CalPundit made a proposal over the weekend that I absolutely love: teach history backwards.
[History] is a subject that I talk about frequently with my mother (an actual teacher, mind you), trying to figure out why it’s such a disliked subject. After all, we like history, but surveys routinely show that it’s the least liked subject, ranking even below obvious suspects like math and spelling.
Why is it so disliked? Who knows, really, but it’s probably because it seems so remote from normal life. It’s pretty hard, after all, for most teenagers to get very enthused about a long-ago debate over the Missouri Compromise that has only the most tenuous connection to the present day.
So in the true spirit of blogging (especially weekend blogging!), here’s my dumb amateur idea about how to teach history: do it backward.
It’s hard for kids to get interested in century old debates without knowing all the context around them, but they might very well be interested in current day events. So why not start now and explain the events that got us here? War on terrorism? Sure, let’s teach it, and that leads us backward to a discussion of how the current state of affairs is the successor to the bipolar world that came apart in 1989. And that leads back to the Cold War, and that leads back to World War II, etc.
In other words, invert cause and effect. Try to get them wondering about the causes of things they already know about, and then use this curiosity to lead them inexorably backward through history.
I have to say, I think this would be such a good approach. History never really caught my attention in high school — in the words of a tongue-in-cheek quote I found somewhere, “You meet all these interesting people, but they’re all dead.” I’m not sure I could have pinned down exactly why at the time, but the perceived lack of relevancy to anything I dealt with on a day to day basis, or expected to deal with in the future, certainly makes sense. Math, much as I hated it, I knew I’d have to deal with throughout my life, and the same with much of the sciences — they were obviously useful subjects. History, at least the way it was presented to me then, wasn’t.
Of course, that mindset has changed drastically over the intervening years, and now I find historical subjects fascinating — enough so that one of the many ideas I sometimes turn over in my head for when I can finagle the time and money to get into school again is exploring becoming a history teacher.
If I ever travel down that particular road, you can bet I’ll see what I can do with this approach. Start with the recent history that ties into current events, then explore the underlying causes of those. From there, work backwards — create that obvious, active link between today’s events and those of the past. While many history teachers have the quote, “Those who do not study the past are doomed to repeat it,” somewhere in their classrooms, I think that an approach like this would actually do more to prove that quote than the current approach does.
(via Atrios)