Reforming our History Curriculum - A Global Approach

This year, I decided to undertake a project that I had no idea how I would actually complete: teaching a World History course. As someone who loves history and ancient civilizations, I thought it would be a cinch. And, after all, I knew more about recent history in the far-flung corners of the world than the average Joe, or so I thought.

As I have fought my way through the course, I realized that something was fundamentally off about how we teach history in our public school's system. To give an example, looking through the textbook, I realized that, in a single chapter, we were supposed to cover the highlights of African history, a history that, in recent times, affects almost every aspect of foreign policy in which our nation is engaged. We, through the democratic process, are making decisions about countries like the Congo, Rwanda, Egypt, Israel, etc., without really having a thorough understanding of the motivations of the people who live there. And the reason is that we fundamentally misunderstand their history, mostly because we haven't studied it.

Then we got to the Asia chapter, again, confined to about one twenty-page chapter in the book with four lessons. I have to admit, on Chinese ancient history, I am an absolute ignoramus. I was totally lost on how to explain the differences between Manchurian China and the Qing, or what the effects of the Mongolian invasion were, and correspondingly, how to fundamentally improve my students' knowledge of these subjects. And yet, if we consider current events as the standard by which we evaluate our history curriculum, it is Asia, particularly China, whose history and culture are completely changing the conditions under which we live.

We are in a global society now, and yet our history curriculum seems to assume that an American will never encounter or need to encounter businessmen, politicians, or even ordinary folk from countries that are only a mouse-click away. Currently, as I understand it, the basic framework for the secondary history curriculum is this:
7th grade - Geography and World Cultures
8th grade - Civics
9th grade - World History
10th grade - American History
11th grade - American Government
12th grade - Elective (Usually an AP course)

The problem with this system is that each of the courses, at best, offer a scattershot of particular cultures in which we are supposed to interact. The "World History" course, in particular, offers particular challenges because, at best, students will gain a shallow concept of the overall development of their OWN civilization and its global sources, but more realistically, will be reduced to learning a modicum of trivia about this or that far-eastern country. Also, each of these courses is going to be primarily focused on the ANCIENT history, or the "origins" of each of the topics under which they seem to fall, which means that, in my experience of the public school and in teaching World History myself, an inordinate amount of time is spent at the beginning of the year on the distant past, while the transition from antiquity to modernity gets short shrift.

Also, the breadth of these courses tends to result in ideological attempts to focus on one particular "theme" throughout the text. This is a good pedagogical method for the curriculum, but oftentimes those themes are unduly ethnocentric. For example, in my World History textbook, ONE chapter is spent on Indian history, a nation that currently has around a billion citizens and is the driver of economic development throughout the world, while TWO chapters are spent on Scientific and Industrial Revolutions in Europe, respectively.

Some attempts have been made at reforming this process in experimental or "classical" private schools, which have introduced a chronological method for teaching history. The basic premise here is that, in order for students to gain perspective on history, they need to learn things relative to the events that were happening contemporaneously. Also, students learn best from a good story and, as experience teaches us, a good, memorable story starts from the beginning and proceeds in a logical order.

There are some certainly some merits to this approach. In teaching the Renaissance, for example, I had the rather bothersome task of trying to bring a chapter that kept jumping from date to date in a topical, rather than chronological order. My students were completely confused. The only way around this was to have them create a timeline of all the events in a clear, straightforward presentation. When we finished this, we starting seeing relationships between the events that we hadn't seen before in the chapter, such as the observation that the Northern Renaissance didn't really get in full swing until after the Protestant Reformation, and that this definitely influenced the different direction that Northern humanists took the rediscovery of classical learning. You can't have Milton without Calvin, Knox, and Luther.

On the other hand, part of this depends on the continuity of the story that you are telling. Different civilizations develop at different times along different lines, and to tell a chronological history of the world in a single course necessarily involves underemphasizing some cultures and emphasizing others. In my experience, the usual way that World History texts resolve this is by centering on outside sources for the American experience, an "inside looking out" approach. The problem with this is that the American experience of today is fundamentally different from that of yesteryear precisely because multiple cultures are participating IN it: just consider the role of Latin American politics in the modern United States. What a history curriculum needs to do is change the focus from an "inside looking out" perspective to an "outside looking in" perspective, if it is going to be truly educational.

So, while wishing to keep the best of the chronological approach, I tend to think that we need a radical reorganization of our history curriculum along ethnological lines. If we are to teach students the story of humanity, we need to refocus our efforts on helping them gain perspective in detail of the various cultures that are participating in the global culture of the twenty-first century. We also need to change our philosophy from teaching students starting with the most familiar and quotidian experiences to the least, to starting with the most distant culture to the most familiar, taking the history of the human species as our fundamental guide. We all share a common origin, so we can all start at the same spot.

In my ideal world, the history curriculum would focus on specific areas of the areas of the world, and then proceed along a chronological basis. Here is a sample curriculum (very roughly drawn):
7th Grade - Ancient Civilizations (Beginnings to the Fall of Rome)
8th Grade - Middle Eastern and African History
9th Grade - Asian History
10th Grade - European History
11th Grade - American History
12th Grade - Pacific History

Students would cover, in a more integrated manner, all of the topics that are the focus of current social studies curriculum. For example, the development of Christianity and the rise of Islam would cover religious studies and be developed in 8th grade. Students would learn about the development of democracy and the philosophies behind it in 10th grade, while they would then learn about our governmental system in particular in American History, which would also include the history of Latin America considered as an integral part of our own story. They would learn geography more effectively, because they would spend more time on individual regions than they have time for in 7th grade Geography.

The arrangement above is not perfect, I am perfectly willing to admit, and the complexity of these individual topics would require a great deal of care in designing texts. The other challenge would be finding teachers who are qualified to actually teach the particular courses, but in our interconnected world, the possibility of finding experts on particular topics of history, such as Asian or African history and bringing their instruction to the United States is greatly aided through the use of e-learning technology and the ease of transferring money over long distances. A global educational network would, in fact, serve to improve the lives of academics and instructors (and thereby, the people with whom they do business on a daily basis) in developing nations. Imagine a cohort of enthusiastic graduate students from South Africa who are being paid American wages to spread knowledge about their culture in a foreign country. The possibilities are rather mind-boggling.