ACT I
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Can I tell you another story? People think and learn in terms of stories.
We think about how things happen as a beginning, a middle, and an end. What were things like in the beginning? What changed? And what was the outcome?
Or if it’s a story that’s happening to us right now, it’s the past, present, and future. What was our situation like at first? What happened then? What’s happening now? What do we think is going to happen?
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Math is a story. First there were five of something, then five more were added, and then there were ten. Or first there were five of something, then they were multiplied by five, and now there are 25.
How do you tell stories in gym class? . If you pass a basket ball like this, you make it easy for your teammate to catch it. Then a game is a bigger story. Your team starts on one end of the court, the other team starts on the other end, you dribble, pass, and shoot a lot, and then one team wins.
If you think of a subject in terms of a sequence of events, you can focus on how one event leads to another. Then you can learn how to make events happen, in order to get an outcome you want.
A cake recipe is a story. It tells you the ingredients you need, then tells you how to mix them together and how to bake them, and in the end you have a cake.
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What about American history? When does that story start? Who is the story about? What were the most important things that happened? Why did they happen? Which parts of history got written down? Which parts didn’t get written down?
Does American history start with Columbus setting sail from Europe? Or does American history start with Native Americans who already lived here?
If we’re talking about the history of the United States, when does that story begin? Does it begin on Independence Day, July 4th, 1776, with the Declaration of Independence, and our ideals about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Or was Independence Day on June 19th, 1865, when the last of the slaves were freed and we started putting those ideals into practice? Or was Independence Day July 2nd, 1964, when Lyndon Johnson signed the Equal Rights Act, and those ideals were turned into law?
When does the history of the United States start being a story about all of us? When do we all start being protagonists in the story of our country?
ACT II
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How you tell a story depends on what you want the story to be about. And how you tell the story affects what people remember about it.
That’s the fundamental problem that Black Lives Matter is struggling against. No matter what version of US history you believe in, race is a big part of it. What does US history tell you about yourself and other people, and how does race fit into that? Racism or not racism comes down to what you believe about people.
Changing people’s minds depends on getting them to believe a new story.
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Why is it so hard to tell the story of American history? Why do people disagree on our history so much?
If we want to talk about what really happened with any historical event, we have to hear points of view from people who were affected in all the different ways it affected people. We can’t learn what slavery really was like just by talking about why White abolitionists disagreed with White slave owners. We can’t learn what Europeans colonizing the Americas was really like if we never hear what any Natives had to say about it.
Now here’s the big problem. Truth and effective communication are two different things. We all find out about Columbus, Thanksgiving, the Revolution, the Civil War, and the Wild West by the time we’re in third grade. Those were all important events. When you’re 8 years old, your imagination runs wild with things like those.
But when you’re a child, there are some things about the adult world that you just can’t imagine. As far as an 8 year old can understand, Black people were kidnapped from Africa, and a lot of American history was made up of wars that Native Americans lost.
By the time you’re old enough to understand what rape and torture and genocide are, how do they fit with your idea of American history? Are you outraged that they happened to your ancestors? Or are you outraged that someone is accusing your ancestors of doing those things to other people?
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Things like this are one reason we need integrated subjects. So different classes can help create the context for others, to make it easier to talk about complicated topics.
When we talk about history as just a sequence of events, the truth isn’t automatically effective communication. Two groups of people can hear the same words but read such different meanings into them that they turn them into two completely opposite stories. American history isn’t a cake recipe!
ACT III
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Have you ever noticed how young children learn things all the time without even trying? You learned that way when you were that age too. Did you even notice that you were doing it back then? Or were you just living your normal life?
Learning is what childhood is for. Because that’s how we get from being infants to being adults.
So why do so many people get so bored with school? If you design an education system for people whose main purpose in life is to learn, and you make a lot of them think learning is boring, that ought to be your first clue that you’re doing something wrong.
So let’s turn this around now. We learn about history in school. Now let’s talk about the history of school.
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Have you ever wondered when the public school system was founded? It was in the 1800s. What was happening then? The Industrial Revolution.
Factory owners suddenly needed a lot of people who were prepared to work in factories. They needed workers that had dependable skills in reading, writing, and math. They also needed workers who could focus their attention all day the way they needed to do factory jobs.
The school system was modeled after the factory system. It started as a factory for mass producing factory workers. Your class schedule is an assembly line. You learn about math for 45 minutes a day, then you learn about English for 45 minutes a day, then you learn about science for 45 minutes a day…
On the one hand, that’s a way to divide life up into different areas of knowledge, and then get teachers who specialize in different areas to teach them to students. On the other hand, the people who designed the education system divided classes that way to try to teach children to think like factory workers.
Working in a factory depends on focusing your attention on one thing at a time. That’s why so many people think factory jobs are boring too.
