Whence
Hi everyone,
Next week we begin our new cohort of our original course on the History of Education. (See below for a free code to access.) I thought I’d step back and share some thoughts on the role of history in our view of education and life.
The study of history has a special pride of place in our pedagogy, for three reasons.
The history of humanity is inspiring. It connects developing minds to the grand story of humanity: our struggles, our failings, and above all our progress. Humanism—a love of the human—is an underlying value in our programming, and history is the curricular vehicle for it.
Montessori thought that we should help children discover that “every achievement has come by the sacrifice of someone now dead” (To Educate the Human Potential 3), and that this was largely if not entirely a matter of properly connecting the study of any subject with an exciting history of its most important findings.History integrates everything. For anyone or anything, you can ask, “Where did this come from?” You can discover a backstory, and deepen your understanding and appreciation. Even for things that are seemingly eternal, like the fundamental laws of nature, you can still ask “What’s the story of how we came to understand these laws?”
You can always ask “whence”, and the answer can always be placed on a timeline. (Timelines are very, very big in Montessori in the older years.) History is a powerful source of order for all of human knowledge.History explains the human world. The answers to most “why” questions about human beings and human society are inextricably linked to history. This includes not just things that we want to celebrate, as per the first point above, but all things, including confusing, ugly, or even abominable things.
History is necessary for understanding, consciously, the facts, ideas and patterns that govern our lives. Without a basic grounding in history, the world, its institutions, and its peoples are all quite mysterious. As Cicero said, “to be ignorant of what came before is to remain forever a child.”
Imagine you woke up every day with amnesia. Imagine the state of being in which you had no access to any experience earlier than your last meal. What an impoverished state it would be! Your ability to know, to act, to enjoy would be entirely diminished, and you’d be at the mercy of circumstances you could not judge or navigate.
With respect to our full lives as human beings, this state of amnesia is exactly what we are in when we lack an internalized understanding of history. Rather than thousands of years of life experience guiding us, too many of us reduce our context to a few decades. Our lives are immeasurably impoverished as a result.
We want to make sure the children we serve have every opportunity to benefit from the story of human history, and so it is a core element of our curriculum. Our students start acquiring the knowledge they need to understand history in Children’s House: geography, mastery of basic temporal concepts, and facility with the idea of culture. In Lower Elementary, they study early civilizations and explore the patterns that unite and differentiate them. In Upper Elementary and beyond, they study history chronologically and with great rigor, gaining a thorough grounding in the story of civilization.
Our commitment to history gives our students an enormous value, a massive competitive advantage in life. It offers a perspective on humanity, rigorously organized in time and space, honest enough to offer countless cautionary tales, inspiring enough to be a reservoir of wisdom and inspired exemplars. Our students, through a developmentally tuned study of history, come to understand human nature and the social world around them. More importantly, they come to have the basic skills and knowledge frameworks that they need to flesh out, update, evaluate, and continuously apply their own historical understanding over the course of a lifetime.
The result is that they both live in a world they are coming to know, and they are better able to know themselves.
For us as educators, in addition to the value of history generally, the history of education is a profound value, including the history of studying history.
The study of history in school actually has its own fascinating history. For many centuries in the West, at least some history was a commonplace in primary schools, with a special emphasis—for historical reasons—on Roman history, and also on the local national history, e.g. American history for Americans. In the early 20th century in the US, this decent but limited history was supplanted by “social studies”, an interdisciplinary approach to the social sciences. History education has never fully recovered.
It’s perhaps not unsurprising that, as history education has greatly declined in quality in most schools, so educators’ understanding of their own history has also declined.
Education is one of a handful of fields that is almost entirely ignorant of its history. Most educators get, over the course of their teacher training, a few cursory gestures at Dewey and Mann, and sundry other facts and narratives. All of which combined do not explain very much about the education system we see around us today.
Just as a lack of historical knowledge has a negative effect on an individual, keeping a person alienated from the human experience, so a lack of historical knowledge of a field has a negative effect on that field, undercutting the potential to do great work and achieve great impact.
Fortunately, with respect to the science of education, this is a problem we are correcting. I am extremely pleased to be able to tell you about our excellent course on the History of Education. This course, free for you, was internally developed and is being taught by Matt Bateman, supported extensively by Jason Rheins and Kerry Ellard, two exceptional historians who are on staff at Montessorium. The class covers 3000 years of education history, including both high theory and detailed classroom practice.
It is the only such course that I know of—and it gives Montessori a special emphasis, contextualizing her on the timeline of education towards the end of the course.
I have taken an earlier version of the course, and it greatly enriched my perspective on our mission as educators. Education is an old field, but first principles thinking in education is historically rare and even more rarely implemented.
In offering this course on the history of education, we are ourselves making history. In participating, in learning what happened in education across the ages, you will be learning your own history.
That is one of many takeaways from the class.
Have a great weekend,
Ray Girn
Chief Executive Officer, Higher Ground Education