History Lessons
Having trouble remembering your history lessons from grammar school? PJM columnist Sheryl Longin is too and thinks she knows why. The wrong things are being taught. Kids are interested in the history of how things work, not stories about Indians. And they should be!
Lately, my daughter has been peppering me with questions familiar to anyone who has ever spent time around children and/or been one. Who invented stairs? What was the first language? When did people start using toilet paper? You can add to this list yourselves, I’m sure. And as I struggled to supply her with answers, I was reminded of the gaping holes in my knowledge of history. I am not alone in this predicament, and frankly my ignorance is all the more troubling because I was an honor student at a top ranking private school and graduated from an Ivy League university. In other words, I was no academic slouch. Most important of all, I really enjoyed studying history.
When I reflect on my history education, I recognize two distinct problems. The first I have already mentioned. It was full of holes. It didn’t flow in any logical progressive order. Fourth grade history, if my memory serves me (and this was in the seventies, so it probably doesn’t) was comprised entirely of the study of Native Americans. Certainly a worthy subject, but honestly the endless terra cotta posters of tribal variations in tepee construction have left the adult me with nothing but an involuntary loathing of Indian casinos, and most sadly, lackluster interest in Native American affairs.
As for the history I was taught, I learned it well enough at the time, memorized dates, battles, presidencies, with ease and comprehension. But here’s the second problem. Over the years, I have retained little. Much of it has vanished from my memory. I’d blame it on age, but this forgetfulness hasn’t plagued me to such a degree in other disciplines. Even ones I didn’t enjoy nearly as much.
Some of my history lessons, however, have remained as clear and vibrant as when I first received them. So I decided to review what they had in common that kept them alive in my consciousness. The answer made me think about how history is taught today.
Like it or not, we in the western world live in an age of materialism, not big ideas. That’s just the way it is. I am reminded of a test screening of a movie I wrote at which the focus group (predominantly teenagers) were asked with which political party they identified. That most said none was no surprise. That most had no idea what a political party was and were unfamiliar with the words “Democrat” and “Republican” was more telling. The movie was “Dick”, a comic revisionist take on Watergate. I’ll never forget the comment of one “skater dude” teenage boy when the focus group leader asked what they thought about the character of Nixon in the film. “He had such bad taste! The Oval Office was so ugly.” At the time, I was appalled by his apparent superficiality.
Now, thinking about history, about what I remember and what I don’t, I have a different reaction. I wonder if we aren’t using a hopelessly irrelevant, archaic framework to teach a subject that is absolutely vital to our children if we care about the future of the modern world. How about basing primary school history education on the evolution of the material, of inventions, of progress? From the evolution of toilet paper will come a thousand other history lessons, touching on everything from economics to politics to religion. And those lessons will be remembered, because they will be answering questions that children (and adults) naturally have.
Imagine a new generation of young people with a working, practical knowledge of the history of progress… We’d better do more than imagine them, because we’re going to need them.
Sheryl Longin is the author of Dorian Greyhound: A Novel and co-screenwriter of the movie Dick.
The best class I ever had in HS was Senior Year Physics.
The class was taught as a history class, and we focused as much on who Newton and Galileo were as much as what they accomplished.
We not only talked about the fall of geocentrism, but by geocentrism was a big deal.
We talked about the theories that these revolutionary people displaced, as well as the ones they came up with.
Oh, and we duplicated a heck of a lot of experiments, using source material as the guide.
Imagine a new generation of young people with a working, practical knowledge of the history of progress…
You mean like Bill & Ted?
I highly recommend the works of Sir James Burke (Connections, et al).
If you want the history of technology, in all its messy, fascinating glory, that will tend to do it. Seeing how inventions occurred in the past also gives one a healthy respect for the power of innovation in the future.
I would happily, heartily recommend Daniel Boorstin’s The Discoverers, which traces the interlinked development of ideas.
When I was in grade school, I went along with the sadly lacking history classes, but at around the sixth grade I found out how really interesting history could be and just started reading non-class books about it. I still do this today, and I find that I know a lot more about history than most of the college students who study at my library, and I’m only a couple of years older than them. History should be INTERESTING to students, or they will quickly forget it.
The emphasis on Indians taught me zippo about actual Indians. It was mostly a lot of feel- good stuff that left me with the idea that they lived peacefully in harmony with nature until they got diseases and died. It’s hard to respect people that didn’t seem to do much to prevent their own demise, or accomplish much while they were around. ‘Living in Harmony with Nature’ is a PC synonym for primitive.
