History as the Human Story: Teaching Students to Think, Question, and Live Wisely

History is the human story, a way of seeing the world and our place in it.

In this episode of The Brighter Side of Education, Dr. Lisa Hassler welcomes back historian and Associate Professor Dr. Christopher Berg for a thoughtful conversation about the purpose of history education, how it has changed over time, and why it remains essential in today’s classrooms.

Drawing from his work in Why Study History?, History and the Public Good, and “My Friend! You and I Have Passed Our Lives in Serious Times,” Dr. Berg explores student perceptions of the importance of learning history, including how students view textbook credibility and the relevance of history in their own lives.

Together, Lisa and Chris discuss why people turn to history during serious times, how historical thinking helps students evaluate evidence and multiple perspectives, and why these habits of mind are especially important in an age shaped by social media and AI.

Dr. Berg also shares powerful examples from his own life and teaching, including the teacher who changed his view of history, the student whose Navy experience helped her see women’s contributions in history differently, and classroom strategies that help students question textbook narratives, compare sources, and develop healthy skepticism.

This episode invites educators to help students see history not just as a timeline of events, but as a way to develop judgment, perspective, intellectual humility, and wisdom for living thoughtfully in the world.

Check out Dr. Berg's book, The Palgrave Handbook of History and Social Studies Education. 

Dr. Berg's teacher recommendation: History Lessons: How Textbooks From Around the World Portray U.S. History

Visit the American Historical Association. 

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Head to the show notes to find if this episode is CPD eligible and details on how to claim your CPD certification!

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Transcript

Why History Still Matters

Dr. Lisa Hassler 0:19

History is often taught as a record of the past, names, dates, events, and chapters to cover before the next test. But for many students, this can make history feel not only disconnected from their own lives, but also one of the least engaging subjects in school. Add to that the biased or incomplete text used in many classrooms, and it leaves many students asking a fair question, why study history at all? Today, we explore how history can be more than just memorization. It can become a way for students to think, make meaning, and live more wisely in the world. Welcome to the brighter side of education, research, innovation, and resources. I'm your host, Dr. Lisa Hassler, here to enlighten and brighten the classrooms in America through focused conversation on important topics in education. In each episode, I discuss problems we as teachers and parents are facing and what people are doing in their communities to fix it. What are the variables? And how can we duplicate it to maximize student outcomes? Today's conversation centers on the role of history education, its purpose in schools, and its relevance in our lives. Gordon Wood remarked that knowledge of the past can have a profound effect on our consciousness and on our sense of ourselves. And while it may not teach us particular lessons, it does tell us how to live in the world. That distinction matters. History may not hand students simple answers, but it can help them develop judgment, perspective, and a deeper understanding of the human experience. More history teachers today are attending to historical thinking rather than exclusively teaching content. Historian and associate professor Dr. Christopher Berg wrote about these ideas in his article, History and the Public Good, American Historical Association, Presidential Addresses, and the Evolving Understanding of History Education. His takeaway is powerful. History at its best is an interactive communal activity that facilitates reflection on what it means to be human in place and time. At its worst, it's an isolated and exclusive activity participated in by only a few. Three years ago, Dr. Berg joined us to discuss why study history. And today he returns to continue that conversation through several connected works, including his recent article, My Friend, You and I Have Passed Our Lives in Serious Times, and his book, The Palgrave Handbook of History and Social Studies Education. Welcome to the brighter side of education again. Chris, it is wonderful to have you back on after three years. My gosh, it's been three years.

Dr. Christopher Berg 3:06

It has, it's just the time goes, and I appreciate you having me back.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 3:09

Yeah, well, you've done some incredible recent work that I would love to discuss and uh bring our listeners into the loop as to all the different places that you've been reaching into academia. When you joined me three years ago, we discussed your article, Why Study History, an examination of undergraduate students' notions and perceptions about history. And one idea that stayed with me from that conversation was that many students questioned the value of history, especially when they did not immediately see how it connected to their own lives or their future goals. So since then, you've continued to explore this purpose of history education through several works. What keeps pulling you back to that question? Why study history? And do you think that question means something different now than when it did when you first began studying it?