Feeling bored with school is the feeling that you have to invest a lot of time and effort into something you don’t feel like you’re benefitting from. Think about that.
Do you have any classes in school that you like? Why do you like them? Because you feel like you benefit from them every day. Because you feel like you’re going to be able to use what you learn for something you care about.
Real life isn’t divided into subjects. Usually you need to think about more than one thing at a time. And use more than one part of your brain at a time.
Preparing students for a future where anything can happen means teaching them to fit together everything they know to deal with anything life throws at them. How many classes do you have about that?
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Is the United States still an industrialized society? No.
Now we’re a post industrial society. We send as many factory jobs as we can to Mexico and Asia. Those people think those jobs are boring too.
If you feel like focusing your attention on one thing at a time doesn’t really prepare you for the future, you’re probably right. So what do post industrial jobs depend on? Creativity. And collaboration.
Creativity means thinking of new ideas. Collaboration means working with other people. Both of those depend on people using different types of information together.
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Do you want to be a doctor or a nurse? The medical field is a collaboration between medical professionals and patients.
If you’re a doctor you could treat your job like applied biology, where you spend all day turning sick and injured bodies into healthy bodies. That is the basic thing doctors do. (And during the pandemic maybe it was the only thing they had time to do.)
But if that’s all medicine is to you, you’ll be the kind of doctor nobody likes to go to. Because who wants to talk about their pregnancy or their serious illness to someone who treats them like a robot?
What about voting?
Democracy is a really big collaboration. It depends on Americans trusting other Americans enough to believe that sometimes other people can have ideas that are better than ours. Not on everyone freaking out and thinking that anyone who disagrees with us is trying to destroy our country. And not on trying to prevent people who disagree with us from voting.
ACT IV
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What does integrating classes mean? Let’s just pretend you’re in college majoring in education. Like your teachers did.
There are four levels to learning something new.
Memorization is the part where you learn the vocabulary words and the diagrams.
Understanding is the point where you start to feel like those ideas make sense.
Application is point where you understand what you’ve learned well enough that you can use it for something.
Correlation—meaning co-relation— is the level where you’ve learned it well enough that you can use it for creative thinking. And deal with unexpected situations successfully.
Your brain isn’t just an empty bucket that your teachers pour water into. What do you already understand about life? What do you know how to do? What do you know how to do well enough that you can figure it out on your own?
Memorizing and understanding a subject that you have no background in is a lot easier if you can correlate it to what you understand and know how to do in other subjects. When you combine things you already know something about, you can correlate among them to learn them faster and further.
Everything connecting to everything else means all the things you’re good at and all the things you like connect to all the things you aren’t good at and all the things you don’t like. So you always have a good starting point for learning anything.
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Let’s say math is your favorite class. What do you learn in math class?
Math class this year prepares you for math class next year. It ties into science, and maybe a few other classes. It helps you use numbers in real life. It paves the way for you to major in math in college and pursue a career as a mathematician. But is that all?
Numbers are everywhere. You can’t always see them or measure them precisely. But you can always feel them.
What about gym class? How fast can you run with the energy you have? Could you run faster if you use your muscles differently? Learning things like that is what gym class is for.
But that’s also math, because you’re comparing amounts to each other. Even though there’s no way to write the numbers down.
Everything in life where you have to make a choice between two possibilities is a trade off. Every choice has a cost to benefit ratio. Every choice you can think of seems like it has some potential benefit to you, but also a price to pay or a risk you have to take to get it.
Sometimes the numbers involved are obvious. Like being offered two jobs and taking the one that pays more. Or buying something you want from the store that sells it cheapest.
Other times they’re not. Every time you make a choice among sodas or pizza toppings or ice creams, where they all cost the same but you like one more than the others, it’s still math. You perceive one to have greater value than the others. But how are you calculating that value? Now we’ve gone from math class to gym class to philosophy.
What do you learn about in English class? Every story about people is a story about people making decisions. Timeless classics are stories from decades or centuries ago. They clearly illustrate characters, their goals, settings, and obstacles, in ways people can still relate to today.
So what are those people making decisions about? Why do they feel like the decisions they make have the best cost to benefit ratio? And why do they feel that other decisions they could make don’t?
Now we’ve gone from math class to gym class to philosophy to literature. Meanwhile, people whose favorite subjects are gym class, philosophy, or literature can use those as their starting points.
ACT V
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Then there’s history class. That complicated story where we’re trying to figure out what America is.
What is American history supposed to be a story about? Is it a story about who made the most important decisions? Or is it a story where all of our ancestors are protagonists? Those are two different things.
What kind of story do you think the people who founded the public education system 200 years ago wanted everyone to learn? Why do you think White men in the 1800s would want everyone to learn a version of history where White men were the protagonists?
If we talk about history in terms of who made the most important decisions, it makes it sound like White people have won at everything that’s ever happened except the Battle of the Alamo, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and the Battle of Pearl Harbor.