The reality is that they were pretty much like people everywhere. They invented all kinds of things, they had a big impact on their environment, they fought wars, and they certainly fought us. Once I read a lot of older history books, they became a lot more interesting. And I respect them more. It’s too bad all the interesting stuff was edited out in an attempt to make them look like saints.
Imagine a new generation of young people with a working, practical knowledge of the history of progress…
Alas, imagining is probably the best any of us shall be able to do for at least another generation. Both the academic history establishment and the academic teacher training and certification establishment are leftist totalitrianisms. Both uniformly take the Howard Zinn view that U.S.-style progress has been an unbroken string of disasters and atrocities. This bone-deep hostility to The American Project is doubtless the source of the pervasive and creepy fascination of these people with the marauding bands of homicidally inclined tribal barbarian aborigines that formerly blighted much of North America, as well as the mendacious crock of romantic fiction now peddled as “history” on their behalf. It also explains the equally obvious present-day soft spot the history and teacher training establishments possess for anti-American tribal barbarian psycopaths from other parts of the world. I fear the present generation of academic poseurs and usurpers are going to need to die before things much improve.
Some American history classes don’t even teach about the Wright Brothers anymore. It’s pathetic.
If you wait to be “taught History”, you will die ignorant. High School students at our local regional confiscatorium, top-rated in New Jersey (sigh), have never heard of the Battle of Hastings; or of the California Gold Rush (the 49ers are a football team); and believe that “Gone with the Wind” was made after the Civil War ended sometime in the 1920s.
Facts as such are not the issue (tell us how the Dow closed Friday: So what?). Rational assessments require context and perspective, inescapably wedded to a generational conflux of ideas.
How did the Fall of Constantinople to Suleiman the Magnificent in 1453 engender Luther’s Protestant Reformation in 1517, followed by a first Siege of Vienna (1529), the Battle of Lepanto (1573) and the Spanish Armada (1588)? Absent chronology, awareness of the Venetians’ “Last Crusade”, Gutenberg, Hapsburg dynasties in Austria and the Germanies fortified by Conquistadors’ treasure galleons, one might think New Worlds on the threshold of the 17th Century’s “Dutch Miracle”, Copernicus and Galileo et al. were so much happenstance… dream on.
The best contemporary overview of fundamental Western themes from 1450 through 1950 (printing through radio/TV) is Jacques Barzun’s “Dawn to Decadence” (c. 1996). If you graduate some fancy school without feeling ignorant and curious –i.e. never thereafter reading what is “not assigned”– you will descend to baffled ideologisms, buffeted by wave and tides. Be aware that we are creatures of our times, no more capable of composing 19th Century Grand Operas than of drafting 22nd Century monographs depicting Islam’s latest petro-dollar usurpations for the nihilist Wahabi frauds they are.
As Sargon says in “Owen’s Alligator” (a fable, yet in progress): “Certain schools maintain that words are all we have, so all we have are words… but words echo voices of the dead. How else bespeak Ideas? Here be dragons, in Terra Incognita on blank charts. Reality takes us all for fools.”
Great argument for home schooling.
The trouble with the “who invented the crapper?” model of teaching history is that it may be interestiung, but it is also worthless. History, ideally, explains how our world came to be; it explains the economic background to the Civil War; it places the War of Independence into the larger context of the British-French struggle.
But I do admit that the generation Xbox is probably more interested in scatological or prurient factoids.
Cheers,
Felix.
The questions your daughter asks are ones that can’t be answered by history. But the history that she wants is not and can not be taught in the classroom. For example, I cannot tell you who invented stairs, but I can suggest you visit Tsankawi Ruins near Los Alamos NM. The “Anasasi” village was perched on top of a butte (though everyone calls it a mesa). Their crops were in the valley below. Each morning the villagers would walk into the valley to work the crops and hunt, each evening they would return. This activity literally made a stairway. Not one developed purposely by man, but by the nature of this activity. Even today, we are forced to walk in their footsteps, even though we are much taller and have a larger stride. I am not sure stairs were invented at all, just noticed and developed.
History is best when visited. My eldest was intrigued by the Comberland Gap. So on a trip we took a hundred mile detour so she could see it, including learning about the gap in the Civil War, something we did not know.
