May. 24, 2007 - The Invention of Writing

Writing about the invention of writing for a 6-9 year-old audience seemed like a major challenge, and yet necessary. Given the chance most children are interested in codes and alphabets and secret writing. The challenge (which I hope I rose to) was writing about the first ideographic and syllabic writing systems in a way that would be interesting and accessible to a young reader.

As you read about the people who lived in Çatalhöyük and Jericho, you may have wished that you knew more about what they thought and did and what stories they told each other before going to bed at night. Sadly, we will never know, because when those ancient towns were built writing had not yet been invented. People did not have any way to record their thoughts and stories for others to read many hundreds or thousands of years later.

Although we are glad that the ancients invented writing because it allows us to read their stories and histories, that is not why writing was first invented . Most of the earliest pieces of writing we have found are not stories; they are tax records.

In the growing cities of Mesopotamia and Egypt (which we will read about in a few more chapters) kings and their servants needed to keep track of who owed them grain and livestock and money. Perhaps writing began with the king's servants drawing little pictures to help them remember who had given the king how much of what, and how much was still owed. However it happened, many of the baked clay tablets that archeologists have dug up in the cities of ancient Mesopotamia are lists which simply record things like, "Two hundred baskets of wheat, three hundred baskets of barley, forty cattle, twenty camels, one hundred goats," and so on....

Read the rest of The Development of Writing.

May. 9, 2007 - The First Cities

Story 2 in the Elementary program is about the rise of the first cities:

It wasn’t only with the invention of farming that people began to want to stay in one place. Even tens of thousands of years ago, when people lived only by hunting and gathering, some of the caves and villages they lived in show signs of having been inhabited for many generations. But in those days, settlements were always very small. If too many people lived in one place, it became hard to gather and hunt enough food to feed everybody, and so the group would divide and some people would go looking for new land.

As people started to keep herds of sheep, goats and cattle, and raise crops of wheat, barley and lentils, it became possible for them to live in larger and larger groups. Instead of being too many mouths to feed, more neighbors meant more people to help work in the fields and watch over the animals.

Around the eastern Mediterranean in the areas where farming was invented, people began to build villages with houses made of mud bricks.

One of the largest of these early villages is called Çatalhöyük [cha-tal-hu-yuk] and stood in what is now central Turkey. People lived in Çatalhöyük for nearly two thousand years, from 7,400 to 5,700 B.C. It was probably the largest single settlement in the world at the time, with as many as 10,000 people living there.

Çatalhöyük was a very different sort of place from the cities that we are used to. The houses were built of wood and plaster, with flat roofs, and they were built so close together that there were no roads at all between them. The houses had no windows, and people got in and out through an opening in the roof with a ladder that led down into the main room. People got around the city by walking from rooftop to rooftop, and they used the space in between the houses for dumping their garbage....

Read the rest here.

May. 4, 2007 - The Neolithic and the Invention of Farming

The first actual story is about the invention of farming which marked the beginning of the Neolithic:

All over the world and all through history, humans have always made tools in order to try to make their work easier. The earliest people made much simpler tools than the ones that you might use today. Still, when archeologists study the places where the earliest humans lived, they find stones that appear to have been used as hammers and scrapers and grinders. Because these earliest people only knew how to make tools out of stone, not metal like so many of the tools we use today, we call this earliest period the “stone age”.

Not all their tools were made of stone. People in the stone age also made tools from wood and bone and many other natural materials they found around them. However, stone tools were the strongest tools they had, and they are the easiest for us to find and study since stone is so durable.

The very oldest stone tools that we have found were made by early humans around two million years ago. From that time down until about 10,000 years ago stretched the period archeologists call the Paleolithic [pey-lee-uh-lith-ik] or the “old stone age”.

During the Paleolithic, people lived as hunters and gatherers, that is, they lived by eating what animals they could kill and what wild fruits, nuts, vegetables and grains they could find. You can imagine, this must have been a lot of work. Imagine if your parents had to find all the food for your family by looking for wild plants and animals. (You might have had to spend a lot of your time helping them prepare meat to cook or gathering nuts and vegetables to eat.) It was very important for Paleolithic people to live in areas where there was plenty of food to be found. If food became scarce, they had to pack up and move to another place in search of food.

People learned to make better and better stone tools during the course of the Paleolithic. Some people lived in caves, and decorated the walls with pictures of people, animals, hunting, and colorful designs. They also made little sculptures carved from bone, wood or stone. But they always had to keep moving in order to stay where there was plenty of food.