That makes it sound like White people are the best at just about everything. White supremacists love that version of history.
If that’s not what you’re trying to teach in history class, how do you tell the other story?
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The easiest time to teach anyone anything is when they’re curious about it. That’s why we start learning history when we’re 5 or 6 with stories of what our holidays and statues are about.
Then when we’re about 10 and we have the attention span to learn how they all fit together into one continuous story we have our first history class in school. But that story is limited to what we can fit into a year. And by what we’re old enough to understand at the time.
After we learn the children’s version of history, where does the story go from there? Is history a story about what led up to your life today? Or is history an outline of the events that have led up to today for everyone, which we can keep adding to as we learn more?
Real history is a story about how everyone involved, every step of the way, made
the best decisions
they could think of
in the situations
they were in,
for themselves
and the people
and things
they cared about.
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Real history isn’t just an action movie, where the good guys face a lot of danger and win a bunch of wars. Real history is a drama, about a lot of people with conflicting goals.
That depends on a different storytelling style. A more complicated storytelling style.
Who at your school knows a lot about using different storytelling styles? How about English teachers? How about theatre teachers?
So this is the perfect opportunity for them to show you a real life application of what they’re trying to teach you.
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Let’s get that started right now.
41 of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, owned slaves. That included George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
The plantation system made it possible for a few well educated colonists to amass enough wealth to formulate, and pay for, a revolution against the British Empire. Those guys helped to found a legacy of ideas that has been passed down to us. That makes up a big part of who we are today.
Meanwhile, the people who were enslaved on their plantations, and all the other plantations, also thought about life a lot. They did what people always do, and passed down what they learned about life to their children.
Not all Americans today are direct heirs to that legacy of ideas. But many of us are.
Those of us who aren’t direct heirs are indirect heirs. Because that legacy of ideas makes up a big part of what America is today too. There is no way to say that one of those things is part of American history and the other one isn’t.
ACT VI
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If you want to learn more about the origins of public education and the successes teachers and schools have had with integrating classes like this, you can read any of a number of books by Ken Robinson. He’s given several TED Talks about this too, which are among the most watched on YouTube.
He’s from England, but he lives in the US. He’s worked in education, and helped reform it, in both places, so he’s seen a lot of ways problems and solutions play out.
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History and science are two of the most complicated classes in school. Because they’re two different ways of looking at huge pictures of how the world works.
If we combine the two into one big story of what science tells us about history, it sounds something like this:
Eleven thousand years ago our ancestors were spread over all of the continents except Antarctica, and many of the islands in the world. They were basically the same as each other.
As individuals they were different, like we are. We think differently from each other because we have different personalities and different combinations of talents and things like that. But every society is made up of people with different personalities and talents. A thousand people who live over here and a thousand people who live over there have pretty much the same combinations of personalities and talents.
The big difference was the environments they lived in. Different parts of the world had different combinations of resources and other environmental factors.
People who lived near the water figured out a lot of ways to build and use boats. People who got a lot of snow where they lived invented snowshoes and sleds and things like that. People ate different food because there were different plants and animals in different parts of the world. That’s not hard to understand.
But it goes a lot further than that.
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In places where there was more food available, people could have bigger families. That made their population sizes grow bigger.
In places where people found animals they could domesticate, they got more dependable sources of food, like meat, milk, and eggs. They got more easily accessible sources of materials like leather and wool. They could ride some of the animals, which let them travel further and faster. They could use some for their muscle power to carry things, and to pull plows, carts, or sleds.
In places where people found the resources they needed to forge metal they were able to create stronger tools, weapons, and armor.
Environmental differences like those added up to some societies being more physically powerful than others.
More physically powerful societies conquered less physically powerful societies. The people in more physically powerful societies invented things that people in less physically powerful societies didn’t. But it wasn’t because they were more intelligent. It was because they lived in places where they found the natural resources they needed to invent those things.
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The grownup version of American history tells us why historical events happened. High school would be the perfect time for everyone to learn that.
That version of history starts with archeology and anthropology. It shows how people in North America, Europe, Africa, Hawaii, Asia, and wherever else our ancestors lived, used the natural resources they had to make lives for themselves. But that’s somewhere in the middle of the story of Being Human on Planet Earth.
The story begins with people wondering why the world works the way it does and looking for ways to fit ideas together. That’s what philosophy is.
Philosophy leads to math. Math leads to physics. Physics leads to chemistry, chemistry leads to biology, and biology leads to psychology.
Psychology leads to everything people do, including archeology, history, and all your other classes about people thinking. It’s easy to see how all these things fit together if we take them one step at a time. Then each chapter of the story is the gateway to a field of study you can learn a lot more about if you want.
So ask your teachers about this stuff. They’ll be glad that you’re so excited about your education.
Won’t they?