Dr. Christopher Berg 3:57

I think this research question has been with me for some time and it's evolved in different ways in different contexts. But I think the idea about it probably goes back to the summer before my senior year and a visit from my grandfather. Oftentimes he would have me come out to the car and take out all the luggage and everything. He says, Grab

A Grandfather Sparks Historical Imagination

Dr. Christopher Berg 4:16

that grocery bag over there, too. So I grabbed it and I looked inside and I see all these historical fiction books that he was just known for reading. And he'd put them on the side of the couch where he would take his position and he would just sit there for six, eight hours at a time. I would just kind of leave him alone. Then before he would leave, he said, I want you to look at these books. And I looked at him and he said, These are for you. And these are the thick books with the little tiny print. You know, I said, Grandpa, I'm not much of a reader. And he says, There's a reason why I read as much as I do. He said, Here, if I'm going to tell you to read one and start with one, it would be this one. That changed my life. Up until that point, the historical imagination really opened up my mind, that idea of being able to transport yourself somewhere else. And he was always completely absorbed by it. I became two. And it really set the trajectory for me to go forward. And when I think about why something like history is important and why we should study history and why we keep coming back to that question, especially today, because every generation, during every turning point, had a different response in some way, even though the kind of the core idea was similar. I think it's that every generation has to find its own answer. And that can change with time. Every generation, from the 1920s and 30s up to the current, is often prompted by a societal shift or a turning point. And it's important for us to be able to meet that. And it shows you how relevant history still can be if we take advantage of that opportunity.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 5:38

In history and the public good, you trace how American historical association presidents addressed history and education in our society. I really loved this piece. What does this evolution tell us about how historians' views of history, education, have changed over time?

Dr. Christopher Berg 5:55

I think the way to look at it,

History Education During Upheaval

Dr. Christopher Berg 5:57

when you look at it as a whole, I try to see patterns and consistent themes that possibly we can thread over time. So if we look at approximately, we have one century, we have the same alarm, and we have five episodes in time. The ones I thought were exemplars were Carl Becker starting in 1931. We have the Great Depression. And had it literally, it was a world depression. It became great once it came to the United States because it happened overseas before it came to us. Then we have 1985 with William McNeil, who's considered the father of world history. That's why we have like a Western Civ class and things like that. 1998, we have Peter Stearns, another world historian, emeritus professor at George Mason. Also wrote the forward for my book. Very thankful for that. Then in I think 2012, we have William Cronin from University of Wisconsin. And in 2014, we have Ken Pomerans. Again, these are world historians. Kim Pomeran's specifically with China. I think William Cronin, though, was more of a US historian, actually, but he spoke in a very broad sense. Oftentimes we go to history to make sense and do meaning making about why something is the way it is or why is there this injustice and what can we do about it? I think it's how history is perceived by the public and its relevance to them socially, but also individually. I think the individual aspect is important. So I think that's become much more of a significant finding. And if I were to think that there was one idea, it is the connection to how social, cultural, geopolitical upheavals or shifts, however you want to define them, oftentimes I refer to them as the history wars when I'm looking at it from a curricular standpoint. Even in 2020, that's actually a very good example. I can speak to my institution and my department. Often it was the liberal arts department. We're like a general education department at the art and design school. They came to us saying, what's going on in the world and help us to make sense of it, which led to a revision of our entire humanities' curriculum at the time. So often, when something like that happens, they come to the humanities or to history and say, help us make sense of what's going on right now. And I think that's what these AHA American Historical Association presidents did. And of course, these were public speeches, but we have them through the American Historical Review. So these are accessible. And you can kind of see that that common thread over time when we have these types of world events or national events that often they say, we need an answer. We don't know what that is. And we're kind of turning to you for that. And that's been a challenge for for the History Academy and history community more broadly.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 8:22

Yeah, I never put together the political arena or what was happening in the world and how our view of history education fits into that. And it really does play a part. It seems as though when there's been times of war, it's like civil knowledge is really important. We need people to know more about their country. We're thinking about AI in education right now, and humanity is at the center of that, saying, How do we deal with an artificial intelligence that can replace us? So often when I think about history, I like to look back and go, all right, when electricity came and there was the guy whose job was the gaslighter on the corner, you know, his livelihood just ended. And I feel like it gives us something to look back to say, we have survived through big changes in humanity. Our world doesn't end. And so I think it gives us hope that change is constant and we always find a way through it somehow. But in your recent article, my friend, you and I have passed our lives in serious times. I love this title. You analyzed 103 undergraduate essays on why students believe history should be studied. So, what did students teach you about the value of history through those reflections?

