Google vs History

This is a brief summary of my article review. The article I read,"Stories and their Sources", was written by Ben Walsh and is from Teaching History, Dec 2008. The link to it can be reached by clicking on the title of this post.

Walsh, a high school history teacher, is deeply troubled by the potential for the Internet, especially the search engine Google, to lead his students, more often than not, towards historical inaccuracy rather than the (academically accepted) truth. Walsh sees it as the history teacher's responsibility to guide their students away from 'bad' history (eg. 90% of the articles on Wikipedia) and towards scholarly websites and other credible sources on the Internet.

This was an interesting article, although a little elitist in the sense that it makes it seem like the claims of a scholarly historian are infallible, even though there have been copious instances of 'respected' historians writing 'bad' history themselves over the years. Nevertheless, I tend to agree with Walsh that a history teacher should at least attempt to point out to their students that researching history is complex and not as simple as paraphrasing a Wikipedia article. A dedicated teacher could no doubt get a class to explore history like an historian, challenging them to go beyond Google and Wikipedia and all the misinformation. They just have to teach them how.