I think it's the perfect history book to read aloud with 3rd or 4th graders. It's written to be approachable, and with a passion that comes through on every page.
I… used to teach a class with that, and I totally forgot about it! A charming book, and little. I want it to be better-written, but I want that of EVERY good book, so. And it’s old enough that it can be looked at as a piece of history itself (look at how it ends!), which can be a bridge to seeing history as stories people make. Good recommendation. (Note that it’s lately spawned a series of books which look excellent.)
Yeah, charming is the perfect description. We tried a couple of the others in the series, but sadly, they mostly didn't have the same charm as the original.
I spent a bunch of time playing with the number of cycles — 12 is a nicely divisible number! — and at times contemplated four cycles of only three years each before concluding that, well, it seemed like too LITTLE time for a robust history program. (Specifically, I feared that a lot of the geographic and cultural diversity would end up getting chopped, and the whole thing would be a repeated run through The Big Stories You Need To Cover.) That said, every approach has its trade-offs, and this one is no exception.
I’d suggest that “the future” isn’t like the other history topics, and I’d be loathe to give it its own year. (That said, I once did create a high school course on future studies where we read a few good books — Joel Garreau’s “Radical Evolution”, Ramez Naam’s “The Infinite Resource”, and… one other one I’m forgetting at the moment! — and that was a lot of fun.) And “prehistory” CAN get a lot of time in this proposal, and furthermore it’s also addressed in the science classes, so it actually needs less time here than one might think.
But could the future be given its own time, maybe as a seperate period, or an elective? I would lean towards elective options here as people in math and physics won’t need to see their impact of work, as it would be much harder to simulate, since those effects are usually seen further out. But, if someone was going into a particular area (maybe ties in with LiD), they might need to take certain classes - like a biologist, not knowing about hazards of biotechnology, would need to take this class. Envisioning the future might be needed, even in areas like biology + chemistry + CS (comp sci/programming), because of this. I do think it should be an elective, but if you had “majors” (LiD but you choose the topic and some courses attached), you would then have to do it in most majors because there could be unforseen consequences.
I appreciate being pressed on this — I think that "how do we make the future a part of the curriculum" is something I haven't fleshed out much. Some thoughts off the top of my head:
1. A lot of the gain will just be from making the timelines (which I'll talk about soon) peek forward to the future: this raises the realization "wow, the story of the world is going to keep on going!" and prompts kids to think about it.
2. Some of the other gain comes from impromptu conversations that come up in class, unbidden.
3. When, we get to the end of the first cycle in 4th grade, a teacher can teach lessons about (mostly laughably wrong) views of the future which past people have had. (Cue images of the Jetsons.)
4. Literature after this period can include various views of futuristic science fiction. (This is about when a lot of kids become interested in that genre anyhow.)
5: High school history will get more "Philosophic", and be concerned less with the details and more with questions like "what patterns are really behind world events?" Starting then, we can explicitly look at these patterns (e.g. tech curves, population curves, energy curves...) and imagine what might happen if we extend them x years into the future.
6: An elective class of futurology in high school might be VERY powerful, if it could ride on the back of all the above! My only worry about planning it out right now is that our first thoughts of what to put into it would probably be things that we'd ACTUALLY want to incorporate into the regular high school history curriculum. Best to put them in there, and then to ask how we could go deeper.
Ah, it’s nice to see better ways being done. (And of course Egan hasn’t been the only person wanting to bring back history into the early grades.) What kind of school is it, and is there anything else you know about the scope and sequence of their history?
It also follows a timeline (starting from 6th). 5th is US, 6th is ancient (round the world), 7th is medival/early modern (round the world), 8th I don’t know.
Thanks for calling attention to this — I think that one of the biggest potential objections to this is that it doesn’t get enough American history! I think I wrote about this in the proposal document (linked above), but we’ll need to spell out how kids get MUCH MORE American history in this scope & sequence than they do otherwise. (I think this is what Susan Wise Bauer argues, and can show that it’s true through her COPIOUS book lists.)
I wasn’t trying to call attention to that. I thought it was well-balanced. Why does there need to be a heavy american focus? Shouldn’t we balance the teaching of history to be around the world?
Sidenote: That same school doesn’t split social studies, grammer/writting, and literature/vocabulary.
Are you familiar with "A Little History of the World"? https://www.amazon.com/Little-History-World-Histories/dp/030014332X
I think it's the perfect history book to read aloud with 3rd or 4th graders. It's written to be approachable, and with a passion that comes through on every page.
I… used to teach a class with that, and I totally forgot about it! A charming book, and little. I want it to be better-written, but I want that of EVERY good book, so. And it’s old enough that it can be looked at as a piece of history itself (look at how it ends!), which can be a bridge to seeing history as stories people make. Good recommendation. (Note that it’s lately spawned a series of books which look excellent.)
Yeah, charming is the perfect description. We tried a couple of the others in the series, but sadly, they mostly didn't have the same charm as the original.
Also, why 3 cycles of 4? Couldn't prehistory and future contemplation be moved into their own years, creating 2 cycles of 6?
I spent a bunch of time playing with the number of cycles — 12 is a nicely divisible number! — and at times contemplated four cycles of only three years each before concluding that, well, it seemed like too LITTLE time for a robust history program. (Specifically, I feared that a lot of the geographic and cultural diversity would end up getting chopped, and the whole thing would be a repeated run through The Big Stories You Need To Cover.) That said, every approach has its trade-offs, and this one is no exception.
I’d suggest that “the future” isn’t like the other history topics, and I’d be loathe to give it its own year. (That said, I once did create a high school course on future studies where we read a few good books — Joel Garreau’s “Radical Evolution”, Ramez Naam’s “The Infinite Resource”, and… one other one I’m forgetting at the moment! — and that was a lot of fun.) And “prehistory” CAN get a lot of time in this proposal, and furthermore it’s also addressed in the science classes, so it actually needs less time here than one might think.
But could the future be given its own time, maybe as a seperate period, or an elective? I would lean towards elective options here as people in math and physics won’t need to see their impact of work, as it would be much harder to simulate, since those effects are usually seen further out. But, if someone was going into a particular area (maybe ties in with LiD), they might need to take certain classes - like a biologist, not knowing about hazards of biotechnology, would need to take this class. Envisioning the future might be needed, even in areas like biology + chemistry + CS (comp sci/programming), because of this. I do think it should be an elective, but if you had “majors” (LiD but you choose the topic and some courses attached), you would then have to do it in most majors because there could be unforseen consequences.
I appreciate being pressed on this — I think that "how do we make the future a part of the curriculum" is something I haven't fleshed out much. Some thoughts off the top of my head:
1. A lot of the gain will just be from making the timelines (which I'll talk about soon) peek forward to the future: this raises the realization "wow, the story of the world is going to keep on going!" and prompts kids to think about it.
2. Some of the other gain comes from impromptu conversations that come up in class, unbidden.
3. When, we get to the end of the first cycle in 4th grade, a teacher can teach lessons about (mostly laughably wrong) views of the future which past people have had. (Cue images of the Jetsons.)
4. Literature after this period can include various views of futuristic science fiction. (This is about when a lot of kids become interested in that genre anyhow.)
5: High school history will get more "Philosophic", and be concerned less with the details and more with questions like "what patterns are really behind world events?" Starting then, we can explicitly look at these patterns (e.g. tech curves, population curves, energy curves...) and imagine what might happen if we extend them x years into the future.
6: An elective class of futurology in high school might be VERY powerful, if it could ride on the back of all the above! My only worry about planning it out right now is that our first thoughts of what to put into it would probably be things that we'd ACTUALLY want to incorporate into the regular high school history curriculum. Best to put them in there, and then to ask how we could go deeper.
I know a non-egan school which uses history for the social studies curriculum (From grade 5 or earlier, they haven't started grades 4 and below yet,)
Ah, it’s nice to see better ways being done. (And of course Egan hasn’t been the only person wanting to bring back history into the early grades.) What kind of school is it, and is there anything else you know about the scope and sequence of their history?
It also follows a timeline (starting from 6th). 5th is US, 6th is ancient (round the world), 7th is medival/early modern (round the world), 8th I don’t know.
Thanks for calling attention to this — I think that one of the biggest potential objections to this is that it doesn’t get enough American history! I think I wrote about this in the proposal document (linked above), but we’ll need to spell out how kids get MUCH MORE American history in this scope & sequence than they do otherwise. (I think this is what Susan Wise Bauer argues, and can show that it’s true through her COPIOUS book lists.)
I wasn’t trying to call attention to that. I thought it was well-balanced. Why does there need to be a heavy american focus? Shouldn’t we balance the teaching of history to be around the world?
Sidenote: That same school doesn’t split social studies, grammer/writting, and literature/vocabulary.