Intelligibility?

I visited Pioneer this past Tuesday and witnessed a presentation on Gothic architecture in a upper-level humanities course. I was impressed with the depth of the lecture, as well as with the integrative qualities of the course in general. This seemed much closer to the liberal arts model that I believe is so desperately needed in education today. This is in fact a rather traditional model (and by "traditional," I don't mean the 1950s), something that was once at the center of education in the West for hundreds of years. This humanities course was innovative only insofar as it was traditional.
As teacher, this course is much closer to the sort of thing in which I would want to be engaged. After being present in the World History classroom over the course of nearly two and half months, I am only less inclined to want to teach this course, because I have yet to understand how it constitutes a "course," properly speaking, at all. What makes World History a distinctive study? Is a global view a viable interpretation of the 10,000 years of history this course attempts to "cover"? Or is this simply a modern imposition? As it is presented in the textbook used in my class, and as it has been taught by my mentor, this "course" usually is reduced to the study of a collection of cultures. The class jumps from China to Rome to South America, from one time period to an earlier one, and then back to an even later one - and around we go in a dizzyingly fast ride through the entirety of the known events of man. No matter that the majority of these cultures, up to even the 17th century, had little conception of a "global" mindset, and that inter-cultural and inter-national contact was engaged in by regions not with a global perspective, but with a local and cultural one.
I would argue that "World History" is a practically meaningless, and certainly unhelpful, way of approaching history, if only because there is simply no unifying principle through which to make it intelligible. One does not study world history as such, but world history as a collection of cultures that happen to span the globe. The most effective and intelligible historical studies are those that address a region, nation, culture, or civilization that can be, in some way, grasped as a unity. The course that World History replaced, Western Civilization, is perhaps one of the most comprehensive (expansive) studies on which one could embark without sacrificing this unifying principle. One could make a very good argument that the unifying principle of a Western Civilization course is the Christian religion. U.S. history can be understood through a study of American culture ("culture" understood here in its fullest sense, i.e. the way of life of a people - religious, political, social, artistic, etc.), which is a distinct entity. The same goes for French history, of British history, or even European, African, Chinese, or Russian history. But World History has not the same advantages as these other histories, for it lacks reference to reality. Even today, in the "global age," the increasing interconnectedness between nations and cultures has yet to yield a distinct worldwide entity that could make World History understandable as World History. The closest thing to a globally unifying principle is religion, which is certainly a trans-cultural phenomenon. Trade networks, International organizations, global alliances - these things hardly constitute a viable principle through which to gain a truly global understanding, for they are artificial or very specialized constructs that have very little direct applicability to the life of a people, which is of course the principle object of any historical study. And of course, they are creations that have yet to survive any more than a century, much less 10,000 years.
If the transition from Western to World History was cast as one which would expand a student's understanding in a global age and be a more culturally sensitive option, which I am guessing had at least something to do with it, then it is all the more a sham. Students would be much better served studying individual cultures or specific cultural interactions than trying to embrace the entire world in two semesters. This course also does little service to increased cultural understanding, because the superficiality (something I have certainly witnessed in my own class) that the scope of this course necessitates only provides students with a series of half-truths, a conglomeration of meaningless facts about 20 different cultures and time periods that lack both sufficient context and sufficient depth. Perhaps the student can learn that the Russian serfs were freed in 1861, but he can hardly be expected to know why, or in what context, this event occurred. In order to gain an understanding that begins to actually address the reality of the event, he must trace the effects of liberalism, of social conditions, of autocracy, of rationalistic thinking, of Slavic tradition, of Westernization, of Russian revolts, of bureaucratization, and so on, building an understanding that can only be achieved by way of a study of Russian culture (remember - "way of life") and its interactions with Europe and other surrounding regions, not under the global interpretation of World History, which serves him in no way. Certainly students learn about cultures and the history of peoples (and maybe even some reasons behind events) in a World History course, but that is hardly due to the fact that it is "World" History. If I am asked to teach this course, I will do my best, but not without a complete lack of faith in the effectiveness of this model. I would only hope that my students could gain a useful understanding (as opposed to superficial) of the major cultures of history.