I knew I was going to like talking to my guest, Barbara, because she is super passionate about history (as am I). But I was not sure what direction the conversation would go and what aspects of history we would discuss. Given her background (she is an author, educator, historian, and parent) we ended up spending a good bit of time talking about education, while using history as the framing. For Barbara the reason she values history so much is because it is the history of "us", there is so much to learn about ourselves by learning about other humans throughout time. That is why she now dedicates so much of her life to using history to try to inspire, entertain, and educate the youth. 

We used that jumping off point to discuss how important critical thinking is in the process of learning about history. You have to be curious and passionate about learning. To time travel back into history and try to empathize with another human with completely different societal frames of reference, you need to think critically. We talked a lot about the history of "teaching" too and why it seems like we all know our schools don't do a good enough job teaching critical thinking, but we can't do anything about it. We explored some philosophical considerations, like is our population too large to effectively educate and does democracy allow too many voices to have a say in education?

This episode was further proof for me that you can take any topic and if you explore it openly and deeply enough, you will pull out fascinating insights. And I think ultimately that is Barbara's point--she wants all of us to think more critically about ourselves, the world, and our history. If we do, it can almost unlock a "cheat code" to the game of life, where we are able to leverage wisdom from past generations and customize it to work for our individual situations.