The Best Way to Teach History

Although history does not change, it continues to grow. Every day there is more history for teachers and students to examine and learn from. But what is the best way to teach history, chronologically or thematically?

As one of the characters in the film History Boys states, "History is easy. It's just one f*&#ing thing after another." History can be seen as linear as any subject. After all, history takes place one day at a time. Most people remember the time lines of events and names that needed to be memorized for the quiz or test. There is a sense of flow that teaching history chronologically offers. Causality can be easier to explain when the results of events are seen immediately.

Teaching history chronologically, however, also has drawbacks. History should be more than just names and dates. Although history is one thing after another, there is a lot of meaning and important lessons to learn in between the things. A chronological approach can make it difficult to see the similarities between time periods. If one topic is covered in September, and another similar topic does not come up until April because of when they occurred in history, the connection between the two will be difficult to see. If the course happens to be a world history course there will be a lot of jumping around. For instance the class will cover Europe from 1500 to 1650 then go back and look at Asia during the same time period, and then Africa, etc. Seeing what is going on all at the same time is difficult to do.

A different approach to teaching history is thematic. Using the thematic approach history is taught based on big themes that run through out history. For instance, how political power is obtained and used could be examined. In order to do this the class would look at different political systems through out time and all over the world. The class may look at the dynasties of China, the absolute monarchs of Europe and the fascist parties of the twentieth century. Comparisons and lessons can be drawn immediately between the topics and more critical analysis would be required of the students. The hope of this approach is that the students would come out of the class with a more complete understanding of history, not just a lot of names and dates.

The thematic approach has its drawbacks as well. Since the topics that are being compared may not be from the same time periods a good basis of chronological knowledge could be missing. Also, thematic based classes usually are not able to cover quite as much content as the chronological approach. Some critics also argue that students in thematic based classes cover a lot of fluffy ideas, but do not develop any hard knowledge of the subject.

As with any either/or discussion, the best scenario is probably a combination of the two. By grounding the history class in the chronological events that occurred and emphasizing certain themes, or vice versa, hopefully the best of both strategies can be achieved.