The ultimate goal of this course is to develop critical thinking skills and habits of mind for evaluating the relationship between primary sources (data), fact, and analytical implications: How do we know what we think we know? What is a fact? When everyone has an opinion, what is the difference between a more compelling and less compelling argument?
This may seem vague, and to some degree this is what all humanities courses purport to do. What about the “hard skills” you can put on your resume?
Reports of the demise of analytical writing are greatly exaggerated: for all the ways AI is reshaping the way we write (see below), your ability to draw upon facts to advance an argument-driven interpetation of those facts (in print or out loud; in an academic essay or on social media; to a friend or to your supervisor) is more valuable than ever before.
Can you name all of the US state capitals? Your p̶a̶r̶e̶n̶t̶s̶ grandparents probably could, or memorized them in school. As more and more information is at our disposal on our smartphones, less and less of it is readily available in our heads. For the most part, that is as it should be: pedagogy evolves along with our tools.
However… it is still important to have some baseline of knowledge in your active memory. Even though you can look up a fact in a matter of seconds, in practice much of the time you will not do so: when you are chatting on the phone, as you quickly peruse an article, when you don’t know what you don’t know. The facts at your immediate disposal in your active memory shape your understanding of the world around you even when you don’t realize it.
Therefore, you will be expected to learn some stuff — even (gasp) memorize a few big-picture facts — relevant to the subjectmatter of this course.