History At Our House

How Much History do Kids Need?

April 21st, 2009 by mrpowell2

As I discussed in my last post (Kids Need History Early), children should start learning history as early as six years of age, and no later than eight. They are ready to learn it then, and they need to start creating the foundation of knowledge that enables their intellectual growth through elementary, middle school, and high school. It’s that growth that I’d like to discuss this time around.

Once kids start learning history, they need to keep learning it, regularly, rigorously, and over the duration of their academic career.  Each stage of this process allows students to progress through natural levels of awareness and ultimately to emerge as historically-minded adults.

The proper goal of early history education is to help children develop the “history habit.”  To put the matter plainly, to learn history children first have to develop an interest in it.  For that to happen it must be presented in a manner that is compatible with their level of thinking and their natural interests.  History has to be taught as an exciting story, with characters and story lines as amazing as any work of fiction.  But children must also learn to appreciate the unique value of history, which stems from history’s stories not being fiction, but fact. They must be encouraged to glean for the first time that history has  universal lessons about life to offer, and that actors and events from the past helped shaped the world around them in tangible ways.

When this is done right, students can become extremely invested in history at an early age. For instance, when discussing the history of Athens recently, I had seven year old students unselfconsciously saying that what they were learning was “cool.”  (When was the last time you heard a student call history that?  We were studying the Athenian Golden Age, which by any proper standard certainly is one of the coolest things in the world–ever!–but do most kids think so?)  Students were learning for the first time what a democracy is by studying the example of Athens.  When this same class of lower elementary students learned that Athens had lost the Peloponnesian War against Sparta, I could hear voices cracking.  (Yes, I have actually seen tears shed by young students in history classes, about events that occurred 2500 years ago!)

Emotional moments such as these demonstrate just how relevant history can be to a young audience.  Indeed, such moments are what history at the lower elementary level is all about.  I made sure to commiserate.  (Whenever I return to study Ancient history, I always find myself saddened that Athens was not able overcome the limitations of its historical setting and achieve an even deeper imprint on Western civilization.)  I explained that there’s nothing wrong with having favorites in history, and admiring certain individuals and cultures, but that history is about what actually happened, and we have to stick to the truth.

When children experience these moments of great value-significance as they learn about the past, they are on their way to becoming successful students of history.  They are fueled by lasting impressions and even armed with some specific knowledge, but most importantly they have a desire to learn more.  They have the “history habit.”

Once children have a taste for history, it’s important to continue providing for their intellectual growth. The second stage of a proper history program, which I call the “upper elementary” level, focuses on reinforcing the material previously learned to help the students create a basic framework of knowledge. When students repeat the same material they once studied just three years earlier, they get to have their first experience of being historically-minded, i.e. of applying historical knowledge. They hear a story, which they learned not long before, and they are able to recall parts of it. In addition they can anticipate what is coming.

This is like watching a favorite movie again. The first time around, you get to experience the story as new and intriguing.  The next time, you get to recall and predict those enjoyable aspects of it, but you also find yourself seeing things you hadn’t seen before, and reveling in a heightened appreciation of the whole.  To use an example from Ancient history: The student hears the name “Epaminondas” and vaguely remembers it.  She is reminded (by me) that Epaminondas defeated the Spartans–whom she remembers in greater detail, because they were so important to the story of Greece.  She is also reminded that the infighting between the Greeks led to their takeover by Alexander the Great (who was Macedonian, not Greek) but her recollection is imperfect. Then she is further reminded that Philip of Macedon was taken as a hostage by Epaminondas as a youth and learned the art of war from the great general. Then it clicks. The student recalls that Philip was Alexander’s father.  She sees the connection.  She grasps a causal chain of events that unites all the different pieces of the story.  (It’s not uncommon in my experience to have kids’ hands shoot up in class, or for them to interject and interrupt the lesson when these identifications strike them.  It’s exciting to realize that you are beginning to understand how history unfolds!)

This is the beginning of an integrated awareness of the past.  Content previously understood is revisited and tied to new identifications. The old knowledge and new awareness complement and reinforce each other. When this occurs, students experience a sense of efficacy, of wielding knowledge as a tool, and–once again–a desire to learn more.  This is the second stage in the development of historical-mindedness.

