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Articles > Teaching
History in a Catholic Homeschool, Part One
(Adapted from a talk originally presented by Sonya Romens in
1999)
If you were to ask any of my five school-aged children what
is their favorite subject in our homeschool they will each
answer, "History." I know this because I ask each of them
periodically and their answer is almost always the same. I
am still just a little surprised by it. You see, as a
student I hated history, or so I thought at the time.
In reality I didn't actually hate history, I just disliked
the manner in which it was presented to me, particularly in
high school. I remember as a child reading for my own
pleasure every book in the biography section of our small
town library. And in high school I loved reading Shakespeare
and King Arthur and other literature from the past. But that
wasn't real history, was it? Real history, or social studies
classes as they are so commonly known in government schools,
was a series of dull textbooks, lifeless lectures and the
lists of meaningless dates and events to memorize and spit
back out onto tests. This system of history "education" did
nothing to promote a personal interest in or connection to
history and I think that many others share my experience. So
how does someone with no love for or understanding of
history teach it to their own children, let alone instill in
them a lasting love for and pleasure in the subject as well
as come to love it herself? That is what I wish to share
with you in this article. I am still no expert in history,
but I have learned more in these years of teaching my own
children than I did in all my years of formal schooling.
I read an essay just lately written by Susan Wise Bauer who
has written a book on classical homeschooling called The
Well-Trained Mind. The essay is about making history the
center of the homeschool curriculum. She states:
“you can bring order to the mass of knowledge a student must
learn by studying history, in chronological order, and
relating other fields of study to this core material.
History is well suited for this role, because history is
simply the account of everything humanity has done, thought,
invented, and dreamed about since the beginning of time. As
filmmaker Ken Burns observes, no type of knowledge can be
studied apart from history. The literature of the past,
science and its progressive discoveries, the music of the
masters--all of these are historical in nature.”
That is what I’ve been attempting to do in our homeschool -
to relate all our studies to History so that everything we
study makes since from a Historical perspective. Over the
years, our studies have enabled us to grow, not only in our
knowledge of the facts of history, but more importantly, in
our understanding of the world and of our rich Catholic
faith and heritage.
When I started preparing for this article I began by writing
down my own history of how I became interested in studying
and teaching world history, just to collect my thoughts. I
decided that I would share some of my experiences because I
hope that they will have some value for you. I want to share
some of the successes and mistakes that I’ve had with
teaching my children over the years and a little of what
I’ve learned in the process. We’ve used a variety of
approaches to studying history in our nine and a half years
of homeschool, some that didn’t work, but most were right
for us at the particular time in our family's history.
We’ve gone through several stages in our family and school
life, too, and a lot of the changes I’ve made in our
curriculum reflect the changes in our family’s life - the
ages of the children, the number of children in our family
and the number that are school-aged. I’ve had 3 difficult
pregnancies since we started homeschooloing and that has
affected how we have schooled, also. So by my sharing the
different ways we have approached studying history,
hopefully you’ll be able to apply some of it to your own
homeschool, whether you’re just starting out or have been at
it for a while. I also hope to explain how our studies of
World History have strengthened our family’s understanding
of and love for the Catholic Faith.
I’m definitely not an expert on history, in fact I had no
interest in history at all when I was in high school and
college. It wasn’t until I married my husband, Ryan, that I
began to even think about history. He’s always loved
history, it was his favorite subject in school and I was
amazed at how much he seemed to know about it. He would
mentions something like the Punic Wars or the 1917 Russian
Revolution and I would just give him a blank stare because I
had no idea what he was talking about. I believed for a long
time that he knew all that history because he must have had
a better history teacher than I did in high school, but now
I believe that it also has something to do with the fact
that he was brought up in a Catholic family. He may have had
good teachers, and he certainly has a strong personal
interest in learning history, but it was his Catholic faith
that made it possible for him to UNDERSTAND history.
I grew up in a Lutheran family, my father is a Lutheran
pastor. About five years after I married Ryan I decided that
it was time to look into the Catholic faith because I had
promised to raise my children Catholic and my father
encouraged me that to strengthen and unify our family we had
to share the same faith. I didn’t know much about the
Catholic faith, although I had been going to Mass with Ryan
on and off for several years, it didn’t seem much different
from the Lutheran service. And I had no desire to change
religions - I liked being Lutheran, I liked the hymns most
of all, so I decided that I would become a Catholic in name
only, but remain a Lutheran in my heart.
