Teaching and learning:
The goal of education - Combining history and geography - The nature of history - Why teach history? - What to teach - How to teach - Learning and thinking - A note to new teachers

The goal of education

Few would dispute the proposition that the primary purpose of schooling is to prepare students to function effectively in the world, and thereby to assist society to function effectively as well. This purpose is accomplished through focused learning, or, as Jacques Barzun put it, "the removal of ignorance."

Barzun is an eminent American historian and professor who has thought long and hard about teaching, as well as history, during his long career in education. Writing about education reform more than three decades ago, Barzun deplored "nonsense" in education which he described as:

"...proposing or promoting something other than the prime object of the school, which is the removal of ignorance. Or again, it consists in undertaking to do what cannot be done within the conditions of time and talent set by the common realities of life."*

Notice that Barzun did not say that education is the prime object of schooling; he considers education to be the result of a life-long process of learning - a process that may depend more on the inclinations of the individual than the programs of the school. Barzun had a narrower goal in mind for the schools, the removal of ignorance insofar as practically possible. Barzun suggests we send young people into adult life with a useful awareness of the world they will inhabit. Learning then should be meaningful, not merely an attempt to stuff information into young minds.

In his book Meaning Over Memory, noted history educator and author Peter N. Stearns put it this way, "The purpose of education is to provide understanding." He suggests we adopt"...curricula that would promote understanding rather than overwhelming critical thought with memorization..."**

Three principles of education

Thus, with the help of Professors Barzun and Stearns, we can identify three basic principles of schooling. It should:

-prepare students for the future
-focus on meaningful understanding
-be realistic in its expectations

These guidelines provide a useful test against which any educational content or method may be measured.

The role of history

Let us now narrow our focus to the special role played by history within the educational scheme. Over the course of the twentieth century, schools developed a structure that addresses five broad and fundamental realms of knowledge:

History: understanding the human world
Science: understanding the physical world
Mathematics: understanding the world quantitatively
Language: communicating about the world
Arts: expressing human creativity

The first two realms, history and science, are essentially knowledge-based disciplines while the remaining three, language, mathematics and the arts, are essentially skills-based disciplines. Of course, each discipline involves elements of both knowledge and skills, but when a student has completed a history or science course, we generally expect the student to have a broader understanding of the world; whereas, when a student has completed a language, math or arts course, we expect the student to have acquired skills that can be applied immediately.

Other areas of learning may be seen as hybrids derived from these five fundamental disciplines. Geography, for instance, combines the study of the human and physical worlds with a substantial mathematics component. Because the central concern of geography is human interaction with the physical environment, geography is a major constituent of world history, which is the broader study of all human experience.

Within this framework, what are the objectives of history education?
History:
- helps us to understand what it means to be human,
- informs judgment, thereby serving as a guide to action,
- provides language and concepts necessary to participate in the ongoing human dialogue. (See: Why study history?)

In other words, history shows us how the world works and how humans behave, and it gives us a common basis for communicating about these understandings. A case could be made that history is the highest order of school knowledge because it considers how humans have dealt with, and shall continue to deal with, the consequences of all areas of learning and activity.

Students familiar with history know their unique place in the stream of time; they have a sense of the trajectory of human development, where it may veer off course and how it might be kept on track. A democracy needs citizens with such judgment and wisdom, and the past is the only place to find it.

Clearly, history has non-trivial work to perform in the education of our young. Just as clearly, the teaching of history deserves an approach more sophisticated than the current practice of making it up as we go.

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* Barzun, Jacques, Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, The University of Chicago Press, 1991

**Stearns, Peter N., Meaning Over Memory, The University of North Carolina Press, 1993