The Student's Friend:
why the Student's Friend? - combining world history & geography - using the Student's Friend - view or download the Student's Friend

Why the Student's Friend?

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." -Albert Einstein

Reducing gaps and discontinuities

High school social studies teachers know they cannot hope to cover all of the material contained in typical thousand-page textbooks, so they must pick and choose, trying to identify the most important information to present to their students. This places an unnecessary burden on teachers, especially new teachers, who may not be intimately familiar with the wide-ranging subject matter of world history and geography. Picking and choosing also means that students must skip around in their textbooks which can lead to gaps and discontinuities.

By contrast, the Student's Friend was designed to include no more information than students can realistically cover during a standard high school course. Within this constraint, the Student's Friend identifies a coherent body of knowledge representing a meaningful overview of world history (including Western civilization) and geography. Because the picking and choosing has already been carefully done and logically sequenced, continuity is maintained and gaps are reduced.

A collaborative effort

One size does not fit all, of course. Because the Student's Friend exists in electronic form, teachers can easily add or eliminate topics or units to meet individual needs. Material developed by teachers can then be shared with other teachers via this website. The electronic format also allows for easy changes and updates to content which is especially important to the Current Issues unit. The Student's Friend is meant to be a continually evolving historical narrative which will improve over time with the collective input of teachers.

Relevant to student lives

The Student's Friend seeks to offer knowledge which will benefit young people as they grow to adulthood in the twenty-first century. Isolated facts with little relevance to the present or future have been omitted. The content that remains is intended to meet two basic criteria: to help students understand their world by explaining how it came to be the way it is, and to help them understand what it means to be human by revealing the range of human experience from the depths of cruelty to the heights of achievement. The Students Friend supplies foundation knowledge that students will need in order to engage in the ongoing dialogue of our culture. (See The uses of history)

Integrates world history and geography

Although documents such as the National History Standards and the Bradley Commission report on history in the schools make it clear that history and geography are inseparable, few teaching materials genuinely integrate learning from these two subject areas. The Student's Friend integrates world history and geography throughout.

Each unit designates locations to be identified in relation the historical developments that occurred there. The essential themes of geography are learned within meaningful historical contexts. For example, the theme of "movement" is encountered as Homo Erectus moves out of Africa, Asians become Native Americans, Hebrews are exiled to Babylon, Vikings settle in England and France, Europeans migrate to America, East Germans flee to West Berlin and Kosivars are expelled from Serbia.

Geographic concepts become important players in the historical narrative rather than isolated facts to be memorized: a strait is used by the Greeks to escape Persian domination; ignorance of longitude leads to the European conquest of America. The role of plate tectonics is encountered with the formation of the Earth, fossil remains discovered in the Great Rift Valley, the physical barrier presented by the Himalayas, and the locations of the Japanese archipelago and the Andes mountains. (See Combining world history and geography)

Organized to be brain friendly

The Student's Friend is organized to aid learning and memory. Research into learning indicates that the mind organizes new information into meaningful "chunks" of related information, while long-term memories are stored under mental categories similar to the files of a file cabinet. Each page of the Student's Friend is divided into several sections, and each section is labeled with a topic heading representing a related set of facts and ideas. Thus, the information in the Student's Friend has been organized into meaningful chunks, making it easier for knowledge to enter long-term memory where it will be available to inform student understanding and judgment. (See Knowledge and the construction of meaning)

Clearer understandings

Perhaps the greatest value of the Student's Friend lies with the clarity it can bring to a student's understanding of history and geography by focusing on essential knowledge rather than on extensive and confusing detail. Professor of education, Frank N. Dempster, has written that U.S. textbooks are "unrivaled in size and amount of information covered...Unfortunately, many texts are so packed with facts, names, and details that the real point of the lesson is often obscured."1 (See Elaboration and interference)

A classroom example will serve to illustrate the professor's point. I gave my tenth grade students a standard textbook assignment that consisted of reading a section on the Congress of Vienna and answering the questions at the end of the section. When the students were finished, I asked them what they had learned. They responded by listing the various diplomats who attended the Congress and by identifying several specific changes in international boundaries that resulted from the meeting. These responses were to be expected since the bulk of the reading was given over to this type of factual detail which few people would recall an hour after reading it.