To me it seems your daughter needs an anthropology course, as you can not have accurate history without a written language. Correct me if I am wrong, but I think the first history was the epic Gilgamesh, which cannot at all be trusted as a history, it is really an epic. This was written long after language was developed. And frankly I doubt there is a eureka I have invented toilet paper moment. Indeed if you visit Europe you can’t be entirely sure toilet paper has been invented.
I teach physics, history of astronomy, and history of physics at a small college in New England. And though a little bit of history is fine in a physics class, as a physics professor I have an obligation to make sure that my students are ready for follow up classes in physics and engineering. Too much history makes a student unprepared for mechanics.
It is in my history courses that these things should be discussed and expanded upon, and frankly there we can do more justice as we study science from Thales to today. It is in this context that we can firmly place Kepler, Descartes, and well, Hans Bathe.
On the other hand, though I know my dates etc, I do not require my students to remember dates, just context. That Lincoln was assasinated on April 14, is of little import, that he died just after Lee surrendered and before Johnston did is very important. Ti is very important that he died when the heavy lifting of reconstruction had yet started. I wonder how different this country would be if he had survived the war.
Can’t answer a lot of questions, but I note that yours from your daughter about as tough as the ones from mine (“Why is a bus named a bus, why not a jibby or a jabby?”)
but the toilet paper one is easy… and no, I won’t tell you why I looked it up in the first place.
http://nobodys-perfect.com/vtpm/ExhibitHall/Informational/tphistory.html
I’ve had similar thoughts for years, specifically regarding the teaching of science (I’m an engineer).
In my engineering program, most technical classes were taught without any context at all, historical or otherwise. We were taught the formulas first and foremost, and the concepts as an afterthought. It was only in my senior-level classes that I found myself making spontaneous connections between what I was taught in, say, a chemistry class, with what I was learning in an advanced materials science class or electronics lab.
My opinion parallels the author’s here — otherwise dry material can be made more interesting and (more important) taught more effectively by including historical background and a broader context…how it came to be known and how it relates to other knowledge.
I’m surprised that nobody here has criticized economics education. If there is one subject in need of (and wonderfully amenable to) improvement in how it’s taught, it’s economics. There is so much fascinating material out there (real-world case studies, broader economic histories, etc.) it’s hard to imagine why we still stick with the boring macro-micro, graph after graph after graph approach to intro-level classes. I learned (and retained) more about capitalism from reading “Atlas Shrugged” than from two honors-level economics classes in college, in which I can barely remember the word “capitalism” even being used.
Yeah, My kids spent two whole years learning about Indians in “history”. Like what symbols they used, how they made rattles, etc.
To quote him “In addition to that, throughout the entire elementary year I had to learn about Indians. Then in middle school it was Indians, Indians, Indians. In eight grade he had to read a book about Indians. All the people in these books are stupid. Even the Indians are prejudiced. That was “Light in the Forest”.
Also what with all the emotional female oriented reading? My son spent four months analyzing “To Kill a Mockingbird”. They spent endless boring hours over-analyzing the emotional content of the book. How did “so and so” feel about such and such. Even when how someone feels is open to debate the teacher wanted her interpretation not only expressed by herself but by the kids in the class. There was only one right answer and it had a certain political slant.
Both my boys want to read exciting boy oriented stuff. No wonder boys English skills are going down. Every once in a while it would be nice if a book wasn’t portraying such a negative image of people, particularly of white people.
My son says they did a school wide set presentations on Columbine, and he thinks they went entirely overboard on it.
It involved assemblies and multiple teachers doing presentations, and associated writing assignments of poems, and paintings, etc. On and on.
They were depicting Rachel Joyce Scott as some kind of prophet because on the back of her dresser she wrote some emotional stuff about dying. Her brother was brought in to speak about it. They were practically breaking out in prayer. We live about as far away from the place as you can get, so I don’t see the point.
He thinks the dresser drawing were entirely unrelated to the incident. She merely drew the outline of her hand as was emotionally dying or something. Then they used the incident for promoting a Christian storyline. Also a spin was that it was somehow related to bullying, when in fact these guys were just nut cases. He said he did his own research after this propaganda campaign. It would have been better if he had just been given an assignment to research it himself, instead of the indoctrination campaign.
BTW, he came in and I’ve been asking him questions, on the fly.