Dr. Christopher Berg 9:38

Even though I'm the teacher, the professor,

What Students Say History Is For

Dr. Christopher Berg 9:41

I learn just as much from my students as I hope that they learn from me. I kind of think of Einstein and just the genius behind some of these individuals like him. And they say that the more they learn, the more they appear behind the veil, the more they see that how little they do know in the scheme of things. And I feel the same way because I felt that I knew more information, if we just want to say information, when I came out of school. I think the key part is that it's the skill sets, those transferable skills that you cultivate the critical thinking in my area, what we call historical thinking, where we use second-order procedural concepts of how we go about doing the thing, how do we actually do the work of a historian? So that idea of historical thinking is something that is, as Sam Weinworth would say, with his uh very controversial but fantastic book back in the early 2000s, historical thinking, he called it an unnatural act. And you think about that, it really grabs your attention. And when I say controversial, I mean that in the most light-hearted way. But the fact is, is that it's something that you can learn. It's not something naturally innate, but it's something that you can learn. And then you sharpen and hone them with time. I had several students who left me with my jaw open, just saying, wow, this is this is more than I could have hoped for. And a couple come to mind. I'll share the one though. I had a student who was a Navy veteran, and she said that why history and why she wanted to take a class like she did with me was so that she could see how other women had done extraordinary things in history. Because she had grown up thinking that women didn't really do too much, because that was the narrative that, whether from home, social context, community context, she said I never really thought much about it. And going into the Navy, she took a course in cryptography. And her chief did a workshop about Genevieve Grotian, brilliant mathematician, and she was the one who cracked the Japanese purple code. That was the cipher machine that Japan used communication with Germany. And she cracked it when no one else could crack it in time. She said now she had someone that she could look up to, and this is someone who didn't have that. And she said the pride, not only that I felt, but the other female sailors felt, she said, was just incredible. And they took so much out of that experience. And she wanted to take a class like mine after the fact to see more examples of that. That one really stuck with me. In terms of one of the key findings that I I had from that particular part of research, it built on what I did previously, but it really expanded in ways that I didn't quite foresee or anticipate. And that's something that has been termed by Arthur Chapman as prudential uses of history. What is prudential? And you have like the word part of it's prudence. And if you're to look at the etymology, you can actually take it back and it goes down to a type of judgment. So to be judicious, well, that's something that we do in history, isn't it, when we analyze events or sources. We're trying to be judicious. So we're trying to use that that idea of to interrogate something, but to kind of remain objective, not to be moved by bias or emotion, but to keep that objectivity. So those ideas of prudential uses of history, these include learning from past mistakes, preparing for the future, drawing analogies. So analogical reasoning is an important one. Because oftentimes analogical reasoning is isn't done correctly. So oftentimes it gets a bad rap when in fact analogical reasoning is something that we generally all do, but sometimes we don't do it correctly. So having some guidance on things like that, but also seeing that that was one of the largest findings was students saying that we don't want to repeat history, we want to learn from history, we want to take lessons from history, and we want to be able to use historical analogy. And that that's a challenge because I think we live by making analogies and often we do them just inexactly. So with a little bit more work that we can do in the classroom, not specific to that, but just in the broader skill set, I think can make a difference because it's not so much what you're learning in terms of facts and knowledge in the classroom. This isn't how you and I grew up. It was very different. We didn't have access. Weinberg wrote a book more recently in 2018, and it was basically why why learn history when you have it on your phone? That's the title of the book, essentially. And he even said we live in a Google-trenched society. We have all this access in this little phone, and it's just a click away. Okay, so now you have the historical knowledge part at your fingertips, whereas before we had to have it, much like the Druids, it was something that we had in our mind. Yeah. That was a sacred kind of knowledge. That's the mystical aspect about it. Well, we don't have to rely on that as much anymore. So how we use that knowledge and what we do with it, that's the crucial part.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 14:17

In the History and the Public Good article that you wrote, one quote, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it. That feels especially meaningful for classroom teachers because it shifts the focus from simply delivering content, so cover to cover, but to teach students how to learn history. And

Beyond Textbooks Into Historical Thinking

Dr. Lisa Hassler 14:37

what does it look like when students are learning how historians think?

