History At Our House

The HistoryAtOurHouse Three-Year History Rotation

June 18th, 2009 by mrpowell2

This is part 3 in a series of four essays I’ve sent to mailing list members exclusively.  I’m posting part 3 as an enticement for those of you who are not mailing list members to join the list.

As I discussed in Part 2 of this series (sent out mailing list members only) and in my article Why History? (available at Secular Homeschooling Magazine), the proper aim of a history program is to help students achieve historical-mindedness.

To be historically-minded means not just to know many facts about the past, but to see how the past is connected to the present, and to be able to use the past as an intellectual resource for living more productively in the present.

Given the state of history education today, fewer and fewer people are developing this trait.  Kids aren’t taught history when they are young.  Then most learn to hate it in high school.  The few who bother with it in college find it to be a completely esoteric subject–which a handful embrace, and the vast majority discard for good.

The only way to reverse this cultural trend is to re-instate systematic history education in the curriculum–for children.  As I discuss in my article “Kids Need History Early,” young minds are ready for history by age seven. To deny them the unique intellectual stimulus that history can provide at that age is to sabotage their chance of ever becoming historically-minded.  (It prevents them from developing the “history habit” early in life, which significantly lessens their chance of ever developing it.)

One of the key issues I discuss in my follow-up piece entitled “How Much History Do Kids Need?” is the need to continue feeding the growth of young minds by a systematic presentation of history over the course of their education, until they graduate from high school.  Given the state of college history education, high school is really the last chance kids have to grasp the value of history and commit to incorporating it into their intellectual lives.

(There is one exception to this.  Rarely, adults actually develop an interest in history on their own.  Unfortunately, without systematic instruction, it’s virtually impossible to make up for lost time once you are older.  I teach bright, motivated adult students history, and I’ve observed first-hand the tremendous handicap of starting late. It’s just not possible to put the time aside, let alone dedicate the intellectual resources, to master history once you’re entangled in your web of family and professional responsibilities.)

Assuming you start your children on history at age seven, and they graduate at eighteen, that means you’ve got twelve years to help them become historically-minded. That may seem like a long time, but it’s not.  There’s 5000 years worth of stories from five major cultural continents to cram into those twelve years!  Furthermore, as everybody knows full well, you can’t teach children something just once, and then expect it to stick for good.  The truth is you’ve got to teach them the same history repeatedly over the course of those twelve years.  And this isn’t just so they will retain it; it’s so their understanding and appreciation will evolve as their context of knowledge grows.  Over the course of their early life and during their teen years children change rapidly. They need to be taught history in a manner that reflects and enhances this growth.

About a hundred years ago, when people were actually being educated in that way we now call “classical,” it was easier to rotate through history’s fewer stories.  One could study Ancient history (Greece and Rome) one year, European history (especially Britain and France, America’s parent civilizations) the next, and America in the third year.  Then one repeated the cycle.  At the time there was really only about 3000 years worth of material (because ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia remained largely undiscovered) and the story was naturally structured in a linear progression of cultures that made up the core political narrative of Western civilization.  There really wasn’t any reason to study anything else.

Then a number of factors caused this approach to be modified, and in some cases abandoned.  With the advent of Egyptology and Assyriology, the background story to Western civilization became 2000 years longer. Then, because of accelerated globalization in the twentieth century, it became evident that understanding the forces that would shape the lives of everyday Americans meant accounting for threads of historical development outside of the traditional Western narrative.  Even if there hadn’t been ideological forces at work–all the “isms” of the twentieth century, from Marxism to multiculturalism, redefining what history should be–it would have been necessary to change the way history was taught, just to account for the objective fact that the Middle East and East Asia were having a greater and greater impact on the course of world events.

As a reflection of the ever expanding range of available and relevant historical information and also the changing pedagogical values in the culture, it is now common to hear people talking about four-year–and even six-year!–history rotations.  These longer rotations arise because of an almost indiscriminate attempt to cover it all, from the Sun King to the Sumo wrestlers, from California to Calcutta.

The first problem that arises from this expansion of the curriculum is that the presentation of the past becomes less essentialized and hence less cohesive.  When different stories about different civilizations are presented just because they are different, the sum inevitably reflects this disparity.  Every civilization has its own essential lines of development; for instance, the progress of Ancient Greece towards democracy, and the emergence of Confucianism during the Zhou dynasty in China.  Each of these themes is unique and historically incommensurable.  They cannot be woven into a single coherent narrative because they happened thousands of miles apart, in radically different contexts, in civilizations that had no contact with each other.  The same can be said of the stories of ancient pharaonic Egypt and the Harrapan culture of early India, even thought these were nearer to each other.

If you commit to teaching any two (or three, or more) such disparate narratives, there are two ways of dealing with the incongruity.  The first is essentially to ignore it, and tell the multiple stories in parallel, i.e. jumping back and forth between them.   Regardless of what adults wish to be the case, the disparity between the narratives is not lost on students, who find this method confusing and unproductive.  The second approach is to tell one story in full, and then the other, and so on. Regardless of whether the stories are told in parallel or in series, if you choose to tell as many as you can, you either have to rush through them, or drag it out endlessly.
Each of these approaches has an insurmountable pitfall.  If you want to move through all of the possible choices quickly, i.e. try to fit all the stories into, say, four years, you have to curtail each of them, rendering the treatment superficial and less satisfying.  If you want to give each story a full treatment, then it can take you all of six years.  The problem with this approach is that students don’t get to return to the same material often enough as they grow to reinforce their previous learning.  If they finally get back to material they learned six years before to learn more, they’ve inevitably forgotten it and have no lasting knowledge to build upon.

