Best 9 quotes of Sam Wineburg on MyQuotes

MindSparks has produced some of the best materials on the market for teaching students how to read and write history with intellectual integrity and depth. Rarely have I come across curriculum so useful in helping students become literate, thinking citizens. Bravo.

We haven't ever known our past. Your kids are no stupider than their grandparents.

History teacher Bob Alston's "expertise late not in his sweeping knowledge of the topic but in his ability to pick after a tumble, to get a fix on what he does not know, and to generate a roadmap to guide his new learning. He was an expert at cultivating puzzlement it was Alston's ability to stand back from first impressions, to question his quick leaps of mind, to keep track of his questions that together pointed him in the direction of new learning.

Texts are not "processed" as much as they are resurrected, and the image of reader and information processor or computer device, which often dominates current discussions of reading, seems less apt than another metaphor: the reader as necromancer.

Texts on a lifeless strings of facts, but the keys to unlocking the character of human beings, people with likes and dislikes, diocese and foibles, errors and convictions. Words have texture and shape, and it is their almost tactile quality that leads readers to sculpt images of the writers who use them. These images are then interrogated, mocked, congratulated, or dismissed, depending on the context of the reading and the disposition of the reader.

(The historian) "was able to disapprove without being astonished. She could reject and still understand.

The problem is not the content of textbooks, but the very idea of them.

The study of history should be a mind-altering encounter that leaves one forever unable to consider the social world without asking questions about where a claim comes from, who’s making it, and how time and place shape human behavior.

Woodrow Wilson claimed that history endows us with the "invaluable mental power we call judgment.