Beyond School

“I want to stress that this book is not, and never was, intended to replace any textbooks of history that may serve a very different purpose at school. I would like my readers to relax, and to follow the story without having to take notes or to memorise names and dates. In fact, I promise that I shall not examine them on what they have read.”
–E.H. Gombrich, preface to the Turkish edition of A Little History of the World

Schooly History: Neither Forest nor Trees (or, “History as Test-Garbage In, Test, Test-Garbage Out”)

I’m tutoring a couple of Korean students home for the summer from their Oregon high school. Like many English language learners, they’re wonderfully bright, but challenged by the readability level of their assigned  high school texts. And like many students generally, all their years of schooling in history have failed to equip them with any coherent understanding of the flow of history at all.

This I’ve confirmed with almost all students (not just English Language Learners) in high school classrooms over the years by doing this simple exercise: Scramble the major periods of history in a random cluster on the board or a handout - you know, “Medieval Period,” “Cold War,” “Roman Empire,” “Enlightenment,” “Age of Exploration,” “Classical Greece,” “Industrial Revolution,” “Greek Heroic Age/Trojan War,” “Renaissance,” “Sumer,” “Solomon Builds the Jewish Temple,” “Scientific Revolution,” “Alexander the Great,” “World War I and II,” “Mohammed and Islam,” “The Crusades,” “Egyptian Pharoahs,” “The Reformation,” “Buddha,” “The Romantic Era,” “The Catholic Church Begins,” “Confucius.” (We can quibble about this list, of course, but for now play along.)

Then tell the students: “Make a list in which you place these major historical events and periods in the correct chronological order.  Then, write the approximate dates you think each one took place or began.”

Then wander the room monitoring the students’ progress. In almost all cases, depending on your personality, you’ll either laugh or weep. It’s not unusual to see the Industrial Revolution occurring before the Middle Ages, the Holocaust during the Enlightenment, and Columbus before Confucius. Stalin was a Renaissance Man. What a muddle.

I tried this on my “advanced placement” seniors this year, and the above description fits (again, there were about two exceptions). Whatever history they’d learned seemed to be garbage in for the test, then garbage out.

Penetrating the Students to Reach the Learners

I recommend doing this with students, because in my experience, it opens up a wonderful space for asking, “How could you have gone through more than a decade of schooling and remember - or understand - so little of what you were supposedly taught of the story of our species on this planet?”

The nice thing about this conversation is that it leads wonderfully into the follow-up: “You’re about to graduate and become adults. You won’t have many more chances to get your head around this story, which truly educated adults should know. If I promise that this 5,000 year old story is really pretty easy to learn and know - as a story - do you want to take this opportunity (possibly your last) to learn it?”

The refreshing thing: By a wide margin, the answer is a very sincere “Yes.”  This conversation seems to penetrate the thick defenses against schoolwork that students have built up over the years, and get them in touch with that part of us that simply doesn’t want to be ignorant about basic things like history. It’s a wonderfully ironic “a-ha” moment that, if subtitled in a film, would read, “How the hell did I remain so ignorant of all this stuff after having it crammed into me for all these years? What a debacle! What a charade, my high GPA!”

History Teacher as Epic Bard, Students as Bardic Apprentices

At that point, the 5,000 year story of history has what it needs to be enjoyed: an eager audience, and (we pray) a skillful story-teller (I’d like to be humble here, but I know my strengths as well as my¹ weaknesses, and telling the story of the last 5,000 years as a narrative, as the real Greatest Story Ever Told - full of gut laughter, wistful “what ifs,” amazing characters and events, philosophical wonder, and chains of cause and effect over centuries, over millennia, all liberally peppered with audience-participation requests for predictions, connections to earlier episodes, summaries of why Marx couldn’t have come earlier than the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment couldn’t have come before the Renaissance, on and on - that is one of my strengths).

