It still seems like a decent idea to me, though: current events are intrinsically interesting, and learning about them make you genuinely curious about why the world ended up the way it did. If the lessons are structured with curiosity about causes in mind, this will make you interested in the Cold War, which in turn makes you interested in World War II, which in turn makes you interested in the Great Depression, etc. It’s a solution to the most obvious problem of teaching history: without any context, why should a 16-year-old care about dusty topics like the Missouri Compromise or the rise of the labor movement? ~Kevin Drum

It is hard to exaggerate how much I dislike this attitude towards the study of history.  In addition to confusing students about the workings of causality, giving them a completely skewed understanding of historical significance and basically endorsing quasi-Hegelian, teleological readings of history as the unfolding of some necessary, predetermined outcome and anachronistic “precursorism” as the desirable ways to think about the past, which ought to discredit the method right there, it betrays the assumption that there is something more intrinsically interesting about present events (which may or may not be terribly historically significant) than about events that we know are historically significant.  Taken to its logical conclusion, this method would take the music of System of a Down as a point of departure for talking about the Armenian genocide, rather than trying to show the causes for the genocide and mentioning, in passing, that modern Armenians still consider this to be a defining event in their history. 

This assumption that current events are more intrinsically interesting is one that I imagine the average teenager doesn’t share.  To the average teenager, what happens in contemporary European, Near Eastern or even American political life probably seems just as boring and irrelevant as the Missouri Compromise.  Indeed, the pursuit of relevance is misguided and doomed from the beginning–for example, WWII shouldn’t have to be relevant to you, the ignorant teenager, to make it worthy of study.  Besides, the job of the history teacher is to cause the students to take an interest in things that they would otherwise not be interested in.  Some might call this process “education” and others might call it “broadening” the “minds” of students.  There is nothing at all wrong in relating history to current events or using contemporary references to help explain a concept, but it is important not to muddle things or confuse students about chronology, when they often have a hard enough time appreciating the importance of chronology.  Teaching isn’t supposed to be spoonfeeding students what they already like and then hope, miraculously, that this translates into an interest into other things.