made to memorize. Without good models, children have no way to know which facts are important and which are not. Students leave school thinking history is a senseless waste of time. Then, deprived of the real lessons of history, the student is vulnerable.