In my last installment , Regine Pernoud, gave some suggestions on teaching history to young children. Her overall goal was to get children to actually do the work of the historian in later years. She says,
"Around nine to twleve years, any educator can greatly stimulate the social sense that is awakening and also show his students how to see what surrounds us by having recourse to local history. The study of history could then be mixed with that of the environment. This is, moreover, what the masters formed in active methods have long called "the study of the milieu". In order for this to be done well, it demands a reference to history and also some explorations that could be extremely beneficial: visits to museums, of course, but also to archives, even if merely those of the town mayor, as well as the study of land registers, of the civil state, of the census ... Finally the study of monuments of the past, of people and events that marked the locality, eventually of excavations that might exist nearby - all that should be subject matter of a history course and would obviously be more educational than having to learn a textbook summary." from Those Terrible Middle Ages (pg 165)
No comments:
Post a Comment