History in HLS curriculum

[Anonymous]

I've been looking at the HLS course catalog and have a question about how history is handled. (I'm a homeschooler who is trying to streamline my own curriculum choices.)

I see that ancient history is studied very thoroughly in conjunction with Latin and in CCS, and that Famous Men of the Middle Ages and some medieval literature are covered in 5th grade. American history, geography, and civics are also covered over a long stretch. Where does the Renaissance/Reformation period fit in? Do students ever do a systematic overview of history and/or literature, such as a Great Books sequence, to get the "flow" of history and ideas? Is there any attempt to integrate non-Western history into the sequence? Are the Middle Ages revisited at any point?

I very much want to focus on Latin, Greek, and CCS with my dc, but I studied history piecemeal in public school and it took me until graduate school to get the "big picture." ops: So I'm leaning toward the chronological approach suggested by TWTM, but am worried about the amount of time it will take to do all these subjects justice.

Any thoughts or advice from HLS faculty or other homeschooling parents would be much appreciated.

Andrew

[martin]

History Sequence

Andrew,

We will be addressing our history sequence in great detail in our next catalog coming next January, but let me let you in on a few highlights.

First, our programs will be broken up into three general areas: Classical Studies, English Studies and American/Modern Studies. They are chronological in the sense that Classical Studies comes before English Studies which comes before American/Modern Studies.

We have tried to integrate our cultural programs within these three broad natural categories. There are certain broad characteristics that distinguish classical thought and culture, and certain other characteristics that mark out medieval/English culture and modern/American culture. So we have integrated history, geography, literature, and language into these three programs.

Grouping them this way seemed to us to give the best balance between chronology, integration and the natural cultural demarcations that distinguish these ways of living and looking at the world.

In this way, we felt that we could address the problem of students only getting a "piecemeal" view of history, while at the same time taking into account the very real differences between the three periods of history--ancient, medieval and modern.

We certainly don't pretend to have the ultimate answer to the problem of studying history. There are a number of great ways to study history, and we like think our way is one of them. Susan Wise Bauer's more straight chronological approach is another excellent choice.

The rule of thumb here is like that we recommend for, for example, spelling: find a good way and stick with it.

Martin

[Anonymous]

Thank you, Martin! That does help, and I'll look forward to next year's catalogue, too. Luckily my dd is still young, so I have some time to sort this all out.

-Andrew