I remember the same kind of political injection into my English classes also. It sounds much worse now however.
I have a history degree, but am mostly a tech guy. Taught web design at a high school last year. Studied philosophy and history of science independently during college.
1. I believe it was the the Fatih who conquered Constantinople. Mehmed II
Let me know if I’m incorrect.
2. I was a sucky student a low level state school, so my experience with academic history may be different.
We didn’t learn any ideas. Just a bunch of irrelevant fact.
Teaching an applied discipline was a hoot. I taught bottom up skills that could immediately be applied to MySpace. My first assigned work was to open notepad and write a letter. Not to me, but to your best friend, or your dog, or the floor. Whatever YOU like.
History could be taught the same way. John Dewey could teach it that way.
Those questions are awesome! What was the first language? “Well, who do you think would have spoken the first langauge?” “Did you know that dogs understand humans better our closest cousins, the chimpanzees?” “Do you know it’s because dogs read our bodies, hands, and eyes?” “Can you guess what the first language might have been?” “Let’s look it up on the Internet!”
I think if I were teaching history, I would teach from present to past. Start with now, and work backwards. I would also want my students to discover their own history. Genealogy, interviews with grandparents, history of the city, of their house, any famous relatives? Any relatives fought in a war? In some cases you have to ask, which side?
But I’m no history teacher, though I’m sure you’re right, there are a million different ways to teach it.
David,
It wouldn’t be WNEC, would it? I may have taken PHYS 134 with you.
In college, I agree that the classes should be focused and rigorous, to prepare for what’s next. In HS, the physics class may be the last time most of the students are really exposed to that type of thinking. If it’s not interesting, they’ll forget everything the day after the exam.
Frankly, I think its upsetting that academics has been broken up into subjects to be studied in 45 minute periods, as if Math, History, Science, and English really are different topics.
I blame Horace Mann.
Buckminster Fuller
Even historians cannot agree what history is. But whatever it is, it isn’t knowing who invented stairs.
However, if your kid wants to know about that, buy her the works of Henry Petroski. There she will learn not only about how things came about (though not stairs), but how we know how they came about. She would love ‘The Pencil.’
Let’s get serious. A fourth-grader is not capable of asking, let alone understanding, a meaningful question about history. History is for grownups.
What we learn in school need not be memorable. Most of us, especially in lower levels, are not gathering information for future use. Rather, we are learning how to process information and use it to our advantage. Those of us with interest in history will spend time gathering historical information using the tools we learned in school. If we learned in school only what will be relevant in the future we would have to assume that the future is set and that people could know all we might ever need to know. This is simply not possible.
In school we should present simple facts to young minds and regulate their minds in the forms of critical thought, experimentation, and fine observation. Those with high apptitude in such activities should be rewarded and their successes should be touted.
Early schooling need not fill us with relevant facts. Rather we should be learning to discern between relevant and irrelevant information. Talented individuals will then seek information that is relevant to their interests. All this discussion about learning history, technology, ECT… Is a misguided discussion, not about education, but rather about which propoganda the above posters prefer.
I think that the history of events should be taught hand in hand with the history of technology and economic history. Kids need to understand that world events are driven by what technology is available and how it will be paid for (and vice versa). Otherwise world events look like they were decided upon at random– “Hey, we haven’t been at war with France lately, let’s go fight them!”– and inventions look like neat, useless stuff (“Who would bother inventing THAT?”).
Your daughter isn’t being taught history. She is playing a TRIVIA game. Apparently her teachers don’t know what history is and like so many teachers really don’t know ANYTHING.
By the way learning about Indian Tribes in the 4th grade? I’m afraid that was the beginning of the downgrading of history in our schools..in the 60s and 70s..
Our citizenry today just doesn’t know much about history or how we as a people got to where we are.
I’m reminded of a quote from Jane Jacobs’ Dark Age Ahead:
That appears to be what we’re doing with Western Civilization – forgetting even what it is we’ve lost.
I hear you load and clear. I am a 43 year old looking for my first teaching job in Social Studies. All of my long term assignments have garnered me many positive comments from students and parents. Being told that a parent’s child actually enjoys History, when they never did before is exciting. The sad part, I can’t figure out why nobody has hired me yet. I get results, students to pay attention, and actually retain information after they leave a classroom beyond the next test. I have witnessed so many teachers that frame their class around memorizing names, dates, places and people. Not cause and effect, which is how Social Studies should be learned.
