Tuesday, February 16, 2021

on the teaching of history


We use this history book, The Story of Canada by George W. Brown, in our Morning Time as we read aloud to learn Canadian history together. (You can purchase it from Living Book Press and even see a great sample from the website.)
While looking for an image of this book, I stumbled onto the archived Teacher's Manual available for download. As I started looking through the table of contents, I noticed this lengthy preface for teachers on the teaching of history and I thought it was very good. 
So good, that I decided to copy and paste it into a Google drive document for our Charlotte Mason Study Group to read and print if they liked.  I will put a link to it below.
This is the type of document that would be worth reading again on Canada Day or the August Provincial holiday before another year of lessons begin. (Or for non-Canadians, on your civic holidays.)
I may take issue with some of his ideas as to how the teachers should impress morals of Canadian history and a few other stray comments, but I think overall, he has given much to stir up parents and teachers with love and devotion to Canada and beyond.
For the first time as a dual citizen, I felt protective of what my children truly love of Canada and we are learning so much from his book.  We have learned a lot of history from the Maritimes where my husband is from and we are eager to travel again to see the sites with a new understanding of Canadian history.
If you interested in reading it, I hope you feel even more proud to be Canadian in a very authentic and rooted way and that you can see how much we owe our children to love this country well and want to see her thrive under God's care. 
Below is the link to the Google document called: History in the Schools or download the Teacher's Manual (linked above) and read it for yourself.

Through the school, the family, the church, and other agencies and daily contacts, each generation must enter into the experience of the present and grasp the heritage of the past from which the present springs and without which it has no root. The child robbed of all understanding of a family background in which he can have some confidence and pride is robbed indeed, as we know from tragic examples. The democratic nation that fails to give its children a knowledge and understanding of its ideals and institutions and their background is robbing them and undermining itself. 

~George W. Brown

P.S. This is also an interesting article by Susan Wise Bauer on how history is written and taught to children. On History, Children and the Inevitablity of Compromise: All of History is an Argument

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