Dr. Christopher Berg 14:40

Go back to that premise with Sam Weinberg, that historical thinking is an unnatural act, meaning that it's something that you can't learn. There's research that shows that historical thinking can be implemented, that type of a program, of course, on a much more rudimentary level, in elementary history classrooms in the social studies and things like that. So they have a good base of research that shows that these types of skills can be cultivated. And I think, again, back to my own experience of just instructional decision making and those exceptional teachers that we all think back on and just I smile just as I think about it. Again, the context of it, I kind of forewarn your listeners and viewers, I'm sure different people feel differently about it. But I had a incredible, incredible teacher. So I had a world history class that met at 7:30 in the morning. That was a problem for me because early mornings and things. So I had this teacher, and he said, you know what, you should come to class. It's important that you show up. And I didn't really know what to make of him because I had him for several weeks at this point, and I've already missed a good amount of time. And I remember him walking in just as the bell rings, and he's got this massive six-foot American revolution musket, and he's explaining it to us, just goes right into it, and he's showing us, you know, this is what it did, this is how it functions and everything. And I swear he had like that little twinkle in his eye. And next thing you know, he ba-boom, he dry fires this thing in the classroom. Now you have to remember this is the mid-90s, a completely different era. But I remember just the smoke coming out the front, the pandemonium behind me. And I remember just looking around, somebody was trying to open the window in the back, and he's just standing there in the midst of this. It looks like Mel Gibson from the Patriot. And I'm thinking, that I don't know what to think about this. I started attending class after that, and he became my favorite teacher. I even did a student internship with him my senior year. He changed everything about how I how I viewed it. I remember thinking this was one of the coolest things. And that kind of changed how I felt about history because it's not just a textbook. The textbook has its place, but I think there's an over-reliance upon it. And there's so much that's in the textbook that, like you mentioned, coverage. I don't know how you can cover everything, like cover to cover, the publisher textbooks, they get bigger and bigger, it seems.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 16:58

Yeah.

Dr. Christopher Berg 16:58

I think we're always making instructional decisions about what to include and what to exclude. How students encounter history is important. And if we give them history through the lens of a textbook, I think that it's Pandora's box in some way. And there's a whole literature on that. But the fact is that if we want to do historical thinking, we need to move a bit away from the textbook. We can start there for that foundation, but the skill sets that we need to kind of hone and sharpen and develop, that takes more time. And that's not something that can often happen just within a couple of lessons. So it's something that has to be integrated into your instructional design, into your philosophy of education in particular. And there's many ways that you can do that.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 17:41

How do you cover the necessary content with helping students be able to ask those questions, examine evidence, make meaning, kind of like what you were talking about with that musket? What a big startle that was. However, it was historically anchored. So that artifact made sense for the content that he was speaking of and definitely impacted your take on the historical context and the value of it at that point because you had something that you saw in front of you. So, how do teachers do that without firing muskets in a classroom?

Dr. Christopher Berg 18:14

Yeah, that's not that's not advised anymore.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 18:16

So no.

