History General Education in the Era of Convergence : Seeking Change by Climate History

Abstract

Although making the history general education convergent can be compared to hunting two birds with one stone - due to the fact that history general education is not well established yet - climate history could serve as a pertinent tool for doing this sort of hunting. This paper discusses the multifarious aspects of climate history for convergent general education in three steps. The first section reviewed the convergent experiments and new methodological discussions continued from Annales and global history through ‘Big History.’ In result, it confirmed the inherently convergent character of history content itself. In the following section, this paper payed full attention to climate history, not Big History, which is often cited as a front runner of convergence science. It also discussed why this new field of history has a bigger potential to lead the convergent shift of history. The last section was devoted to three subject matters, i.e. climate science, climate discourse, and the earth system, which need to be considered in the process of developing climate history as a convergent general education content, not as the content of a convergence science. Eventually, this paper came to the conclusion that climate history is the best content for convergent type of general education, due to the possibility that it could lead students to develop a new thinking and responding skill by keeping distance from the current academic and political discourses and by making their own judgments based upon historical events.