Either way, students can never gain a command over what they are studying.  This means that the intellectual maturation they should be experiencing through ever more intensive studies of the same material cannot occur. Where they would have been in a position to study history with intellectual penetration in high school, they cannot. They are not ready.  And because they are not ready, high school cannot serve them as it should.  Students thus fail to emerge as  historically-minded adults.
The solution is to find a pedagogical approach that allows students to gain command over the right material before high school, so that they can become historical-minded adults in high school.

The solution is to determine what is the most essential material that students need to learn, present it properly, repeatedly, at higher and higher levels of abstraction, until students know  history inside out and can readily leverage its constituent facts in meaningful thinking.

That material is the integrated progression of Ancient, European, and American history taught in a straightforward three-year rotation, used in HistoryAtOurHouse.

This approach delivers the power of essentialization.  Out of the plethora of historical options, this approach delivers a narrative that is tightly woven, with the story progressing from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome in the first year, to the Dark Ages and the formation of modern Europe in the second year, through the Age of Discovery to the story of America in the third.  The essence of this story is the development of Western civilization as an inheritance of the Ancient world, an amalgam of European influences, and a culmination in the American Epoch that is the world today.

This compact narrative is highly cohesive.  There are direct causal links that bind the component parts of the story together–from the conquest of Egypt by the Persians, to the conquest of the Roman Empire by the Germanic barbarians, to the conquest of the Americas by the Europeans.  This narrative also illustrates universal themes that are not found elsewhere, such as the development of democratic, republican, and socialist forms of government, as well as the feudal and monarchical and theocratic forms so common everywhere else.  In addition, from Solon and the ancient Athenian debt slavery crisis to Lincoln and America’s own modern struggle against slavery, it is full of individuals and events that shaped the world around us.

This approach also delivers the power of repetition. Presenting this more delimited story over a three-year cycle allows students to return to the same material often enough to allow them to gradually learn it better and better. Importantly, this doesn’t just mean one additional exposure compared to a four-year cycle, or two more exposures compared to a six-year cycle.  (Nominally: 12 yrs / 6 year cycle = 2 exposures; 12 yrs / 4 year cycle = 3 exposures; 12 yrs / 3 year cycle = 4 exposures.)  It actually means repeating the same material 20-50 more times!  Although I’ve never kept an exact count of how many times I discuss the same key facts over the course of one academic year, it easily is more than 20 times.  It may even be more than 50 times.  That means that over the course of twelve school years with a three-year rotation, students will revisit the same facts 80-200 times! Each distinct exposure helps students better understand and better remember, especially when they are encouraged to recall and interpret the meaning of these facts by me through targeted Q&A sessions in class.  Each time they revisit the same material with their growing context of knowledge the experience is more rewarding because they can better grasp its significance by seeing how it fits in the “big picture.”

It is only when they are armed with a strong grasp of this “big picture” that students entering high school are ready to do the intellectual work that their more mature minds can be and need to be doing.  A high school student should not be focused on learning basic historical facts, such as the dates of the Thirty Years’ War, the names of the major Roman Emperors, or the specific amendments of the Bill of Rights.  He should already know these things.  Then, based on this knowledge, he can learn how to investigate what underlies those facts, to uncover the causes of history, including and especially the intellectual underpinnings of the major upheavals in civilization, such as the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, the Reformation, and the American and French Revolutions.  To grasp how certain intellectual paradigms have dominated the progress of history, one cannot get hung up on grasping what that progress is, one must already know it.  Only with this foundational knowledge already acquired is a student’s mind freed to do the more significant thinking that will allow them to fully grasp how and why history matters.

Returning to the key point I made at the outset, it is this more significant thinking that is the real aim of history.  The point of learning history isn’t just to know facts, it’s to leverage those facts as an intellectual tool for living.

The choice when designing a history curriculum is whether to take the goal of historical-mindedness seriously or not.  The choice is whether to embrace a more essentialized, cohesive, causal, and intellectually productive narrative, and to do it well; or to scatter one’s focus, and cover a lot of material less productively.  Using a four or six year rotation inevitably comes from choosing to present too much material, which degrades the key values that history has to offer. By contrast, the tightly-woven, iterative approach used in HistoryAtOurHouse delivers an inspiring, instructive narrative that can propel students to achieve an unmatched degree of historical-mindedness.

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So what about China and the Middle East?  Don’t kids need to learn about them?  The answer is: it depends.  Joiin the mailing list to learn how HistoryAtOurHouse will be offering the history of East Asia (China and Japan) and the history of the Middle East as optional programs in its curriculum starting in 2011-12.  This exclusive preview–coming this summer–will be available for mailing list members only!  Also coming soon for mailing list members only: Part 4 of this series on “the HistoryAtOurHouse difference” on the crucial importance of high school history: how to get ready for it, and why you shouldn’t accept any substitute for the HistoryAtOurHouse high school program!

Posted in Homeschooling Curriculum, Education, Homeschooling, Secular homeschooling, History At Our House, History Curriculum

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