Dr. Christopher Berg 18:17

Don't don't say that Chris said that I should, oh, please don't say that. I think that the challenge with the textbook is that it gives the impression, and again, this is going back decades of research earlier. I keep going back to Sam Weinberg, and there's a reason why he's basically the father of history education in this country. He did a study himself in one of the chapters in the book, and he asked students if they thought that the textbook was authoritative, essentially. There's another one, Robert Paxton is another individual who did this kind of research too. But he found out that I think it was 90 plus percent said, oh yeah, it's it's just it's completely true, it's factual, and and therein lies the problem. The textbook is not authoritative in that sense, it's a distillation of information that is drawn from many different sources. And it's done in a narrative way. This is a nice, easy way for us to absorb information, but history is not settled. The textbook is not unchallengeable. There's a lot of layers to this because oftentimes it seems every year there's just more and more demand on time, workload, things of this nature that requires more advanced training or additional professional development, which actually, through professional development courses and grants like the Teaching American history that you used to have back in the early 2000s, early 2010s, I think, was a good way for the academy to connect with public schools and meet in the middle so that they had enough to be able to go on and try this out. So some of it has to do with just familiarity and content knowledge and understanding how historical thinking, you know, works and in practice and how to develop your own lessons. So I will share something that I've done and I continue to do. There's a book called History Lessons by Dana Lindemann and Kyle Ward. I actually met Kyle through his book, and we have since become very good friends and colleagues. In fact, I started using a section of that book this past year on another project that has stemmed out of this Y study history. So the idea here of this history lessons is looking at,

Comparing Textbooks To Build Skepticism

Dr. Christopher Berg 20:11

again, the national narrative of the United States, looking at it through all these different changes through history from Spanish American War, let's just say up to September 11th, to kind of give like about a hundred years or so. What he did, they took textbooks from different parts of the world, translated them, and then used excerpts to explore how these textbooks saw the Great Depression or the decision to drop the atomic bombs or the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall. So you take your US history textbook, and this is a very simple way to do it, and you take those excerpts from one of those given topics. And this is something I've used for the atomic bombs, actually, in the decision making. Well, now we're looking at our own narrative, but now you're comparing it to Canada and what they say about it in their textbook. What about Great Britain? What about Italy? And let's throw in the Philippines to make it very well-rounded. Students really don't know what to think when they read their textbook and then they compare that information against the other textbooks. So it can either expand their understanding, that's the that's the hope, it can help them critique and challenge and hopefully gain a little bit of a healthy skepticism. There's nothing wrong with a little skepticism. You don't have to be rude about it, but a little bit of healthy skepticism, just saying, I don't know, I don't have enough information to make a decision about this or how I feel about this at the moment. Again, you're being judicious. That's that Aristotelian idea of phronesis, and that's where we get like epistemology, epistemic beliefs from an individual standpoint of what we think and how we relate and understand knowledge. So this goes back to Aristotle, goes back to the Greeks, and this is where we get our idea of prudence today, one of the cardinal virtues. So we think of wisdom, prudence, phrenesis. These are all very related and interrelated ideas. This is what we want students to cultivate. We want them to cultivate this idea of independent thinking through test and hypothesis. I have my textbook, I believed it to be true. I think it's true. I have a little bit of doubt now, a little bit of skepticism. But I have four other textbooks that are giving me more information. Why wasn't this included in mine? Why did they feel that this was not a good decision? I had no idea Canada played a role in the development of the atomic bomb. So you get all sorts of different emotional reactions. To that. And I've been finding it. And Kyle said, please come back and let me know how students react to it. It's been very interesting. And from this past fall semester and spring semester, I'd say 50% of my students still remain unchanged. Nope. The textbook was factual, but about 50% felt a constellation of emotions and had different thoughts about it. So I don't know where that'll go, but that's an idea that is very low stakes. You can pick up one of these books uh secondhand on Amazon and if it costs $5, pick up a used copy, go through it, find something that you're interested in. So that's something that even I use. And I would encourage others to do something very similar.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 22:54

I love that. Well, we have social media, AI, they're having such an influence on students' information intake. And students are surrounded by information you were talking about, like right at their fingertips or on their phone, right? Why learn it all when you've got it just right there on the push of a button? However, it's not only instant, it can be very persuasive, it can be incompetent, it can be misleading. And so,

Historical Thinking For AI And Media

Dr. Lisa Hassler 23:14

how can historical thinking help students become better evaluators of information that's coming across their phones or or in general, just better evaluators of information that even they're reading?

