What Matters in the Past

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What Matters in the Past

Directions: As you read each section: circle unknown words, underline important information, circle the main idea of each section, and write a 1 sentence summary next to each paragraph.

Directions explained: Try to use context clues or a dictionary to define unknown words. This will help you better understand the passages read. Don’t underline only facts, be sure what is underlined has come value to it. Circling the main idea of each paragraph will help focus you on what the paragraph and the entire reading is about. Write the one sentence in your own words. By making the sentence your own it will help solidify the information in your mind and help you to understand the information read. Doing this is what I call “close reading”. You will be “close reading” every single time you have a reading. Every. Single. Time.

Reflection – What is History?

“All human cultures tell stories about the past. Deeds of ancestors, heroes, gods, or animals sacred to particular peoples were chanted and memorized long before there was any writing with which to record them. Their truth was authenticated by the very fact of their continued repetition. History, which may be defined as an account that purports to be true of events and ways of thinking and feeling in some part of the human past, stems from this archetypal human narrative activity.

While sharing a common ancestry with myth, legend, epic poetry, and the novel, history has of course diverged from these forms. Its claim to truth is based in part on the fact that all the persons or events it describes really existed or occurred at some time in the past. Historians can say nothing about these persons or events that cannot be supported, or at least suggested, by some kind of documentary evidence. Such evidence customarily takes the form of something written, such as a letter, a law, an administrative record, or the account of some previous historian. In addition, historians sometimes create their own evidence by interviewing people. In the 20th century the scope of historical evidence was greatly expanded to include, among many other things, aerial photographs, the rings of trees, old coins, clothes, motion pictures, and houses. Modern historians have determined the age of the Shroud of Turin, which purportedly bears the image of Jesus, through carbon-14 dating and have discredited the claim of Anna Anderson to be the grand duchess Anastasia, the daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, through DNA testing.

Just as the methods at the disposal of historians have expanded, so have the subjects in they have become interested. Many of the indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, and Polynesia, for example, were long dismissed by Europeans as having no pre-colonial history, because they did not keep written records before the arrival of European explorers. However, sophisticated study of oral traditions, combined with advances in archaeology, has made it possible to discover a good deal about the civilizations and empires that flourished in these regions before European contact.

Historians have also studied new social classes. The earliest histories were mostly stories of disasters – floods, famines, and plagues – or of wars, including the statesmen and generals who figured in them. In the 20th century, however, historians shifted their focus from statesmen and generals to ordinary workers and soldiers. Until relatively recent times, however, most men and virtually all women were excluded from history because they were unable to write. Virtually all that was known about them passed through the filter of the attitudes of literate elites. The challenge of seeing through that filter has been met by historians in various ways. One way is to make use of nontraditional sources – for example, personal documents, such as wills or marriage contracts. Another is to look at the records of localities rather than of central governments.

Through these means even the most oppressed peoples – African-American slaves or medieval heretics, for example – have had at least some of their history restored. Since the 20th century some historians have also become interested in psychological repression – i.e., in attitudes and actions that require psychological insight and even diagnosis to recover and understand. For the first time, the claim of historians to deal with the feelings as well as the thoughts of people in any part of the human past has been made good.

None of this is to say that history writing has assumed a perfect or completed form. It will never do so: examination of its past reveals remarkable changes in historical consciousness rather than steady progress toward the standards of research and writing that represent the best that historians can do today. Nevertheless, 21st-century historians understand the pasts of more people more completely and more accurately than their predecessors did.”

What are the main points of the passage?

The Article: Teaching the past, April 13, 2013, Economist Magazine

FEW school subjects are so divisive. When Michael Gove, Britain’s education secretary, released draft changes to the country’s national curriculum in February it was his plan for history that created headlines. Mr. Gove’s proposal called for history to be studied “as a coherent, chronological narrative”, beginning with the early Britons and ending with the cold war. Opponents said the syllabus overstressed the deeds of “posh white blokes” and underplayed those of minorities. “Unteachable, unlearnable and un-British” blasted a campaign group on April 10th. Rival camps of historians have published petitions and rowed on television. That shoot-out will last beyond the official consultation period, which closes next week.