Read a book called ‘Lies My Teacher Told Me,’ and you will get a great understanding about why schools are the way they are. Administrators don’t want students to take home information ad have their parents disagree, that will make them call the school, lets stay on bland things that will not make any waves, thats safe. Geeze! It really is frustrating.
Eric
I agree that history is very important. It is the story of the choices man has made and their consequences. No other subject shows the actual results of human choices in progress, philosophy, politics, and technology. That is why I homeschool. My daughter attends a history teleconference for homeschoolers and people who understand they need to supplement their children’s public school, and often times private school, education. You can hire tutors to correct poor teaching in english and math, and now history too. The website is http://www.historyatourhouse.com/main/index.html
The kids need the whole story. Talking about who invented stairs gets you nothing but a disconnected jumble of facts, not a cohesive story of mankind. Sparking some temporary interest is how education ended up the mish-mash it is today. Children need a cohesive story that actually teaches them useful information. That keeps them motivated and interested.
If you want to learn useful history, DO something. Find a re-enactor’s group and join, and learn the things you need to know to fit in. Society for Creative Anachronism, Civil War, Revolutionary War, buckskinners – they all need to learn a whole corpus of stuff about their particular period and interest.
I was in the SCA. I learned to cook medieval food, to sew medieval clothing, to do some blacksmithing, to make some of the musical instruments of the day and play them. And you would positively enjoy hearing Henry VIII or Edward II treated as gossip instead of battles.
I have friends who do circa 1850 – they’re re-enactors at Fort Snelling. He’s become a blacksmith, and she is a good enough seamstress that she’s earning much of the family income doing 1850s clothing.
And best of all, most the time you don’t have to sit down, shut up, and listen. Except when the King is speaking, of course, but that’s a history lesson too.
I have similar feelings of, “what’s it all mean” when I read my kids history books. Its like they leeched all the meaning out of them and everything is a succession of platitudes and unrelated facts.
I blame interest group politics and books written by committees. There isn’t a “have it make sense” interest group, so all the other groups get satisfied and meaning goes by the wayside. Also, my daughter’s high school history book has nine authors.
I send my kids to the library to learn history.
To Eric,
It’s my understanding that social studies positions are reserved for coaching staff. In fact, here in Tennessee, no one gets hired until all the coaching positions are filled, then they hire teachers for any remaining positions.
-David Prince
As an eight year homeschooling mom of three, we highly recommend “The Story of the World” from Peacehill Press. It is designed for elementary grades, but we all find it facinating. It has made history addicts out of the whole family. I would recommend it to any family who wants to enhance their child’s public/private education. (Make sure to get the activity book that goes with each volume. It’s loaded with maps, coloring pages, crafts, questions, and additional reading sources for each chapter.)
Hi – building on what Dr. Ellen said at 5:21 yesterday, I’m doing something to re-teach myself history: a project evaluating each of the presidents in order that they served. I am most interested in their successes and failures in achieving their goals, how they used executive authority, how much they expanded executive authority, how they were elected president and why, and whether they dealt with the problems before them or passed them to the next man in line.
I’m up to Buchanan, and have learned, and more importantly, retained, much more than I learned in grade shcool, high school and college.
Here’s my site, if you’re interested:
http://thepresidentsatbigmo.blogspot.com/
Owen, Why do you blame the Educator, Horace Mann? I am currious, having been brought up in
the midwest and educated between 1938 through 1949, with his system in force. We had
classes from 8:50 to 3:55 and were offered so
many after school programs, very few were on the street, Our teachers worked together to connect information of history , music, math, etc.
Creative writing was a big part of relating what we as individuals were learning, Social Studies was a class that no one wanted to miss, even those in sports wanted to attend, learning about the backgrounds of fellow students & respecing their cultures. I for one loved the system he brought to education for all.
By the way, My school was named Horace Mann and started at Kindergarten “age 5-12th”, then had another building offering evening classes similar to today’s Junior College. It was free except to buy your book’s,
and helped educate even those whom had not had a chance in past years for an education. He was responsible for all this. Again, this is how he helped advance educational opportunities in my time.
A few years ago there was a series on public TV about an English family that chose to live
in a 19th century house for a few months, using nothing but 19th century transportation, kitchen appliances, toiletries, and so on.
They found it hard going, to say the least, doing without air conditioning, central heating, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, electric light, and so on.
