Reflections from High School World History Students

As many of you know, in addition to teaching AP Government, Military History, and US History, I also teach World History (yeah, I know- 4 preps!). At the end of each year that I have taught World History, I have my students do a capstone project or final project that requires students to integrate, interpret, analyze, synthesize, and link together different ideas, concepts, people, and events from world history.

It's not a complicated project. First, I take all the important words from our course, including people, places, events, concepts, and terms, and put them on a list and then randomly sort them. Then I break the list up into 10 separate groups. Students are to pick one word from each group. Then they are to create a timeline that demonstrates the relationship of the words through time. Then they are to write a paper linking together all of the words into a coherent and comprehensive essay that hopefully displays some sort of big understanding of history, religion, science, government, economics, social structures, etc. The theme drives which words are chosen and that in turn drives the timeline and essay.

Reading through the essays written by my regular World History High School students, I was struck by the wisdom that even high school students sometimes can exhibit.

One student wrote about an interesting pattern that she saw after looking back on world history- she wrote about the long history of anti-Semitism that stretched from burning Jews in the Middle Ages to the Holocaust to events of today (for this example, she used the biased coverage of the Gaza boat controversy). Another high school student wrote that one pattern he saw was the continuing struggle of freedom vs tyranny, even in countries that seemed to have had it figured out- he pointed out that at various times in history freedom has seemed to have won, but then later tyranny rose up and overwhelmed freedom (examples used were Greece, Rome, Germany in 1920, Japan in 1910, and the USA today), demonstrating how fragile and fleeting freedom really is.  Another student pointed out how it has been such a long struggle for women's rights in our world, and documented all the progress that we have made, but ended her paper by concluding that our society still doesn't treat women equally (as an example she used the Sarah Palin Boobgate controversy). Another one of my high school students pointed out that history is always seems to be more of the same- that although there are the occasional true revolutionaries (Locke, Socrates, Newton, Einstein, Da Vinci were the examples used) that turn things on their head and advance ideas that are brand-new, most of history has been filled with more of the same- people promoting old theories as new or recycling bad ideas all over again (Marx, Lenin, Mao, Hitler, Napoleon, and Obama were all used as examples).

People lose hope in our next generation, feeling that the years of public schooling and liberal indoctrination that goes on in those facilities has created a group of people who are somehow less than future generations. But they are wrong- students today, just like students in the past, are as smart, hard-working, intuitive, and creative as previous generations, as long as the previous generations get out of the way and let them be all that they can be. Have hope- after a year of going through World History, you can clearly see that students recognize the big themes that are out there, and I'd be more than happy to have them as voters someday, provided they are not crushed, demoralized, and further indoctrinated by those previous generations.