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The Student's Friend:
Why the Student's Friend? "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."
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 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 geographic concepts. Because the picking and choosing has already been carefully done and logically sequenced, continuity is maintained and gaps are reduced.
The Student's Friend seeks to offer knowledge that 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)
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. Important themes of geography are learned within meaningful historical contexts. For example, the theme of "movement" is encountered as Homo Erectus moves out of Africa, 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: plate technics shape the earth and a valley in east Africa where early human remains are found, a land bridge supplies people to populate America, physical barriers prevent the dissemination of new knowledge to sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas, the ancient Greeks use a strait to escape Persian conquest; ignorance of longitude contributes to the European conquest of America, and so on. (See Combining world history and geography)
The Student's Friend is organized to aid learning and memory. Cognitive research 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 file folders in a file cabinet. Each page of the Student's Friend is organized into four sections, and each section is labeled with a topic heading that represents 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 and become available to inform student understanding and judgment. (See Knowledge and the construction of meaning)
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, confusing, and unimportant 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 may serve to illustrate Professor Dempster'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 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 likely 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 perennial political poles of conservatism versus liberalism. While these were the most important concepts in the section - and they were transferable to the real life experience of students - they were completely lost amid the kind of mind-numbing textbook detail that generates perceptual static and interferes with meaningful 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 about 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:
Concise doesn't necessarily mean simple-minded. The Student's Friend introduces a number of higher-level concepts such as: Is there enough information? Still, you may wonder, can world history and geography really be covered adequately in only 52 pages? Skepticism is reasonable 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, b) how many educated adults would be pleased to know even half the information contained in the Student's Friend? I suggest you read the Student's Friend and make your own judgements. It should also be noted that the Student's Friend is bigger than 52 pages would suggest. Printed on 8-1/2" x 11" paper, each page is roughly twice the size of a page in a standard hard-cover book, and margins are smaller. Consequently, the Student's Friend equals about 120 pages in a hard-cover book and probably 150 pages or more in a typical high school textbook heavy with illustrations, big headlines, empty space, summaries, question boxes, etc. Furthermore, the topics covered in The Student's Friend are highly consistent with the Bradley Commission's recommendations for courses in world history and Western civilization. Notes: 1 Dempster, Frank N., "Exposing our students to less should help them learn more." Phi Delta Kappan, February, 1993 2 Bradley Commission on History in Schools, Building a History Curriculum: Guidelines for Teaching History in Schools, National Council for History Education, 2000
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