I'm going to have to sit with this for a bit to work out my thoughts about what's being suggested here:
The suggestion to create an app, an AI tool, "that makes a kid feel the weight of what already happened" has my mind spinning. In the context of talking about World War II, I know that directly communicating with the people who lived through the war is becoming less and less possible--I had four uncles who fought in World War II, and
my father was in General MacArthur's Honor Guard in Tokyo after the war. They've all been dead for at least 10 years.
However, there are documentaries, oral histories, histories, historical fiction and movies--probably even comic books graphic novels--many of which could be used to help "a kid feel the weight of what already happened." So while on the one hand, I applaud the idea of applying the latest technology to helping carry on public memory, on the other hand, I wonder if an AI app is really the best tool for this. Isn't what we want rather the voices of humans who experienced history or who have created nonfiction or fiction with the materials of history? If a machine can by itself manufacture something that can connect us empathetically with our past, our ancestors, I don't know if I should be impressed or scared. Perhaps as scared for what we've become as for what the technology has become.
I'm thinking about this point also in the context of the intro to rhetoric course I'll be teaching in the fall. This post brought to my mind something I read years ago by rhetorician Gerard Hauser from his book,
Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. Citing Paul Ricoeur, Hauser points to
the fragility of rhetoric in a context so overrun by alienation and difference that one has difficulty locating compelling terms that might anchor society in the silt of cultural memory. At the level of praxis, society's rhetors are custodians of history's story. By giving memorable form to distinctive episodes and persons, they evoke bonds of communal understanding and sympathy that can frame common commitments and motivate common actions. The question we face is whether the distance between the contracting relevance of the past and the fading horizon of an uncertain future precludes the possibility that we can still establish bonds of community. (p. 112)
I'd add that in addition to what he calls "the challenge of a past and future moving in opposite directions" is now the question of who or what will tell history's story--and what difference it makes.
I'm not sure that we will get into this in our course--I'm still working on developing the course, and these questions, while interesting and important, are perhaps not as central as the issues that arise from teaching an intro to rhetoric course in the US during the midterm elections. But I want to follow this thread and see where it goes.
It's late now, and I might come back to tinker with this post some more later.
[Update, 5/7/26: This article puts the learning of history in terms of "historical empathy": "'The more we can put it in terms of everyday people, and help people relate to those individuals, we find, the more successful we can be,' said Michael Hensinger, who oversees K-12 education for the museum. 'It can be really hard to relate to a general, a king, queen, somebody like that, which is often the lens through which a lot of history was taught when I was growing up.'"]