The reason I’m giving you this background is that it will
help explain why teaching Catholic history to my children
and to myself is so important to me. Because when I became a
“Lutheran/Catholic” I had no idea what I was getting myself
into. What I’ve discovered over the past eleven years in the
Church is that being Catholic is a whole lot more than just
where you go on Sunday or what songs you sing in church -
it’s much more than a religion - it’s a worldview - it’s a
culture - it is the basis of Western Civilization - western
culture IS Christian culture - and Christian culture IS
Catholic culture! That may seem obvious to you, but it
wasn’t to me at the time.
One of the reasons that history didn’t interest me in school
was that, to my mind it was nothing but a series of
unrelated events - names and dates and places that had no
connection to each other. I knew that they were important
for understanding government and wars and politics, but I
wasn’t much interested in all that so I wasn’t much
interested in history. Another reason was that I have no
memory of ever studying any history other than American
history. I don’t remember ever reading any world history
until I entered college, and then I was totally lost. I had
very little idea what they were talking about. I had heard
of some of those people - Socrates, Plato, Aristotle - but I
knew almost nothing about them.
Back in the early 1980’s I watched a PBS series on history
called “Connections”, hosted by James Burke. That show was
amazing to me and it got me interested and thinking about
history for the first time. I don’t know if I would feel the
same way about it now - but at the time it made a deep
impact on me. Watching that series of shows gave me my first
understanding of the importance and impact that history has
on our lives now, and how interconnected we are with people
of the past, their actions, choices and ideas. I just had
never made those connections in my own mind before then.
About a year after I became Catholic we began homeschooling
our - then - four children. When we were first married I had
worked for a Montessori school for a year and my best friend
had been a Montessori teacher. I had read and studied a lot
of Dr. Montessori’s books. I had no idea at the time that
she was Catholic. Her philosophy had a strong influence on
my desire to teach my children and on the way I wanted to go
about it. So I had some ideas about what kind of education I
wanted to give my children, but I really had no idea how I
was going to go about it. I knew that I didn’t want to use
the traditional classroom approach, I wanted school to be
fun and the children to be active in their own learning. I
wanted to facilitate their learning and discovery
experiences, as opposed to spoon-feeding everything to them.
And I wanted them to see the relationships between subjects
that are normally split up into separate school subjects.
In my research on home education I came across the idea of
UNIT STUDIES - which is taking a theme or unit of study and
delving into it deeply over a period of time, integrating
all the subject areas as they apply. (definition from the
Elijah Company catalog, pg. 10)
This really appealed to me because it seemed to fulfill my
goals of how I wanted to teach. As I mentioned, I had just
joined the Church the year before and I knew very little
about the Catholic Faith. I didn’t know any other
homeschoolers, let alone Catholic homeschoolers, I didn’t
even know many Catholics!. There were no Catholic homeschool
groups around , at least that I could find - and I did look!
I didn’t want to go the traditional textbook route, and I
couldn’t afford the tuition for a full-service curriculm
anyway, so that wasn’t an option I considered. What I did
finally decide on was a Christian unit studies program. It’s
structure is based on character traits like honesty and
patience, which they then relate to studies of people, like
Abraham Lincoln for honesty and activities like baking bread
for learning about patience.
Well, I was very excited about this whole concept and dove
right into it with a unit study on Cathedrals. I learned a
lot, but my children hated it! For my oldest daughter,
Charissa, who had just been pulled out of the middle of
third grade public school, it was just too much change too
soon. My younger children were too young to really “get” the
idea of what we were trying to accomplish. We made several
false starts through that first year, but it just didn’t
catch on. It didn’t have enough overall structure, the idea
of character traits made sense to me, but was too abstract
for my children and they just didn’t make any connections
between what we were trying to do and how it applied to
their lives.
So I kept reading and looking for an answer to my questions
on how to make my educational goals work with our family.
As I was looking through a copy of a Protestant homeschool
catalog I came across this quote by V.M. Hillyer:
“In common with all children of my age, I was brought up on
American History and given no other history but American,
year in and year out, year after year for eight or more
years. “So far as I knew 1492 was the beginning of the
world. Any events or characters before that time, reference
to which I encountered by chance, were put down in my mind
in the same category with fairy-tales. Christ and His times,
of which I heard only in Sunday-school, were to me mere
fiction without reality. They were not mentioned in any
history that I knew and therefore, so I thought, must belong
not to a realm in time and space, but to a spiritual realm.”
This was a perfect description of my background! The article
in the catalog went on to describe a method of studying
world history in chronological order using biographies and
“living books” instead of textbooks. This made sense to me
and that is what got me started on the road to studying
World History with my children. Instead of a full-blown Unit
Studies approach, I decided to make World History the center
of our curriculum and do lots of exciting hands on
activities, read books and watch videos from the library.
The catalog set out a plan for studying history using a 7
year plan. From that point World History became the center
of our homeschool studies. |
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