“A great many people may have died due the lack of useful knowledge that we get from history education,“ writes Mike Maxwell in his new book, “Future-Focused History Teaching: Restoring the Power of Historical Learning.”
Maxwell, who taught history at Mancos High School for a dozen years, says he discovered “the awesome power of history” as a young soldier in Vietnam.
“I picked up three history books and read about a 1,000-year-long pattern of tenacious Vietnamese resistance to foreign invaders,” he said in a press release.
“I concluded that the American war effort was no more likely to succeed than previous invasions of Vietnam, and history proved me right,” he said.
But when Maxwell became a history teacher, he was painfully aware that his teaching lacked the power of history.
“Like other history teachers, I spent most of my time teaching students about one-time events from the past that had little or no relevance to the lives my students would live in the present and future.”
When he left teaching, Maxwell gave himself a new job: to find out how history education could be made more useful to students and society.
The result of his seven-year investigation is future-focused history, “the commonsense idea that knowledge from the past can inform judgment in the future.”
Maxwell’s book identifies five basic principles of history education, a coherent purpose to guide instruction, four kinds of historical knowledge relevant to the future, and essential cognitive learning strategies.
The book has received endorsements from nationally prominent educators including David Perkins, professor emeritus at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Sam Wineburg, director of the History Education Group at Stanford University.
While Maxwell was completing work on “Future-Focused History Teaching,” he decided to publish a second book, “The Student’s Friend Concise World History.” Maxwell developed “Student’s Friend” for use in his classroom, and he has been making it available free to teachers over the internet since 2001. It is now available in book form for the first time.
Maxwell says “Student’s Friend” is designed to be consistent with findings from cognitive science that call for teaching the most important principles and concepts of a school subject, rather than covering large quantities of factual detail that can interfere with effective student understanding and that are likely to be forgotten shortly after the exam is over.
Maxwell’s books are available from local libraries and bookstores and from national retailers including Amazon.