How and why should you study history at school?
The main feature of history as a science and as an academic subject is that it does not reflect objective scientific knowledge about historical processes and events, but serves ideological attitudes that are beneficial at the given moment to the political elite of the state, or rather, to a group of senior officials influencing educational standards. selection and approval of the list of textbooks. History turns out to be a way of manipulating people, public consciousness. Even Plutarch noted that in historical events it is impossible to trace the exact reasons and find the final truths. As a result, the subject content itself experiences fluctuations, as they once said, “along with the party line.”
However, at the same time, a significant part of school history teachers have their own, personal preferences in the interpretation of historical events, so what is written in textbooks and standards is not so important. As a result, the schools taught history in accordance with the tastes and attitudes of specific teachers, and not in accordance with the textbooks.
It is quite natural that the history turns out to be different in the classes led by young teachers or, conversely, by teachers of the older generation.
But is this really a problem? Not at all. By itself, the traditional reproductive and classroom approach to teaching history at school has become so obsolete that history lessons do not leave a noticeable trace in the minds of schoolchildren. Whether there are lessons on this subject, whether there are these lessons – this does not lead to a special difference in knowledge and, moreover, in the values and views of schoolchildren. After all, it is no coincidence that mass journalistic polls of graduates show that schoolchildren who do not specialize in history in the context of the final exams find it difficult to ask who Macedonian is , when there was a civil war and the Napoleonic invasion. Of course, leaving gaps in the study of history is a big mistake, but if the student cannot understand it on his own, he can always ask for help on history https://essayassistant.org/history-homework-help/.
The simplest (and wrong) approach that could help in solving this problem is to reduce the study of history to memorizing the dates when a particular historical event occurred. Indeed, historical dates are the objective and obligatory basis of historical knowledge. However, there are a lot of events, time flows continuously, therefore the task of assessing and explaining these events makes it inevitable to interpret and reconstruct the details of events that do not have sufficient objectivity.
A more modern approach to the study of history at school is that history is studied as the development of ways to meet human needs, that is, as the history of everyday life, in its influence on the life of an ordinary person. It opens up wide opportunities for the application of project and task approaches, in which children independently seek answers to questions about the causes and consequences of certain historical processes, the prerequisites of events, complement and reconstruct historical and archaeological data. For modern children, this option is the best, but at the same time the most difficult. They often need help and essayassistant.org is always happy to provide it.
The study of history within the framework of this approach must begin already in elementary school – and the subject system of this school must be thoroughly corrected for this. As for the middle level, history in this context should become a system-forming basis, the skeleton of the system of school subjects in the middle level and high school, and not only literature with language, but also physics, chemistry and biology should be “stringed” onto history . It is in conjunction with history that this will allow our youth to acquire a systemic vision of the world around us – a worldview.
Naturally, this will be a “casual” view of history. Such an approach, even for well-established historians, can open up a lot of unexpected and new things , and illuminate the previously dark, previously blinded sides of what is happening. And one must be bold enough, ready for the fact that the historical truth will appear in a completely different, unexpected light. Only in this case history, as a subject, will teach our children something, will be useful for them.