Chapter 9: Teaching History and Social Studies to Young Children

Are children in the primary grades capable of learning history and understanding the past in ways that will make their lives more meaningful in the present? A small but important body of research conducted for purposes of answering this question has focused on the nature and significance of relationships between children’s developing sense of time and their ability to engage in historical reasoning. Underlying this research is the belief that: “Without a strong sense of chronology—of when events occurred and in what temporal order—it is impossible for students to examine relations among them or to explain historical causality” (NCHS, 1994, p. 18). The members of any culture, however, have different ways of making temporal distinctions and using time. For example, the Nuer, a pastoral people residing in the Southern Sudan, recognized and lived by two different but related systems of time. One system reflected important ecological cycles that signaled when it was time to move from villages to camps whereas the other was used for purposes of reckoning kinship relations within Nuer social structure: “Both refer to successions of events which are of sufficient interest to the community for them to be noted and related to each other conceptually” (Evans-Pritchard, 1940, p. 94). In many industrialized societies time is viewed as a limited resource and valuable commodity used to achieve specific purposes and therefore “we understand and experience time as a kind of thing that can be spent, wasted, budgeted, invested wisely or poorly, saved, or squandered” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 8).