Future-Focused History Teaching

SHOULD HISTORY EDUCATION PROVIDE KNOWLEDGE USEFUL IN LIFE?  If so, we need to stop teaching isolated facts from the past and start teaching knowledge relevant to the future. 

      Former journalist and history teacher Mike Maxwell embarked on a seven-year journey to discover how history education could be made more useful to students and society. He asked the tough questions that few others were asking: How useful is history education as presently taught? Why does history occupy an inferior position in the schools relative to other fundamental realms of knowledge such as mathematics, language, and science? Why do students score much worse in history than in other core subjects on national assessments of student learning? And most important, why does our society find it so difficult to learn from history? 

     The result of his investigation is future-focused history, the commonsense idea that knowledge from the past can inform judgment in the future. Maxwell writes, "Any society that has developed the capacity to destroy most life on earth needs all the good judgment it can get, and there is no better place to seek it than in the long record of human experience." 

     FUNDAMENTALS OF FUTURE-FOCUSED HISTORY TEACHING INCLUDE 

•  Five basic principles of history education, 


•  A coherent and useful purpose to guide instruction, 


•  Four kinds of historical knowledge relevant to the future, 


•  Criteria for weighing the importance of historical events, 


•  Four essential cognitive learning strategies. 

     Maxwell believes that Future-Focused History Teaching has the potential to restore to historical learning the power that it once held but has since lost; to return history to its rightful place of prominence among the fundamental realms of knowledge taught in school and college; and to provide important knowledge of how the world works that can help students and society to function effectively in the future.