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Though we are not home schooling, I’m attracted by the approach used by many homeschooling philosophies. One which I really admire is The Well-Trained Mind and their approach to history.

The authors argue that, in our current school system, we spend too much time studying history that happened in the last 250 years…that is, US history. As you may fuzzily recall, from your own days in school or perhaps less fuzzily, from your children’s schooling, a year studying US history (the last 250 years) is followed by a year studying world history (the other 7000 years or so). This goes on for the 12 or so years of US education. While important for those residing in this country, this is a rather myopic view of history and, dare I say, may have led to the current, rather narrow minded, “America is the Center of the Universe” culture.

The authors of The Well Trained mind suggest instead that:

The logical way to tell a story is to begin (as the King said to Alice) at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end. Any story makes less sense when learned in bits and pieces. If you were to tell your five-year-old the story of Hansel and Gretel, beginning with the house made of candy and cookies (because that’s likely to be the most interesting part of the story to the five-year-old), then backing up and telling about the woodchopper’s unfortunate second marriage, then skipping to the witch’s demise, the story isn’t going to make a coherent whole in the child’s mind.

Now, doesn’t that make sense? Since I, as a product of a US education, was, of course, rather unclear on how to manage this, I follow their approach, which is to divide history into 4 parts.

Ancients, BC 5000-400 AD
Medieval/Early Renaissance, 400-1600
Late Renaissance/Early Modern, 1600-1850
Modern Times, 1850-Present

As we currently do in the traditional (US/World/US/World) model practiced in US schools, children do one part each year. Then start all over again on a deeper level. This way, however, rather than exploring US history in greater and greater depth every other year, children explore the entire range of recorded history every 4 years.
I find this model so appealing I’ve started it with my 5-year-old who enters kindergarten next month. We purchased only one book – The Usborne Book of World History . Half encyclopedia, half picture book, it includes stories, projects and facts. Since we have 4 years to complete it, we are going slowly, supplementing each section with books from the library, visits to museums and exhibits and fiction from each period, including story CD, movies and chapter books.

My DS loves to look up the places we are studying on his globes and maps. I enjoy working in clay, fabric, food and wood to make the various different projects we find. My DH enjoys supplementing with fables and stories of battles and wars – which, I of course, find less appealing than these two do!

Each member of the family brings a different perspective to our study and we find we are all learning and sometimes, that’s really the point of home schooling – engaging in an educational family activity. Oops, gotta go, we’re dressing up like Egyptians today!

[tags]kids, children, parents, home schooling, history, the well trained mind[/tags]
Photo graciously provided by Stuck in Customs, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved