Teaching History to the Young

Archival Quality Communication

AQC for Today, for Tomorrow, and for ever . . . .


It was probably a frustrated history teacher who asked his class in an exasperated tone: "Are you all ignorant, or just apathetic?" A student answered: "I don't know and I don't care." If this was done with conscious irony it was a brilliant reply; but it is more likely that he really did not know or care.

No wonder there is so much apathy and ignorance about history. As it is usually taught it is very far from the concerns of ordinary people. Why should I, or anyone, get so excited about Manifest Destiny, or the mercantile system? Does anyone, who is not actually doing a Ph.D. on the topic, care to discuss the Wilmot Proviso? It could be interesting. But how do you connect with it? How can a student feel this is part of what makes this nation and himself what it is?

Most attempts to make history more exciting trivializes the whole thing. It will not do to make history a course in current events. That is not history, not yet; maybe not ever. The method of pretending the student is making original discoveries from (carefully selected) documents presenting conflicting views is little better. Who really shot McKinley, or blew up the Lusitania? Is the Kensington Rune Stone actually genuine? A semester of this and the student comes to think that everyone's opinion on an historical subject (including theirs) is equally valuable, that is, not valuable at all. The conclusion is usually that historical truth is nowhere to be found, or is submerged somewhere in a mass of conflicting opinion.

How do students come to realize that history is connected to us because it is really about the present? We cannot see the past. It does not exist. Even yesterday is real to us only in memory. We discover our own past through historical thinking. It is common to discover a note or letter and find that we are re-enacting a state of our own mind a number of years ago. We may have forgotten, or retain only a residual impression of what we were then thinking. All thinking of past thought, even our own, is historical, and we must reconstruct it through historical thinking simply because it is not now present to us. Someone who is an hundred years old is very little closer to the events of the American Revolution or the Codex Hammurapi than a teenager. It is not age that allows us to understand the past, but experience. Sage thinkers of earlier days used to say "History maketh a young man to be old." A young person may well be a better historian than an older one.

Young people must be taught to think historically. This can only be done by starting with what they know. I think this means starting with local history. It is the area in which a person lives that most impinges on their life. It is here that the first questions about the world, culture, and the social web arise. It has often been said that all politics is local politics. It is just as true to say all history is local history. It is at this level that students will come to know and feel, so that the teacher may find their interest has risen to the level that they will say "I know, and I care."

This is an Archival Quality Communication

James Duvall, M. A.
Annals of Boone County
Kentucky
Local History Research Specialist