Interesting post on the academic blog, New Kid on the Hallway (“The Glory of Progress“) about the tendency by students and even some scholars to assume that because people from the past didn’t write what we would write or think the way we would think, that somehow this means they were…well, not as smart as we who live in the present day. (I’m excerpting larger than usual sections because the website is blocked in China.)
Something I run into relatively regularly is the idea that people in the past were stupider than modern people. (Granted, it’s not usually stated as bluntly as it was today, when a student explained something we were talking about by saying literally that medieval people were stupider than modern people, but the idea frequently underlies other comments.) I’m curious about how students define “the past” and “modern” in thinking about this – I suspect that they actually draw (entirely unconsciously) on an old school, secular humanist Enlightenment vision of history that disses the Middle Ages, and that they don’t actually believe that the ancient Greeks and Romans were less intelligent than people today – but I’m sure that this idea pops up in many