Learning from the past

In a recent letter to the editor, Sheryl Bradshaw asked two questions about her child's social studies class: "Why?" and "How do we know?"

As someone who works with preservice social studies teachers, these are questions that I constantly ask my students. We all invest in public schools, so it is reasonable to expect that taxpaying community members will sometimes ask schools to justify their actions, and I want my students to be prepared to do so.

While I do not speak for the school where Ms. Bradshaw's child attends, I can offer some potential reasons for studying the ancient Middle East. One goal of social studies is to examine the nature of the human condition, to note both differences and similarities between groups of people. For example, despite geographical separation, societies around the globe developed -- among other things -- sophisticated agricultural systems, forms of writing and complex religious and governmental institutions. These traits all seem commonplace in today's world, but that was not always the case. In order to get a sense of how these remarkable human accomplishments may have developed, we often have students study some of the places in which we believed they developed first, such as Mesopotamia.

Another reason for studying these ancient civilizations is that many societal traits that developed thousands of years ago continue to influence the modern world.

Understanding a society's past can help us to interact more effectively with that society in the present. Potentially, we might learn a great deal about the people of modern Iraq by studying the stories they tell or the ways in which their ancestors responded to the challenges of climate or war.

Both of these goals, however, require reliable information, so Ms. Bradshaw's question of "How do we know?" is an essential one. Given that we often have trouble remembering events in our own lives, it may seem counterintuitive to believe that reliable information actually exists about events that happened thousands of years ago. To be sure, whatever conclusions we draw about so distant a past must be tentative, but we do have some pretty good data with which to work. For example, there are a few written records that survive from the time, and historians have analyzed them extensively. Also important are the artifacts left by ancient people and interpreted by archaeologists. By subjecting objects -- from buildings to bowls to garbage dumps -- to rigorous disciplinary guidelines, these scholars have been able to draw some fascinating conclusions.

None of these answers, however, are "common sense." Few of us are likely to use knowledge of the ancient past in our everyday lives or to need to know how historians or archaeologists create that knowledge. Because we may not use it often, it might not occur to us that studying the ancient history of Mesopotamia or India could provide us with valuable information about our world and ourselves, which is why it is essential that we keep asking the kinds of questions asked by Ms. Bradshaw.

Daryl Fridley is the coordinator of the Social Studies Education Program at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau.