ABSTRACT
I started teaching a course called World History (632–2000) at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn in 2001, after—not before—I was recommended to serve on the first Advanced Placement World History Test Development Committee. The titles of my courses for the previous four years had been Ancient History (sixth grade), Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century World History (ninth grade), Modern European Cultural History, 1350–1998, alternating with Economics 101 (eleventh and twelfth grades), Twentieth-Century Ideas, and Debate (both high school seminars). My books were on French Christian thought in the Enlightenment, modernism in the West from 1872 to 1913, and the republican political tradition from the prophet Samuel in the Bible to Senator Sam Ervin. When Larry Beaber, one of the two staffers for the Educational Testing Service World History development committee, called me up to say the committee was considering me, he said, “We're not sure you teach world history,” to which I replied, “Actually, I think I've been teaching it for over thirty years.” I meant it. For me, the whole point of teaching history has been to introduce young people to the disorienting but maturing and potentially exhilarating truth that they are not alone in the universe. That project makes world history the most important course in the curriculum, whether you teach it in one year or seven. In 1974 when Saint Ann's was still new, our history department set up a four-year chronological world history curriculum: ancient history in sixth grade, medieval history in seventh, early modern history in eighth, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century world history in ninth grade, followed by électives for juniors and seniors that cover smaller parts of the same ground more intensively. And I have tried to make every class period and assignment count toward that goal of reducing natural self-regard by passing on at least one unexpected comparison of their world with the larger one and at least one counterintuitive truth.
