RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

There are a handful of historians who now advocate teaching an all-encompassing form of history known as big history. Everything about big history is outsized, from its backer, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, to its critics, who see big problems. Author Eric Weiner explains the controversy in our series, The Future of History.

ERIC WEINER, BYLINE: Sometimes, one phone call can change your life. Not that long ago, David Christian, a history professor at San Diego State, received just such a call.

DAVID CHRISTIAN: I think it was a Monday morning.

WEINER: Christian was in a foul mood.

CHRISTIAN: Because I had to do lots of tedious administrative things, and I was sort of gearing up for that.

WEINER: Then, the phone rings.

CHRISTIAN: And I say, yes, what do you want? And a very nice voice at the other end says, oh, I'm sorry, is this a bad time? And I say, no, no, no, no, it's not a bad time. What do you want? (Laughter). And she says, look, I'm so sorry. I can call back later. But I'm calling from Mr. Bill Gates' office. And I said, oh, yes?

WEINER: Gates was calling about big history. He'd seen Christian's video course on the subject and was intrigued. Like all big ideas, big history began with a what-if. What if you began teaching history not with the agricultural revolution, but earlier with the Paleolithic age? What if you ventured even further back?

CHRISTIAN: And then, once I went down that track, you can see where it's going to go (laughter). I started thinking, how do you, you know - we have to talk about the evolution of life. We have to talk about the evolution of the planet. And eventually, we have to talk about the evolution of the universe. And so that was my first idea was, could you teach a history of everything?

WEINER: Yes, you can.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

CHRISTIAN: There's a huge release of energy, and - bam - we have our first stars.

WEINER: Christian's TED Talk has garnered more than 5 million views, and college courses on big history are extremely popular. Students like the way it weaves different disciplines, from cosmology to biology, into a coherent whole. A modern origin story, Christian calls it, told through the prism of science. Big history expands not only the scale of history but also the sort of questions historians and their students are encouraged to ask.

CHRISTIAN: I remember as a kid, I think there were lots of - lots of people who went to school expecting to ask the big questions about what's your place in the universe. How does everything fit together? And what your schoolteachers more or less have to tell you is, shut up about the meaning of life (laughter), you know, and get on with your history of the Industrial Revolution or whatever it is.

WEINER: Big history can change all that, Christian believes. And it was that phone call from Bill Gates and a subsequent donation of $10 million that enabled him to take the next step and bring big history into the high school classroom.

JEFFREY MALBROUGH: If we spent the majority of our time 13,000 years ago searching for food, how much time do we spend with our food today?

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENTS: Not a lot.

MALBROUGH: Not a lot, right? A few minutes, right? You can pop Easy Mac in the microwave and have it done in a minute.

WEINER: Kenwood High in Essex, Md. is one of some 700 schools across the country that now offers big history. Teacher Jeffrey Malbrough readily admits this is an experiment, a learning experience for all involved.

MALBROUGH: For the most part, I'm learning more than the kids are learning sometimes, I swear.

WEINER: His lectures are peppered with phrases such as Goldilocks conditions and smoothie state, plucked from the lexicon of big history. It's a dizzying pace, 14 billion years of history in a single semester. Humans do play a role, of course, but a relatively small one.

MALBROUGH: One of the first lessons that we did was taking them out and talking about scale, taking them out to a football field.

WEINER: Yes, a football field - one goal line represented the big bang, the other goal line, today.

MALBROUGH: And then, where do humans come in? It's between the one-yard line and the goal line. So I think getting them to understand that there's more than just us, there's more than just the world that we see today. There's so much out there that they can experience.

WEINER: Many of Malbrough's students struggle to maintain interest in other classes. But you wouldn't know it watching them gobble up big history. Timothy Frey and Kamal Shah (ph) say it's unlike any history class they've ever taken.

TIMOTHY FREY: It changes my way of how I think of humanity (laughter). Like, I used to just think that, oh, we - we're the top species. But really, we're not.

KAMAL SHAH: I took AP world history. And we learned, like, a lot of facts, like every little detail. But none of it actually connected. Like, in this class, everything connects. Like, we connected, like, the Opium Wars all the way back to the big bang. And I thought that was really interesting 'cause it actually made sense.

WEINER: Big history, though, has raised some unexpected big questions.

SAM WINEBURG: My primary question is, is it history?

WEINER: Sam Wineburg is a professor of education and history at Stanford. He's all for making history more compelling but doesn't believe big history, with its stratospheric perspective, is the answer.

WINEBURG: History is about human beings. History is about the decisions that people make that change the course of our time. And the kinds of questions of the big bang or did mammals evolve seem to be quite far and distant from the immediacy of the need to understand our present through the lens and the prism of the past.

WEINER: Wineburg and other critics are also concerned about big history's wealthy backer, Bill Gates. Philanthropists have long dipped their toes and sometimes more into the world of education. But this, says Wineburg, is different.

WINEBURG: Andrew Carnegie built libraries, but he didn't tell people what to read.

WEINER: Not so fast, say supporters of big history like David Christian. Sure, Bill Gates put up some money and lent his name to the project. But that's about it.

CHRISTIAN: This is not his history. He's not steered it or controlled it in any way. What he's done is he's enabled it.

WEINER: Enabled students who might otherwise have been turned off by musty history to actually, well, enjoy it and at the same time wrestle with some very big questions, not only about history but about the meaning of life. Moss Arnold is a 10th grader at Kenwood High and a budding existentialist.

MOSS ARNOLD: It made me think a lot more about just the whole universe itself because it all started from the big bang, of course. And when you think about it, he was saying that it would all come to an end soon. So when you really think about it, what are we doing here? It just makes you think that really everything will be meaningless soon.

WEINER: Big history promises big questions, not necessarily happy answers. For NPR News, I'm Eric Weiner.