How to hide history
Something like that. (Nasjonalbiblioteket)
I grew up in a beach town in Southern Maine known for its excellent schools. For the most part, my education was pretty good. There were only three AP courses offered at the tiny high school, but the teachers were strong and the curriculum was solid.
However, there was one gaping hole: world history.
It seemed like every year, we learned about American history beginning with Columbus and petering out around World War I. Usually, there was a field trip to the colonial history museum in the center of town, where we would churn butter and learn about the clothes and customs of the people of European descent who inhabited the village all the way back to 1652.
In sixth grade, we learned about South America (Lake Titicaca, ever a source of giggles for American twelve-year-olds)…Canada, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean…taking a look, country by country, at geographical features, government systems, languages spoken, and so on. We did learn about the Mayan, Aztec, and Incan civilizations.
But as far as I can remember (and my memory is embarrassingly good), that’s it.
No Babylonians, no Athenians, no Romans, and no Byzantium. And certainly nothing about the dynasties of China or the empires of Mali or India.
And in high school, only courses on American History were required. The same history we’d already studied a few times over, and had no broader context for.
How does this happen? Perhaps it was a lack of communication on the part of teachers. Maybe there was no official department overseeing things. By now, a million years later, the problem may have been corrected — there may be a comprehensive, cohesive history (not “social studies”) curriculum for Kindergarten through twelfth grade. Although decentralized educational systems have their merits, a bit of organization would benefit students.
But when I began my research in preparation for The Little Middle School, I was surprised to see that the “continent by continent” system is still de rigeur, at least in the state of Georgia. Sixth graders study the Americas and Africa, seventh graders study Europe, Asia, and Australia, and eighth graders study Georgia. In each region, they are to study geography, politics, economic systems, and history.
The problem is, the continents don’t mean anything on their own. Now that I have finally studied world history as an adult, I don’t see how you can get a decent understanding of, say, the Roman Empire, which spanned three so-called continents at its height, if you are studying Europe, Asia, and Africa separately.
Likewise, it distorts cultural, political, religious, and economic trends to, for instance, dismiss the historical impact of the Sahara desert, which isolated the people of sub-Saharan Africa from the rest of the world for millennia, and treat all of Africa as a unified landmass.
I have found it a far more logical approach to look at world history from a chronological perspective, beginning in prehistory and continuing into the 20th century.
This allows for a better understanding of geography. Instead of focusing on the somewhat arbitrary division of the world into continents, the student can see how the geography of a region influences the settlement patterns of humans and the interaction (or lack thereof) of different groups. For example, the Mediterranean Sea is the geographic feature that is key to understanding the Roman Empire, not the landmasses.
The chronological approach also helps us understand political, economic, and religious trends more deeply and fully. I have often wondered whether this is actually the reason that this is not the framework used by public schools. It’s impossible to explore historical events and trends without making a judgment about them in some way, even if that judgment is implicit. Simply deciding what is worthy of including in the curriculum is, itself, a judgment.
The continent-by-continent approach, because it obscures and neutralizes political, economic, and religious trends, is “safe.” That’s how you end up with a worksheet in which students fill in the blanks with facts (GNP, GDP, per capita income, population, square mileage) about Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, even though these three nations are wildly different. The fill-in-the-blanks may expose these differences, but they don’t address the reasons behind them. How did these three countries get to be the way they are? The truth is complicated, painful, and fascinating.
To truly study the world, not as a list of disconnected facts but as a real, interconnected entity, we have to be brave enough to uncover our biases, question our assumptions, and revisit the status quo. This turns up in unexpected ways. Do we say “we” when we’re talking about the English colonies of North America but find ourselves using “they” when we’re talking about Spanish Florida? Do we feel a sense of victory at the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople or a pang of loss? What do we call “strange” or “exotic,” not realizing that our own culture may seem that way to an outsider?
To me, these are intriguing questions that make history much harder to teach. I believe that’s a good thing. Is this a story of adventure and excitement or of suffering and misery? It can be both of those things at once. To embrace and investigate, rather than eliminate, that ambiguity and complexity is the path toward a more mature understanding of the world for all of us.