November 24, 2024 | Everything Has Meaning
Why History Day?
Age of Ancient Empires…
Why We Teach a Timeline Song + Have a History Day
“That’s quite a mouthful of big words!” exclaimed a prospective parent walking out of a PCS classroom and into the hallway. “And that is only a small part of it,” I responded. The timeline song is one of the most noted features of a PCS tour. Parents are often surprised to hear young students singing about historical facts and places they themselves did not learn until high school or later.
Why does history receive so much attention in a classical Christian education? One of the goals of a classical Christian education is a cohesive knowledge, and you can’t really make sense of anything without an idea of the order in which events fall.
I imagine approaching the timeline like a child opening their closet, where up high is a long, straight bar. When you come into the classrooms at PCS you see timeline cards hanging. Each card is like a hanger on the closet bar, and at first, the child is so small, it is all they can do just to get each hanger up on the rack. On each hanger the teacher puts various clothes and accessories. This may be stories, songs, maps, poems.
For example, imagine a “hanger” for England’s Magna Carta. On it I could put a song with the date it was signed and one main idea. I could also add a story about King John. Perhaps, I can hang a map of England. Slowly and systematically we are building the “wardrobe” of the child. On a day like our annual Lower School History Day, we want to try on the clothes literally: dress up, play, imagine, and live in the time a bit.
In teaching history to children, we start at the beginning of recorded history because children, by nature, tend to be self-centered. Starting with the beginning of the timeline helps students locate themselves in the right place – as a small person at the end of the line. Having this mindset helps children be open to listening to some of the great thinkers of the past who we will put before the students as they get older.
Likewise over time, students grow more eye-level with the “closet bar” and begin to flip easily back and forth between events on the bar. At first it was a task just to get the clothes on the hanger, but now they can start to make outfits and see how things go together. When you hand them a new item of clothing they can flip to the place where it goes. In Upper School, they no longer play dress up, but instead will “put on the clothes” by inhabiting the mindset of the past: not judging ideas and actions with their modern assumptions, but putting themselves in that time and place to examine and understand the timeless “Big Ideas.”
Learning history gives us greater context, and context deepens understanding, cultivates compassion and leads to wisdom. One author says, “history is the lived answers to ultimate human questions…Seek to understand them (people of the past) as they understood themselves, resisting the prejudice that equates the newest with the best. Students should understand history neither as a story of constant progress culminating in the present, nor as a series of disconnected events lying side by side in time.” We learn a timeline song not so that we can wow visitors with our knowledge of history (though we can do that), but in order to prepare to listen in on how the people of the past have grappled with the ultimate questions of life.
Deep learning always culminates for children in play and so we developed Lower School History Day to invite them to do just that. In third grade, students study U.S. History, so they hold a mock “Continental Congress.” In fourth grade, students come through “Ellis Island,” each embodying an individual story. A medieval feast might be in store for another class. History Day enlarges our imagination for the past, and cultivates a lifelong passion to engage the big questions in our own time. Come explore history with us!
History Day is Tuesday, November 26, and begins with an assembly in the chapel at 8:15 am. Seating is limited, and special seats are reserved for grandparents and grandfriends.
