Why School Is Killing Your Child’s Passion For History (And What You Can Do)
Last Tuesday, I was pulling chocolate chip cookies out of the oven when my 13-year-old Javi dropped his backpack by the kitchen table and groaned so loud it made the cookie sheet rattle. I wiped flour off my hands and leaned over to see what had him upset. He flipped open his history workbook to a page covered in blank lines, all labeled for dates of 12 different 19th century train route expansions. “My school is killing my passion for history,” he said, dropping his pencil on the table. “I used to care about this stuff. Now I just don’t anymore.”
I knew exactly what he meant. Two years ago, Javi came home from a trip to the state natural history museum obsessed with the Roman Empire. He spent his allowance on plastic legionnaire figurines, binged 45-minute documentaries on his tablet every weekend, and badgered our local librarian for every kids’ book about gladiators they had. He could rattle off why Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon better than he could recite his times tables. But this year, in 8th grade, history is all memorization and map drills and multiple choice tests that count for 60% of his grade. There’s no time to talk about what people ate, or how they argued with their neighbors, or why a random 2000 year old debate about taxes still matters today. All they ask is that you remember the date.
I sat down with him and split a warm cookie, and I didn’t rush to give him a pep talk or email his teacher to complain. I’ve volunteered in our district’s social studies department for three years, so I know most teachers aren’t purposefully sucking the fun out of the subject. They’re required to cover 200 years of content in a single school year, they have to get every kid ready for the end-of-year standardized test, and they have 28 kids in a class with 50 minutes a period. There’s no time to go down a 20 minute rabbit hole about medieval jobs just because one kid thinks it’s cool. The system’s built to prioritize facts over curiosity, not because teachers don’t care, but because that’s what they’re told to do.
That doesn’t mean we have to just sit back and let that passion fizzle out, though. We tried a few small things that have worked for us, none of which take hours of planning or cost extra money. First, we started a weekly 45-minute “history rabbit hole night” every Friday, right after dinner. No rules, no grades, no notes to take. Javi picks whatever random tiny part of history he’s curious about that wasn’t covered in class, and we mess around with it. Last month he picked “what pets did people have in ancient Egypt.” We looked at photos of mummified cats from the British Museum’s website, watched a short video of an archaeologist talking about why some cats were mummified and some weren’t, and made a silly list of what our own cats would look like if they were mummified (we decided they’d probably be buried with their favorite crinkle toy mouse). It just gives Javi space to be curious about history again, without the pressure of remembering anything for a test.
Another thing I started doing that takes almost no effort: if he’s complaining about a boring history homework assignment, we take a 10 minute “side tangent” break before he starts working. Last week he had to match 10 founding fathers to their political roles. Before he started, I pulled up my phone and we read the silly letter John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail complaining that his hotel bed was too lumpy during the Continental Congress. It took 10 minutes, and it reminded Javi that these weren’t just names on a worksheet—they were real people who got annoyed by bad beds just like we do. He said it made the whole worksheet feel less like a pointless chore after that.
A couple weeks after Javi first complained, I did email his teacher, but I didn’t ask her to change the whole curriculum or give him special treatment. I just sent a short note explaining that Javi loves history outside of class, and he’s been feeling burnt out from all the memorization. I asked if it would be okay if on his tests, he could add one short extra note next to each answer about a fun fact he knows about that person or event, if he wanted to. It wouldn’t add anything to her grading, and it wouldn’t change his score. She wrote back the same day saying that sounded great, she’d love that. On his last test, Javi wrote next to Alexander Hamilton that he died in a duel because he didn’t believe in shooting to kill, which is something he picked up from a rabbit hole night. His teacher wrote back “cool fact” at the end, and Javi taped the test to the fridge.
It’s not a perfect fix. Javi still complains about history class at least once a week. He forgot to study for a map quiz last month and got a C+, and he slammed his workbook down just like he did that Tuesday with the cookies. We still have rabbit hole nights, though. Last weekend he found a collection of handwritten letters from local 13-year-olds who lived through the 1918 flu pandemic at our town’s historical society, and he spent three hours on Saturday reading through them and telling me all about what school was like for them back then. That passion isn’t dead—it just doesn’t live in his school workbook right now. I don’t know if it’ll ever go back to being fun in the classroom, but for now, that’s okay. We’re keeping it alive in the small bits of time we have at home, and that’s enough for right now.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why School Is Killing Your Child’s Passion For History (And What You Can Do)