Hello Everyone,
Over the last nine years of teaching history at a classical charter school, I’ve written a few chapters worth of handouts in what could one day become a secondary-source reader in a high school-level Western Civilization course. I also have enough lecture notes and musings on the teaching of history to turn into a fair number of blog posts and mini-essays. There’s plenty of content to keep me going for a good long while, and I hope that having a regular writing outlet and (eventually) a subscriber base will help me write more new content, and hone my craft.
I also help train and mentor new teachers, and so I want this blog to be a resource for teachers; especially those new to history, or who are teaching history without a deep background in historical training and methodology. I also hope my content and resources will be useful to homeschooling families.
While I have a degree in history, I’m certainly no academic historian, and I don’t claim any authority in that domain of specialized experts. However, I have spent almost a decade thinking about and practicing the art of how to communicate and illuminate the past to students. I think that good content explained well and with enthusiasm goes a very long way in teaching history, and that I have knowledge and insights that can be useful to a general lay audience.
“Historia” in the original Greek (from Herodotus) means “inquiry.” While the famous George Santayana quote about how those who don’t study the past are doomed to repeat is the most common answer to the question “why should we study history?” the original meaning of the word actually suggests something different. Most other subjects, especially in the humanities, offer important lessons and try to help us avoid mistakes; literature, history, and philosophy all teach us about human behavior and try to nudge us towards right action. But the unique property of history is that it explains the past to us, and in so doing, reveals to us how the past becomes the present (and possibly how the present might become the future, although this rather quickly becomes dicey).
History is prone to all sorts of limitations of bias, uncertainty, and incomplete knowledge. But, when history works, its powers are profound. We rely on past knowledge in our daily lives constantly. Whenever a student asks their friend “what’s the new teacher like,” or when someone looks up a review or asks a friend for a recommendation, we consul past knowledge and translate it forward in time as a future prediction or judgment. The unknown future is an obstacle-strewn room in the dark, and the historical record offers a chance to save your toes from a painful stubbing.
My area of focus is Western Civilization, especially the ancient, medieval, and early modern eras. American history will naturally come up from time to time, and I’ll touch on topics relating to World History as well. I will defend the teaching of Western Civilization as worthy endeavor, and explain both what I think Western Civilization is, and isn’t. I have a special fondness for military history, the Byzantine Empire, the history of institutions, and I can also contribute thoughts on the nature of classical education, and why it remains important in the 21st century.
Now is a fertile time to be involved in classical education, which, while still small next to the mainstream of American schooling, is growing rapidly. The rise of progressive education in the early 20th century created a rupture with previous traditions of education, and so the task of classical educators today is, as with medieval monks and renaissance humanists before us, to once more reconstitute the lived art of training individuals to be free and flourishing human beings.
