Before this summer I had never heard of Mohenjo-Daro. But that was before starting first grade using The Well-Trained Mind as our guide. While I agree with the majority of the ideas expressed by the mother and daughter authors of the book, their philosophies regarding the teaching of history made absolute sense to me.
"History is not
a subject. History is
the subject. It is the record of human experience, both personal and communal. It is the story of the unfolding of human achievement in every area-science, literature, art, music, and politics. A grasp of historical facts is essential to the rest of the classical curriculum.
When you first introduce the elementary student to history, you must keep one central fact in mind:
history is a story.
The logical way to tell a story is to begin (as the King said to Alice) at the beginning and go on till you come to the end. Any story makes less sense when learned in bits and pieces."
They then write about telling your five-year-old the story of Hansel and Gretel starting with the house made of candy and cookies and skipping around until all the elements of the story have been told, but in a jumbled manner.
"Even if he listens to the end, you may have lost him long before that.
History is no different. Yet it's too often taught unsystematically-as a series of unrelated bits and pieces: American history this year, ancient history the next, eighteenth-century France the year after that. Think back. By the time you graduated high school or college, you'd studied King Tut and the Trojan Way and the Bronze Age; you probably learned about the end of the Athenian monarchy and the rist of the city-state; you may have been taught about the Exodus and the conquest under Joshua or the early history of Ethiopia. Chances are you studied these subjects in different years, in different units, out of different textbooks. You probably have difficulty fitting them together chronologically.
Furthermore, you probably started with American history (which is pretty near the end of the story as we know it) and then spent at least twice as much time studying American history as you did studying the rest of the world. Yes, American history is important for Americans, but this myopic division of the curriculum does the Founding Fathers a disservice. Children who plunge into the study of the American Revolution with no knowledge of the classical models used by Jefferson, Washington and their colleagues can achieve only a partial understanding of American government and ideals. And American history ought to be kept in perspective; the history curriculum covers seventy centuries; America occupies only five of them.
A common assumption found in history curricula seems to be that children can't comprehend (or be interested in) people and events distant from their own experience. So the first-grade history class is renamed Social studies and begins with what the child knows; first, himself and his family, followed by his community, his state, his country, and only then the rest of the world.
This intensely self-focused pattern of study encourages the student of history to relate everything he studies to himself, to measure the cultures and customs of other peoples against his own experience. And that's exactly what the classical education fights
against-a self-absorbed, self-referential approach to knowledge. History learned this way makes
our needs and wants the center of the human endeavor."
With classical education, "the student learns the proper place of his community, his state, and his country by seeing the broad sweep of history from its beginning and then fitting his own time and place into that great landscape. The systematic study of history in the first four years lays the foundation for the logic stage, when the student will begin to understand the relationships between historical events-between Egypt and Greece, Greece and Rome, Rome and England, England and America."
The authors break the school years up into Grammar stage (1st-4th), Logic Stage (5th-8th), and Rhetoric Stage (9th-12th).
Our first grade year is spent learning about ancient history from 5000 B.C through 400 A.D.
Second grade covers Medieval through early renaissance from 400-600.
Third grade covers Late Renaissance through early modern from 1600-1850.
Finally, fourth grade covers Modern history from 1850-present.
We repeat the same time periods from beginning to end in 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grades, but begin to explore the relationships between the major events of the world. For example, "Instead of studying the Revolutionary War as a single event, the seventh grader will read about the early days of the colonies and ask: What happened to make Americans discontent? What happened after the war that allowed American to stay independent as a nation? In the logic stage, history changes from a set of stories into one long, sequential story filled with cause and effect."
We repeat the same time periods again in 9th-12th grades, building on the stories we read in 1st through 4th grade and the connections made in 5th through 8th grade. Now we will read original works and study great books. This "allows the past to speak for itself, combining history, creative writing, philosophy, politics, and ethics into a seamless whole" because "The goal of the rheoric stage is a greater understanding of our own civilization, country, and place in time, stemming from an understanding of what has come before us."
Obviously this is a snippet of the ideas presented in the (717 page) book, but it speaks loudly to many of the reasons we chose this particular curriculum.
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So, what does this have to do with Mohenjo-Daro? I'd never heard of it before, but it's an absolutely incredible place. It was a city of 40,000 in ancient India (now Pakistan). The city was built in a grid pattern around a citadel with a stronghold built into it in case enemies attacked. They had wells, toilets, baths, drains, and gutters, things unheard of in any other part of the world at this time. But then something happened around 1750 BC and no one is quite sure what it was. The cities were abandoned and weren't discovered until the 1920's.
After reading about this fascinating city, so different from the Ancient Egyptians and Babylonians we've been studying, Isaac had a creative writing assignment. He was given the beginning of a story and then dictated the rest of the story to me. Finally, he illustrated his story.
It was a dark and windy night as the town of Mohenjo-Daro slept. Little did anyone know that this was their last night. Armed soldiers came running into the city and they destroyed the citadel. They killed lots of people and the people they didn't kill didn't even know their city was being destroyed. Finally they couldn't stay in their houses any longer because of the noise so finally they went outside and the soldiers killed them.
My biggest little guy is a guy of facts so creative writing is a great mental stretch for him. I love to hear him talk about Mohenjo-Daro, to hear Audrey ask about pharoahs, and to watch Elliot build pyramids. They are all getting it in their own way and will build on what they are hearing and learning and talking about and experiementing with now for years to come. What a journey!