Dr. Christopher Berg 23:25

I think the key is just in what you said, evaluation, rather than just accepting it wholesale, but as in I I need to investigate a little bit more. So it's having that idea of, like I said, the healthy skepticism. Let me investigate, let me explore where does this information come from? I mean, it of course it popped up on AI, but is do you trust it in implicitly? Like 100%, you have a complete faith in AI. And a lot of the answers that we get, they found it sounds so so convincing, so true. It sounds like, wow, this is really put together really well. AI kind of gains your trust in that way. And they have that term hallucination that if you challenge it and you say, Are you sure? Can you double check? And it often come back, yes, thanks for checking that. Or I looked and you're right, it is XYZ. And you're like, hmm. So AI, you make a lot of mistakes. And it goes, I do. Thanks for pointing that out. I'm like, you're a very good student. Thank you for that. You can have very interesting AI conversations, so it can't be amusing. The fact is that we've had Google for some time, and I think people and students in general treat AI as a super Google and they kind of interact with it in the same way. And the fact is, is that the same thing that I say with students, I go, yeah, you provided me sources, but are they credible? So if they're going on Google, well, Google said this. I said, well, let's choose Google and we can fact check with it and then we can build from it. It comes back down to those basic historical thinking skills. Let's just go with credibility and the sources itself. A credible source is something that has been peer-reviewed, something that has been checked by another expert or professional to ensure quality control, essentially. And we get them in academic books, which I don't push too much because they're not going to read a book. I said, but you can scan through the table of contents. You can look at something that might, you know, jump out. And if you get a journal article, read the abstract. It's kind of like a summary in the front. Read the introduction, read the conclusion. It takes five minutes. If there's nothing there that once you makes you or encourages you to read further, move on to the next. You know, there's a lot of accessible internet encyclopedia. This Stanford does some really, really good ones in philosophy. There are a lot of good, accessible, open access journals, encyclopedias, and oftentimes you can use a primary source. So what's the difference between a primary and secondary source? But this is where you start using that intellectual muscle in your building it. And of course it's uncomfortable in the beginning. But if we build these in a couple places throughout a unit or throughout a term where this is something that lines up with your interest as a teacher or a professor, and that you think that you can make meaningful for students. And one just might be sourcing and what that looks like. Another might be more interpretive because history is very interpretive. That's why there's that idea of there is really no wrong answer. I say that I can almost put quotes around it. Kind of, you know, it's kind of very open-ended, and people might very much disagree with that. But the fact is that you can still have an opposing viewpoint and not be wrong. You don't have to like it, but you can still recognize it on its merit. And again, this is just one aspect of a historical thinking. When you take it as a whole, it's very powerful and it becomes a way of how you see the world and ultimately your place in that.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 26:24

When you're thinking about these AI engines and being able to look at mysteries within history context, are you seeing any sort of exploding possibilities out there? Any positive influences of AI in history education?

Dr. Christopher Berg 26:39

There was this mathematical dilemma, quandary that has been unsolvable since the 1950s, I believe it was. It was a story in the Wall Street Journal. I don't know which AI did it, but it it solved it. And it's been unsolvable for what is that, 70-ish years or so? It was able to take the information, find out that one of the assumptions that everyone else in the world accepted, found that it was essentially false, and then rebuilt the whole proof on the revised assumption. And then took all this other information to be able to do the mathematics, and then created, I think it was a 70-page mathematical proof. And it took it, I want to say, a couple days of continuous work. And there was a very well-known mathematician who said, this needs to be published. This is incredible. It needs to be published in a scientific journal. And of course, people are saying, oh, we don't know about that. We need to, we need to check it out and do this and that. But the fact is that an AI model cracks something that all the brilliance of all the human minds over this time uh were unable to do. So the possibilities here are incredible. And with that, it's also one of those things you feel a little bit of of a reticence and hesitance. Like, let's let's not move at such warped speed to use that kind of terminology. Maybe we should advance a little bit more intentionally and deliberately going forward. Because it all these things are very exciting, but it is moving at such a very quick pace.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 28:01

I do think so. I just think it has the potential to maybe solve some of history's mysteries. Because maybe it has access to information over here or over here and connect dots that we don't all see. But as we wrap up and reflect on your work, there is a recurring idea that history is ultimately connected

Prudence, Serious Times, And Living Well

Dr. Lisa Hassler 28:20

to the human story in your paper on history's response in schools. I like that a greater meta-world narrative whose soul focus is the human story. I love the idea that history is the human story. And so I guess that takes it away from the AI for a moment to say, this is about us. This is our history, right? This is our story in the world. What is one idea about the purpose of history education that you would like listeners to walk away with?