But hearing the story, being mere audience, isn’t enough to learn it.  Like the bards that kept the Iliad and Odyssey alive through several centuries of the Greek “Dark Age,” during which reading and writing disappeared, and the story lived through oral transmission from older to younger storytellers, the students need to rehearse what they’ve heard from teacher - and a simple, low-tech way for them to do that is simply to re-tell the story they’re hearing, episode by episode, as simple written narrative summaries.¹

Back to the two students I’m tutoring: Today we just concluded our last class together. Over the course of two or three hours of this story-telling for each of twelve days, they’ve gone from the muddle above to being able to tell the story of five millennia, with approximately correct dates, causal connections, main players and events - and with enthusiasm. That’s roughly how long it took Homeric bards to recite the Iliad and the Odyssey.

I share this simply because I find it wonderful, but vexingly difficult to implement in the school setting. In schools, bells would have stopped the story. Other classes would have choked and vitiated the story’s roots with competing homework. Large class sizes would have made the constant comprehension-checking conversations impossible - unless one of you can suggest a way to pull it off, for which I’m all ears.

I know it’s not fair that all students can’t afford this kind of private education - but I wonder if a different approach to delivering it (YouTube presentations?) might not narrow that unjust gap.  But besides that, I just discovered a book that comes very close to that “bardic” approach to narrative history.

E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World: The Big Picture for Little People, English Language Learners, and Historically Clueless Adults

Gombrich is deservedly acclaimed for his majestic The Story of Art, which was my college art history textbook; but he wrote A Little History of the World for children. The results are overall wonderful: the readability level, lexically and syntactically, is appropriate for eight-year-olds, but better still, so is the tone. By tailoring his story for that toughest of audiences, eight-year-olds - too young to pimp for grades and too alive to endure boredom - Gombrich succeeds at restoring the wonders of storytelling to world history, in a way that has both entertained me and, better still, clarified for me some of the basic stories and their significance to the bigger story. Best of all, he refuses to underrate his audience by refusing to dumb history down; the waters stay deep, but because they’re unmuddied by too many names, dates, and ten-dollar words, they’re clearer too. They never lose track of the storyline. (To see just how “deep” this history is, check out this commentary on the controversy it has caused between conservatives and progressives in England. And I’ll add my own little cavil: Gombrich seems to lose his objectivity when treating Judeo-Christianity as history, implying more metaphysical truth in it than in the other world religions he discusses. But maybe I’m just sensitive that way.)

So whether you’re a homeschooler, a parent wanting your child (and maybe yourself) to know history better, or a teacher with a textbook at frustration readability level (or pedantry level) for some or all of your students, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s almost 300 pages long, and a total page-turner for me.

And best of all: If you failed that little history challenge above, I guarantee you you’ll pass it after reading this book. The story takes care of the plot in such a clear, lucid way that you’ll never again reverse Romans and Romantics.

Bonus Video: The Perfect Prehistoric Introduction

My students spent the night in our apartment last night, and we had dinner and a movie night. I couldn’t resist showing them “The Dawn of Man,” the 20-odd minute prelude of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as I’ve done at the beginning of so many history and literature classes in schools.  It’s a stunningly realistic “Genesis for moderns,” as I see it, complete with the (technological) “Fall of Man” and Darwinian “Cain and Abel” story. Just stunning. Enjoy:

(Thanks to Christopher Sessums for tweeting me the link.)

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¹ For you techies out there, I will add that my favorite unit design since I drank the digital koolaid employed videotaping students telling the story to class in pairs, episode by episode, and embedding those videos in a student-created wiki history textbook (scroll to bottom for student lectures) a couple of years ago; they also rehearsed all the episodes, not just the ones they orally re-presented, by summarizing them - as stories - in Moodle forums. In retrospect, this local, low-key unit seems more valuable than the splashier global collaborations these same students did in other units - and danah boyd’s findings that teens just aren’t very interested in connecting with strangers in global collaborations - because they’re more keen to extend their face-to-face school relationships with these tools instead - seems to explain this phenomenon. I was far more abuzz about global collaboration than my students, and I didn’t get it until I watched danah’s presentation on YouTube a few weeks ago.  Oh what the heck: here it is. danah starts in the middle third, wearing the wool cap:

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