Armed with this level of awareness, a student who enters the junior high history program is ready to achieve mastery over history’s essential content. This may seem like a bold claim, but it is possible, and I have seen it. I have seen students achieve this mastery, and the reason they did so was that they had been properly guided since they were elementary-grade students.  (Conversely, I must say, such mastery is never achieved without that prior instruction.)

Let us look more closely at some of the elements of Greek history discussed above to elaborate on this later stage.  Lower elementary instruction yields an awareness of certain unit facts such as that there was a man named Epaminondas, and that there was an event called the Peloponnesian War.  It also familiarizes the student with the names of places such as Sparta, Thebes, and Macedonia.  At the upper elementary level, this knowledge is reinforced and more carefully ordered.  The sequence of developments from the Peloponnesian War (between Athens and Sparta)–to the Battle of Leuctra (371 BC), in which Thebes defeated Sparta by the innovative use of the phalanx by Epaminondas–to the hostage-takings by Thebes in Macedonia during their period of ascendancy–to the instruction of Philip during his youth as a hostage by Epaminondas–to the Battle of Heraclea of 338 BC (when Philip applied his knowledge to defeat the Greeks)–and finally, after the assassination of Philip, to the ascendancy of his son Alexander, whose prodigal military ability shattered the balance of power in the entire Ancient world.  Junior high students who are taught this same material a third time can take the sequence and see how it translates into various phases of development, such as the “Theban Supremacy,” the “Rise of Macedonia,” and “The Alexandrian Period,” and how these are periods that can be subsumed under a more abstract heading, i.e. the decline of Greece towards the Hellenistic Period, and ultimately how they all connect to the fall of Greece by later Roman conquest.

Students at this level who have done the prerequisite work have had repeated exposure to the necessary facts and the instruction to order and make sense of those facts so that they can independently describe the general flow of history.

Imagine a student equipped with this level of knowledge entering into high school.  Given current educational standard this is precisely what we must do–imagine–because students rarely know this much when graduating from college! But a student so-equipped is ready to understand what moves history.  She is ready to grasp the intellectual roots of the progress of humankind.   Having acquired the “history habit” at a young age, gained a strong base of knowledge through “upper elementary” history, then intensified and integrated that knowledge through junior high, she is ready for strive for the deeper insight into history that comes from studying the thoughts and actions of its pivotal characters.

It is at the high school level that the student is ready to start reading the Inquiries of Herodotus to see why Greco-Persian Wars occured, Pericles’ funeral oration to see what drove the Athenians to empire, Plato’s Crito and Phaedo, to see what motivated Socrates to accept the injustices of unlimited democracy, and Demosthenes’ Philippics, to understand more precisely how the Greeks responded to the growing threat of Macedonian power, etc.

But this type of work can only be done  with the necessary prerequisites in place.  Reading Herodotus or Demosthenes without knowing Greek history may yield literary enjoyment, but their writing is focused on episodes far too remote from the present to motivate students who don’t understand why they matter.  For such reading to provide real, lasting knowledge to a young student, that student must first understand its relevance–which only comes from grasping the “big picture” first.

With ten to twelve years of proper history instruction under their belts, students can emerge with a wide base of knowledge of the past, and an understanding of how its lessons and causal progressions are embedded in every aspect of life around us.  They know history.  They know what drives it.  They know how to use that knowledge.  And they are ready to explore the vast treasure-trove of humanity’s experiences independently.  They emerge as adults guided by a keenly developed sense of historical-mindedness.

Next time: Why the HistoryAtOurHouse program follows a three-year rotation, and not the more common four-year rotation espoused in WTM.  (The short answer: a three-year rotation is far superior! )

Posted in Ancient History, Education, History, History Homeschooling, History for High School Students, Homeschooling, Homeschooling Curriculum, Pedagogy, Secular homeschooling 2 Comments »

2 Responses to “How Much History do Kids Need?”

1. Jason Crawford wrote on 04/22/09 at 12:27 am :

   Oh, how I wish I’d had you as a teacher at age 7, Scott! At least I’m doing the next best thing, taking your classes as an adult!

2. Rachel Miner wrote on 04/22/09 at 2:17 pm :

   I so agree with Jason. Cameron is still five, but I was just reviewing long term goals with Andrew last night, and enrolling Cameron in your courses is on the list!

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