Dr. Christopher Berg 28:46

I open with a quote in that article, my friend, you and I have lived in serious times. The context of that is that's a letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson. And this is both after they've lived long lives and they're reflecting back on their incredible lives and the roles that they played in history. But then the quote continues, and I'll read it so I don't butcher it. It says, I know not whether we have ever seen any moments more serious, that's a capital S, more serious than the present. And I think every generation says that. I think each of us believe that we have lived through serious times, and I think that we have, and there are more serious times to come. And I think history is an antidote. It helps to protect us, it helps for us to prepare those ideas or those prudential uses of history so that we can take some lessons, we can apply them in our own way to prepare for what's going on right now, but also for the uncertainty of uh what lies ahead. And I think that's really where we get our core value from. I think it helps us to to act wisely. I keep coming back to that idea of judgment, and I mean that in the in the most positive sense, to be judicious, to be able to weigh evidence, to be able to see different things from different perspectives, not just one unilateral way, but from multiple perspectives, because the story can be more complete, to be more open-minded, to maybe have a little bit of intellectual humility and not think that you have it all figured out. I think history can really pressure test some of those types of things. I think we can apply these types of principles to almost every aspect of our lives. So history in the school sense, in the academic sense, we can extrapolate so much that's useful in our everyday life from those skill sets. And even if you take one or two of those things, even in very basic ways, and you cultivate it and grow it and extend it, it'll grow. Just like anything else. I think that makes makes all the difference because we want more prudence. We have those cardinal virtues, you know, there is Aristotelian idea of wisdom, justice, temperance, prudence. We we need more of those. And I'm reminded of one of my favorite figures from history, Marcus Aurelius. He was a second century Roman emperor, named one of the five good emperors of Rome. And he was handpicked at a very young age by the Emperor Hadrian, knowing from a very young age that he would one day succeed Hadrian. There was no one more powerful on earth than Marcus Aurelius, yet how he lived. And the fact that we have this amazing, incredible memoir, this notebook he kept for himself was never meant for anybody else's eyes, and we get to read it, and we get to have the mind of the most powerful man in the world. It's incredible to look at what he writes about of his mother, her her devout, upright, and loyal ways, his adopted father, who he revered, his teachers, who he loved, his half-brother, who he loved immensely. You could just see a very human individual who had the ability to over life and death over anybody, and never used it. He used it judiciously, he used it very humanely. And I think he's an outstanding model. And I remember there's a quote that he used that has been really getting a lot of lot of traction in recent years because he's very quotable, because I think he's very human. And he shows you the idea of what could be, what we could do. We're not emperors, of course, but what we could what we can do in our everyday life, how we can live better, and how we can hold ourselves to a higher standard. He said, waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be, be one. So in other words, instead of saying that you could do X and Y an intellectual activity, apply it, embody it. So that idea of being judicious in your life or being guided by prudence. I think this is what history can do. It can do so many different things. But if it can do one thing, it can show you through the lives of other individuals how you can live a better life today.

Dr. Lisa Hassler 32:37

What's a wonderful way that we can wrap this up? Thank you so much for your reflection on your work. I think it is so applicable today more than ever. Honestly, the human story, how to become the embodiment of a better human. Don't just discuss it, be it. So thank you for your time. Thank you, Lisa. The call to action today is to help students see history as more than a timeline of events, but a way to make sense of the present and give us hope for our future. If you have a story about what's working in your schools that you'd like to share, you can email me at Lisa at drlisaarhassler.com or visit my website at www.drlisaarhastler.com and send me a message. If you like this podcast, subscribe and tell a friend. The more people that know, the bigger impact it will have. And if you find value to the content in this podcast, consider becoming a supporter by clicking on the supporter link in the show notes. It is the mission of this podcast to shine light on the good in education so that it spreads, affecting positive change. So let's keep working together to find solutions that focus on our children's success.