Then between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago something changed: people started planting seeds of the grains and vegetables they ate. Instead of having to search for and gather food, they grew crops near their homes. This may seem like a simple idea, but it was a very big change for people to go from searching for all their food to clearing fields and planting crops. It was difficult too. If there was not enough rain, the crops would not grow, and there would be nothing to eat....

Click here to read the rest.

May. 3, 2007 - What Is History

The introduction to the first volume of the Elementary Program is an essay on "What Is History?":

This is a book about history. There are many kinds of histories you might hear about. Perhaps your grandparents have told you about the history of your family. And perhaps you have read books about the history of our planet full of dinosaurs and giant insects and woolly mammoths. Or perhaps you have read about the history of our galaxy and our solar system.

Sometimes people use the word “history” simply to mean “a story about things that happened in the past”. However, a history book such at this one usually talks about only those people and places which we can find out about by reading the stories people wrote about themselves, and digging up the houses they lived in and the tools they used.

For more recent events, this can be very easy. For instance, many of the men who went on the moon as part of the Apollo Program are still alive, and can tell us about what they saw and did. However, events that took place long ago can be much more difficult to find out about, because very few stories about them were written down to reach us hundreds or thousands of years later, and even the houses and cities that people lived in long ago have sometimes left very few remains.

This book is about the history of what we call Western Civilization, by which we mean the peoples who have lived in Europe and America over the last 6000 years or so.

Six thousand years may seem like a very long time to you and me, but scientists tell us that humans not so different from us have been living in Europe for five or ten times that long. However, it was only about four thousand years before the birth of Christ that people began to gather together and live in large cities. About that same time, people invented writing so that they could keep records of what they did and what they owned....

The rest of the introductory essay can be read here.

May. 3, 2007 - Introducing Myself and the Humanities Program

My wife and I are those increasingly common creatures, second generation homeschoolers.  We were both homeschooled from the fifth grade or so on, and we are now getting started on homeschooling our three daughters.

One of the cornerstones of my parents homeschooling efforts (and one that I had known from the beginning I would want to immitate with my own children) was their development of the Humanities Program, a four year classical/great books program which covered history, literature and philosophy during our high school years.  This was well before The Well Trained Mind or Designing Your Own Classical Curriculum existed, though my parents being very like me, I suspect that they would have developed their own program even if they had.

For some time I'd been wanting to pull together all the different versions of the Humanities Program (it was revised with each of us kids that went through it) and make it available to other homeschoolers.  However, with my oldest only just starting to do K -1st level work, it was clearly a while before the original Humanities Program would be at all applicable to my own family.

So in the end, two programs were born.  The High School Humanities Program is a revised version of the program which I and my two siblings used in high school.  As we go along, we're trying to reconcile the different version, replace out of print editions with newer ones, and provide a brief summary of each work with suggestions as to which editions are most useful.  We've also provided a general set of scheduling advice, for those who would prefer guidance on how to implement the program.  So far the lists are up for the first two yeas, and we're working through the first year adding notes on each work and scheduling suggestions.

The Elementary Humanities Program was designed with my own daughters' more immediate needs in mind.  I had been searching for a "great stories" sort of book or series which told about famous events, people, myths and literature at a good read-aloud level for children somewhere between 6 and 10.  However, although I could find plenty of brightly illustrated childrens books on history, few combined history and literature in the way I wanted.  And many did not make very good read alouds, because rather than having a single story they had lots and lots of separate notes and captions.  So I decided to write my own, in collaboration with other willing writers, and taking advantage of the fact that my brother (and thus fellow graduate of the humanities program) was wanting to produce some portfolio work to show off his illustration work. 

The lists of story topics for four volumes covering Western History from the ancient world to the present are posted, though the latter ones are pretty rough, and the stories themselves are going up more-or-less chonrologically at the rate of 1-3 a week.

Once at least one volume is complete with illustrations, we will make a hard copy version available to order in addition to the electronic version available on the web.

Having done a lot of work with open source software of the last few years, I wanted to experiment with developing both programs in a completely open environment, with the full text available for free on the web and comments open for readers to provide feedback.  As new pieces go up, I will be consistently linking to them and posting excepts here.  We'd all be very grateful for any and all feedback on both programs as we work on making them available.