Unfortunately, my students missed the big picture that the Congress of Vienna was an attempt to undo the egalitarian changes brought about by the French Revolution and Napoleon and to return Europe to the old aristocratic order. The students also missed the more general concept that the Congress of Vienna represented an early clash between the continuing political tendencies of conservatism versus liberalism. While these were the most important concepts in the section - and they were transferable to the life experience of students - they were completely lost amid mind-numbing textbook detail that generates perceptual static and interferes with understanding.

Although the Student's Friend emphasizes quality over quantity, some may dismiss it as "history light." Classroom teachers, however, may recognize it as history focused, understood and remembered. To return to our classroom example, the textbook used five pages to obscure the important meanings of the Congress of Vienna. The Student's Friend uses only one-third of a page to identify the major concepts involved and, moreover, to relate conservatism and liberalism - the political right and the political left - to the major political parties operating in the United States today.

In 1988, the respected Bradley Commission on History in the Schools recommended that the following question be asked when designing the structure and content of history courses:

"Has the notion that "less is more" been considered, as themes, topics and questions are selected? The amount of time required to achieve student engagement and genuine comprehension of significant issues will necessitate leaving out much that is "covered" by the usual text."2

Significant concepts

Concise doesn't necessarily mean simple-minded. The Student's Friend introduces a number of higher-level concepts including Nietzche's "Will to Power;" Hegel's view of the dialectic in history; Marx's dialectical materialism; the origins and implications of Social Darwinism; the relationship of science to technology; the historical and continuing prominence of ethnic violence; reflections on the nature of humanity, religion, art, government and warfare and many other important concepts ranging from agricultural surplus to globalism. Because the Student's Friend reconsiders these concepts in different contexts at several points during the world historical narrative, student understanding becomes deeper and more readily transferable to situations outside of school. (See Learning transfer)

But, is there enough information?
You be the judge.

Still, you may wonder, can world history and geography really be covered adequately in only 52 pages? Skepticism is appropriate considering that even the best encyclopedias merely scratch the surface of these mighty subjects. More useful questions might be these: a) how much information can students realistically be expected to comprehend and retain, and b) can a worthwhile overview of history and geography be provided in this format? I suggest you read the Student's Friend and decide for yourself. Did you gain any new knowledge or insights? Did important events and concepts receive adequate coverage? Would you be pleased if your students retained this much information? If your answers to these questions are yes, then the Student's Friend is big enough.

It should also be noted that the Student's Friend is larger than it first appears. Printed on 8-1/2" x 11" paper, each page is twice the size of a page in a standard hard cover book, and each page contains more than twice as much information because less space is devoted to margins. The 52 pages of text in the Students Friend are equivalent to approximately 120 pages in a standard hard cover book or 150 pages in a textbook. It should also be noted that the content of The Student's Friend is highly consistent with the Bradley Commission's recommended topics for courses in world history and Western civilization.

Furnishing the rooms of history

Although the Student's Friend is concise, it nonetheless contains more information than students can comprehend and remember unless this knowledge is reinforced through other means such as visual aids, class discussions, readings, projects and thinking strategies. The Student's Friend supplies the rooms of a house of history, but students won't live there unless the rooms are furnished with more tangible connections to their world, past and present. Historical knowledge is of dubious value if students cannot use it to inform their judgment as adults. The Student's Friend is intended to be an efficient learning tool that leaves time in the curriculum for building such deeper, meaningful ties to the past, present and the future.

2 Bradley Commission on History in Schools, Building a History Curriculum: Guidelines for Teaching History in Schools, National Council for History Education, 2000