With the advent of the internet you'd expect that educational standards would rise as the flow of information/facts become freely available.

The combined knowlege of the world is there at a keystroke...and therin lies the problem. I've got that "Harlequins Hunt" going on in the religious section, where I'm trying to get to the bottom of the whole Israel and when it began thing.
But I'm bumping into so many differing opinions masqurading as "fact"..all of which are telling me everything I thought was true simply isn't! I've learned so much that makes what I was taught at school nonsense I simply cannot see how kids at school could pass an exam.

Presumably the exam markers have some version of events that they call "correct", and the closer the child comes to this version of "correct" the higher the mark the child gets.
This certainly -to me- must be the case in subjects such as history.

"History is wrote by the victors"

Napoleon Bonaparte, 1st Emperor of France 1798 - 1814, 1814 - 1815. Died 1821 St. Helena.

Well since we have answer guidelines, which i think only help the teachers...

Which doesn't answer anything. All that does is get you marked for getting close to what the teacher has been told is the "right answer" is.

It's actually a damn good way of changing history.

Now there's a topic..Napoleon.

Was he a meglomaniac who has become a byword for being a loony?

Or was he someone who wanted to overthrow the Royalist rule of Europe?

Our leaders had us shouting "For King and country!"...He had his troops shouting "Liberty, Fraternity, Equality." Exactly which cry is the better one for the poor sods actually doing the fighting?

Our Royal masters had us dying to keep them in the lap of luxury. Napoleon wanted an end to that. But the media of the time was in the trall of those with a vested interest in the status quo of Royalty and landed gentry being "right" and in charge at all times. So the propaganda machine rolled right over Napoleon, he had the tag of "Petty dictator" applied and that was his lot -historywise.

History is not written by the winners, but by those that pay the writers.

If i remember when their was a discussion on Dictators, there was the usual ones Hitler, Mussolini, Castro, Franco. But i surprised the teacher by saying Salazar of Portugal.

I thought that was an old Klingon saying

Exams in education are based on critical thinking as well as current scholarship.

You can actually say what you like when it comes to the intepretation of evidence, as long as you are able to support your case with evidence - even if the examiner disagrees with you. What's being examined is your awareness of the debate, the issues involved, and how you make your own case. So you could argue that there was a revolution in government in mid-16th century England. Most scholars would now disagree with that, but if you in your exam essay argued that reasonably, citing relevant sources and facts, you could still in theory walk out with an 'A'. Deny that the holocaust happened, and in theory it's still possible to get your 'A' - but extremely unlikely because most the evidence is so overwhelming that you'd make factual errors or misuse sources or miss out critical evidence or arguments or whole works by other scholars, etc.

When scholarly books and journal articles are written, they go through a process of peer review by other experts in the field. Conspiracy theorists, holocaust deniers and creationists and their ilk will tell you that that's how alternative views of x [insert subject here] are blocked, but anyone who knows anything about academia will tell you that anything written must be with verifiable sources and/or - in the case of the sciences - experimental data that can be replicated in the lab. This written material is then read by other scholars (obviously) and they're going to have something to say, so the process of checking and cross checking is continous.

There is no such checking process on the internet, and a lot of what passes for "information" on the internet turns out to be "misinformation", either on purpose or unknowingly. That's why you have to ask yourself, who's written this site and why, and what sources are they citing, and then acutally check those sources to see how scholarly they are. It's ok if they're not scholarly, but you enter at your own risk, so to speak. For example, one of the great internet myths is that the story of Jesus closely parallels that of Horus, an ancient Egyptian god, and it's one repeated on many sites, often without saying where this otherwise startling revelation comes from. The conclusion is that Christianity is a rip off from this particular ancient Egyptian mythical god. But in the end, there's only one source for that wheeze: an 18th century book long since discredited by scholars.

Personally, as far as the ancient Israelites are concerned, I'd go with scholarly books written for the general public over the internet, at least until I'd got a good background to figure out what's actually known and what's speculation. Personally, Finkelstein and Silberman's The Bible Unearthed would be where I'd start. It's takes a sceptical view of the Bible (but one based on scholarship) in that it uses it as part of the evidence and not part of the intepretation of the evidence. It would, though, cite scholars who take different views to theirs that you could also follow up, and so on

"Who controls the past now controls the future
Who controls the present now controls the past
Who controls the past now controls the future
Who controls the present now?"


Philosophy in music.

there is also an hierarchy in scholar works.

new scholars often "make their mark" by suggesting a unique alternative view, while more seasoned scholars refute their claims in counter-publications.

so the "summery of theory" and "theory revisited" publications are the more interesting ones - they sum up the theory and changes made to it over the years, along with it's refutes, and show the results of the process, and not temporary by-products.

the downside is that you get these publications at least a decade after the original theory - and only for theories that are (or were considered in the past) both solid and interesting - which means most theories never reach that stage.