Politicians with an axe to grind have often twisted history books, lionizing characters they admire and tainting ones they do not. In March Dmitry Livanov, Russia’s education minister, promised a new textbook to replace the 80 or so in use. That looks like an effort by Vladimir Putin’s government to commandeer Russian history and partially sanitize Stalin (though Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” is also taught in schools). But the rumpus in Britain reflects a deeper and more subtle argument dividing school staff rooms around the world – one with broader consequences. As well as tussling over the content of courses, parents, teachers and politicians are now discussing the techniques by which history is taught, and debating what the discipline is for.

For 40 years history teachers in most of Europe have favored concepts over chronology. Rather than tackling history as one long narrative sweep, schoolchildren dip in and out of periods in search of topics thought appropriate for their age. Close analysis of historical sources – such as cartoons, photographs and contemporary accounts – emphasizes that history is slippery and subjective. In Britain this approach emerged from the Schools History Project (SHP), a review of teaching methods launched in 1972. Its boosters proclaimed that history “is not a body of knowledge” but “a heap of materials which survives from the past”. That thinking influenced the syllabuses now followed by most British schoolchildren.

The model has fans elsewhere. Schools in Germany’s 16 Länder (states) employ several exam boards and more than 400 different textbooks, but evaluation of historical sources makes up the “core of the teaching” across the country, says Sylvia Semmet, the president of the European Association of History Educators. The history syllabus of post-apartheid South Africa, also influenced by the SHP, makes “applicable” learning the priority. Schools in Australia take the same approach.

What are the main points of the passage?

Some teachers in these countries are growing weary of this method. At its most extreme, source-based history and skill-based teaching can seem to devalue knowledge for its own sake. Peter Kallaway, a professor at the University of the Western Cape, points out that South African children learn about America only through the prism of capitalism (in the Grade 11 topic, “Capitalism and the USA 1900-1940”). European history feels disjointed –children may learn a little about the Second World War but then wait two years to learn more. Grumblers in Britain fret that pupils’ historical knowledge is narrowing. Under one exam board, students can earn 40% of a history GCSE (a standard qualification for 14- to 16-year-olds) by learning about cattlemen and cowboys in the American West.

Critics look to countries such as France and Poland for the antidote. Students there must study history until the final year of school. Teachers lead their charges through chronological summaries of important events. Pupils still sift fact and fiction from contemporary sources, but not until they are older. They also learn to be good citizens. Children in France learn about their country’s revolution, and how the republic has fared. The curriculum helps consolidate national identity says James Cathcart, of the Lycée International de Saint Germain-en-Laye, a school near Paris.

These methods can sometimes be stodgy. Indian schoolchildren complain about learning dates by rote. Yet teaching full of fact-filled narratives can help bright sparks focus. Chloé Blanchet, a 14-year-old high school student in Quebec, enjoys learning about Canadian history, which her studies have covered in depth. Her teacher uses an activity book to test the class’s knowledge of key dates. Facts are tangible and near at hand. Across the Atlantic in northern England, Alice Grierson, in her penultimate year of school in Yorkshire, is glad that she is not being taught in a strictly chronological fashion. Nevertheless, the elements that she enjoys most about her course – economic history, British social reforms –are those that place her learning within a larger narrative context.

Perhaps politicians overestimate their ability to influence the classroom, whichever approach they favor. Henning Hues of the Georg Eckert Institute in Germany has studied the curriculum in South Africa, where teachers are hard to corral. “Textbooks do not have an impact there,” he says. In America a broad range of teaching styles and syllabuses have survived government efforts to unify them. In Germany some teachers have avoided teaching the history of the German Democratic Republic, says Ulrich Bongertmann, president of the country’s History Teachers’ Association. That problem remains, but it is now fading as younger teachers enter the profession and those years grow more distant.

Better teacher training, an extension to the compulsory age at which history is taught and more time for history lessons would help young Britons’ education as much as innovation in the curriculum. Richard Evans, a historian who opposes Mr. Gove’s plans, says that “history is an unmanageably large subject in many ways”. A better sense of chronology can help young minds make sense of a sprawling discipline. An enthusiastic teacher matters more.

What are the main points of the passage?

Reflection:

As a student, which historical lessons have been most effective in increasing your knowledge of the past? Tell me about a lesson, a teacher, and experience, a story from your grandparents, a story from your own life, anything that increased your knowledge of the past…but you must tell me WHY it increased your knowledge. You were interested in the topic? Is was researched based? You had a personal connection? Please explain your answer.

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