You Know How It Is Hard To Find Young People Interested In Ancient Coins?

As a separate post, I became interested in World history through coins, not the other way around.
My interest in Roman coins came after collecting modern coins for more than 10 years.

It took me another 10 years before I started to properly appreciate ancient Greek coins, because the history of ancient Greece is of factionated city states, and I still can't properly read ancient Greek legends on coins.
Roman coins are far more consistent in this regard, with an Empire that over ruled a range of local cultures and languages. The roots of modern European languages are based on Latin.

Now, I collect all World coins of all cultures, covering the whole of numismatics over the last 26 centuries.

Modern schooling does not teach ancient history much. My introduction to ancient history was in early high school where ancient history was a compulsory component of history, and the subject of history itself was a minor, but compulsory component of the general school curriculum.

English language (not literature), and mathematics were the only universal but major component of the curriculum for all kids.
Pity.
That is not the case anymore.

I have been trying for years to get my children and grand children interested in ancient coins and in history in general with no luck. They are all in the now and history means nothing to them. To make it even worse they don't keep up with current events, don't read newspapers or watch the TV news. Their heads are buried in their smart phones with social media.

It's sad because they aren't the only ones like this, walk down any street and this is what you will see no one looking around most have their heads on their smart phone and texting away.

My grandson had a baby boy a few months ago named Henry, so I put together group of coins of kings Henry with a write up on who they were and what they had contributed to history. I told my grandson to put them away for him until he is old enough to understand them. I'm hoping that my grand son will learn about them in the mean time and just maybe develop and interest.

This thread hits upon several timely issues. Fostering cultural literacy to youngsters is indeed a challenge these days - perhaps particularly American kids. I am reminded of this well-distributed picture, showing a group of kids with noses buried in their electronic devices, totally oblivious to the masterpiece behind them - a work by perhaps the greatest Western artist of all time (imho), Rembrandt.



A glimmer of hope, at least for me, took place some years back at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. My wife and I watched, with big smiles on our faces, as a docent asked question after question, in Spanish, about one of the paintings, to a group of perhaps two dozen little kids who sat huddled together in front of the work. The group was clearly on a local school trip to the museum. With every question nearly all of the kids enthusiastically raised their hands, bursting with excitement, each wanting to be the one who got chosen to answer. Some couldn't wait to be called upon - in their enthusiasm they would blurt out their opinions about what they saw in the painting. It was wonderful.

Regarding the mural: Literally covering up the dispassionate portrayal of unsavory historical events - as with the San Fran work - is problematic. Better that historical reality is dealt with head on and the imagery used as a backdrop to meaningful discussion. This (the mural) does not seem like a situation in which the artist was in any way glorifying or endorsing the improper treatment of individuals. Sensitivity is extremely important, but then so is confronting our past. I can understand the impetus for the covering up the imagery, but as an artist I have a hard time with censorship - especially when it seems to be geared towards denying some painful historical reality.

Great post, Bob. I heartily agree on all points, especially on the issue with censorship vs free speech as it relates to art. I think (hope?) that we are in a momentary swing of the pendulum a bit too far in this regard.




My wife and I were in the Prado a month ago and saw the same thing in that wonderful Velasquez rotunda. As concerns American kids, it's hard to imagine we will get to the same place, when these parts of the early education curriculum are considered optional and are rife for cuts.

I'm not a regular visitor to the ancients forum, but I saw this thread and had to give it a read.

As a kid, I collected exclusively US coins. I wanted to fill my Lincoln Cent album and accumulate a type set. Shortly after discovering CCF and returning to coin collecting as an adult, I realized that there was so much interesting world history which could be learned from coins. Even a country like Finland has some interesting history.

I think the subject of history was an area where my school system really failed me. History was taught in three parts: American history (this may have been two classes), early world history (ancient to mid-1700s) and modern world history. I think the biggest problem was that the modern world history always excluded US history. There was no reference to what was happening in the US when an event happened in Europe or Asia for example. I think this made it unrelatable to all the American history that was drilled into us. The attitude was almost like world history didn't matter or that the US was not part of the world.

Coins have really opened up the history of the world to me. While most of my focus is mostly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I would eventually like to work my way back to medieval or maybe even ancient coins at some point. Or maybe I'll end up collecting Asian or Indian coins. Who knows where history will take me.

Fin235:

When one considers if collecting Nazi coins is important or not, I think back to their Nazi stance and erasing history by burning books and how ironic it is people would think collecting Nazi coins or documents etc might be not ethical. There was a movie Hitler had produced you probably have seen, as it is easy to find on youtube, "The Eternal Jew". I found that important to watch in my lifetime to understand how the people of Germany could grow to be so afraid of having Jews around them. I came away seriously thinking that Germans of the time had grown to "understand" Jews brought disease, and Communism, and turned on them in the First World War etc. The leaders might have just wanted to get a lot of the Jewish property and money, but the people had a real fear and wanted very much a safer place apparently for themselves. (And as a Jew myself who sells coins I got a kick out of how they showed Jews can trade garbage until they have a little stand with garbage, until they grow to housewares and pretty soon we own all the mansions in town. I remember my Rabbi once told a story of a man in an old European Jewish village who was fixated on reading Nazi literature until his friends worried enough about him to send him to the Rabbi. When asked the man said, things are just so hard in life for us in this town but in these books we Jews have everything and live the good life!) Well I certainly don't see my little coin business getting me a mansion but I am certainly glad no one stopped me from watching the movie as to just think a whole country had "bad people" who are gone now who used to kill us would not have been a deep enough explanation at all. So sure people need to collect Nazi stuff along with Confederate things as if you watch "Birth of a Nation" a film the most progressive president Wilson actually screened in the White House at the time, you learn today how frightened the whites were of losing everything to African Americans and that is why all those statues they are taking down now of Confederates come from not right after the Civil War but at the turn of the century when a bunch of old men were trying to change history a bit and kind of make it seem they won the war instead of lost.

I suspect I am among the youngest here and I am certainly a member of the iconoclastic generation so maybe my opinion is biased, but I think the lack of young people in the hobby is just because it isn't in the realm of the young. It doesn't require youth to do like sports or being a layabout does. People also don't know it exists as a hobby, so there has to be some sort of gateway in, like collecting modern coins, which also isn't a hobby associated with youthfulness.

Will censorship affect ancient coins? I don't think so - it just isn't on these people's radar. More damaging is the movement to abandon our collective cultural history over the perceived problems with it. I think the hobby would suffer greatly if modern society fully disassociated from its past and sanitising public spaces is just one part of that shift. A big part of the shift that isn't much discussed is the erosion of identity. Right now, a lot of my peers don't identify with their country and therefore don't feel connected to the history that surrounds them. Why would they care about a sestertius of Britannia when they see her as a symbol of a problematic culture of which they form no part? People are, for now, censoring stuff that makes them unhappy about their culture as an act of penitence, but there is a growing undercurrent of people who want a new world order completely free of the burden of history - not hiding the past, but starting again.

I think it has to be said that censorship is not a new thing, nor is it limited to the young. Censorship (overzealous censorship in my own humble opinion) lost this sub a fair number of very knowledgable members back when it was decided that the content of one particular coin was too risque for a family oriented site. It's all swings and roundabouts.