By Alaina DiSalvo
The title of this post comes from the eighteenth-century German poet Novalis, and is a staple in sociological and anthropological studies. In my opinion, this phrase captures an idea at the heart of meaningful inquiry-based education.
When I began to study the ancient world, I had a professor who wanted to impress upon the class just how difficult it is to interpret ancient objects. She pulled up a photograph of a quarter and asked us to describe it. We were easily able to do so. But then she changed her question: “Describe it like you’ve never seen it before.”
This changed everything. If we were an archaeological team from thousands of years in the future, or even a team of aliens, how would we interpret this object? We soon realized that an object without surrounding context can be extremely misleading.
A quarter says “In God We Trust” on the front, next to a bust of a man’s head. Acting as if they didn’t know the truth, many students began to come up with structurally sound arguments that this object was a religious talisman, like a cross or rosary beads. Perhaps this man pictured on the coin was a god.
Others argued that since the top said “Liberty,” it might have been a token for soldiers to carry when they were on leave. Another group brought up the four numbers on the coin– which describe the year the coin was made– and playacted a future society with completely different dating systems, who had no idea what the numbers represented.
Our class came out of this exercise with a newfound appreciation for archaeologists. It was incredibly easy to get it wrong. The words “quarter dollar” are indeed printed on the coins, but those words don’t mean much to a group of people who don’t speak English, who don’t use dollars as their currency, and who perhaps don’t even use coins.
The physical description of the quarter is still important. But it’s also important not to jump to conclusions. As students, we were used to having information spoonfed to us through detailed textbook entries and secondary sources. This classroom exercise made us realize how valuable primary sources can be, but also how difficult they are to interpret without thousands of other data points at our fingertips.
For the first time, we wondered: why do quarters look this way? Why do they talk about God, and have a shirtless bust of George Washington, and come stamped with the year? Who decided to make quarters look like this? What purpose do these things serve?
The way to appreciate the world, and to truly understand how it works, is through questioning. Nothing should ever be taken for granted or accepted simply because it comes from an authority figure. We need to give students the tools to critically engage with all the information they come across. A quarter is not just a coin, but a complex symbol of a society with very specific value systems.
Every aspect of our society today is only like this because people with values and plans made it that way. Making the familiar strange is an excellent tool to show students the importance of context and the difficulties in primary source analysis.
InquireEd studio 