Much of the series (which ran, I think, about six hour-long episodes) was devoted to the mother, who studied the history of the women’s rights movement and spent a lot of time trying to playact a 19th century suffragette. This act got dull real fast, not because of the politics but because she had a 20th century attitude of: “I’m a feminist, why weren’t those women feminists?” She seemed to feel that she was a feminist solely because she was smarter and more courageous than the women of that time.
During the course of the series the family hired a maid to do the laundry, clean the house, and to perform other menial tasks around the house (they were, by 19th century standards, a middle-class family, and could afford a maid). After a couple of days of such work she said that cleaning up was a much harder job than she was used to, being without a vacuum cleaner, wood polish, a clothes washer and dryer and other modern devices. She said she thought the feminist movement was only possible because women nowadays don’t have to spend eight or ten hours every day cleaning up, and so they can get a job, go to college, get involved in politics, whatever. She spoke maybe a few minutes, and yet her analysis (and her complaints about the simple drudgery of 19th century work) was more valuable than anything else in the series. (I had known vaguely of a connection between labor-saving devices and modern politics, but she spelled it out in the most concrete terms.)
It is extremely valuable to understand how everyday things work, because they determine what is possible and what is visionary in the “big things” in life.
(E.g. Knowing how the cotton gin works, and how people picked cotton before it was invented, explains volumes about the economics and politics of slavery, and why it became so difficult to get rid of; you can trace a direct line of events from the invention of the gin to the attack on Fort Sumter.)
As a kid I liked to see the connections between things, and knowing those connections seemed to ground the great events of history in the real world. Books that can combine an analysis of the science and technology underlying human activities, like Cronon’s “Nature’s Metropolis”, McNeill’s “Plagues and Peoples”, or Keegan’s “The History of Warfare” are the sort of books that would be valuable to our students; anyone reading this can come up with their own. But, do our present day teachers know enough about science and technology to understand what they’re teaching?
All thier tell kids in schools these days are lies and half-truths i mean some must thing the three Rs is REDUCE REUSE RECYCLE its no wonder johnny cant read when all this PC poppycock is being shoved in his head
ThadStevens:
There are a whole series of these shows, reenacted thru time, from pre-history circa Stonehenge thru the American West and Britain during WWII. By and large they are a hoot, since the participants seem to lack any real knowledge of what they were getting into. I especially liked the one about Plymouth Colony – there was a feminist there too – I think she dropped out a few hours into the program, because she never got to talk!
I suggest that history should be romanticised again. Coming out of high school, I learned little if anything about history. The fact that every teacher with a BA or MA wanted to provide their own shibboleth turned me off. I had only one decent teacher for history, and I can’t recall anything useful from it because it was taught at the slowest common denominator.
I am now an amateur history nut, thanks to a latent love for the subject and the opportunity to research a romantic subject like the highland scots of the 1500s. That got me into researching the renaissance, the wars of religion, and from there bronze age history and finally the civil war. But it started with a subject shrouded in romantic appeal.
Check out “Connections” by Edmund Burke (available on Amazon). It is a series showing the history of technological progress, where each solution to a problem leads to the next problem/solution set. Wonderfully done.
I took a series of four college courses on “History of Art,” “History of Science,” History of Literature,” and “History of Philosophy.” The subjects were taught in a great books format and in chronological order. I learned quite a bit about both what happened and, usually, why it happened. I also learned to spot anachronisms such as Romans with stirups or Egyptian chatiots with horse collars.
I believe it is relativism which has killed history, the abolishing of a basis with which to study and understand it. As Eric above says, history is all about cause and effect, exactly what is lacking and what makes history so uninteresting to most students.
When my oldest son was eight years old, we were driving to our ski place. He suddenly asked me, “Dad, what is the largest thing in the universe.” Now I have a Ph.D. in physics, and although I am in the wrong field I was about to attempt an answer, when he added, “Oh yeah, and why is there evil in the world.” Well, try to be a little easy on the old man. He now attends Princeton…and I’m waiting for him to let me know the answers.
It’s hard to go wrong at any age from about eight or so on up, with “A Little History of The World” by E.H. Gombrich. Narrative, chronological, delightful, and it makes world history make sense.
And I’ll second “Connections” on DVD, especially the first series. Now if only Steve Allen’s “Meeting of Minds” was available on DVD…