For a multi-perspective understanding of the world

What is «time»? Why and since when have humans walked upright? What is culture, why is it described as «higher» or «lower» and is such a categorization justified? For source-based history lessons in the upper school on the way to the final exams, dealing with such far-reaching philosophical questions seems to be a mere luxury. However, the history block of the tenth grade certainly deals with this – and intends to achieve important pedagogical and socially relevant goals.

The first encounter with the topics of the subject of history takes place in fifth grade, at the beginning of middle school. Here it is still the myths and legends about the origins of the earth and mankind, the captivating stories about the pharaohs and the first cities in Mesopotamia, which are intended to train our view of our historical roots and origins. The prehistory and early history of mankind from the beginnings to antiquity is taught a second time in tenth grade as a kind of mirror image; but why is this the case?

The spiraling curriculum of Waldorf schools: double is more sustainable

In fifth grade, history in the narrower sense of the word is still taught as a narrative of events and great importance is placed on the most vivid possible communication by the class teacher, in which the visual experience and understanding of events takes precedence over an awareness of the nature and origin of the underlying sources. In contrast, the teaching of history in year ten is characterized by an examination of the origin of history, its sources and the critical handling of their informative value – especially when it comes to material legacies and traces of past cultures. On the one hand, students can learn about the methods of prehistoric research and its scientific sub-disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology, palaeogenetics and archaeobiology, which use these sources to try and reconstruct human life forms and cultural developments of the past in a variety of ways. At the same time, it can be learned that these factual sources only represent a small section of what once existed and that the evaluation of these «silent witnesses of the past» are always only hypotheses that can change from time to time and from researcher to researcher. In fact, they often provide more questions than answers. The exercise then consists of allowing these sometimes even contradictory views – as long as they are argued in a factual and well-founded manner – to stand side by side and thus practicing a certain tolerance of ambiguity and discourse skills, especially when it comes to the non-visible that needs to be interpreted.

Archaeology: what does the source reveal – and what is interpreted?

This begins with the oldest human footprints, which were discovered in the 1930s in the East African savannah near Laetoli in Tanzania and were only examined in more detail in the 1970s. Around 3.6 million years ago, three people of different sizes and statures walked side by side on a loamy surface without haste, leaving behind valuable clues as to the age of the upright gait. «A prehistoric family: father, mother, child!» is the immediate, hasty judgment of the findings under consideration. However, the gender or age of these three people is not clear from the traces, but only arises from an association culturally influenced by our modern thinking.

A more differentiated approach to sources also takes place on the earliest written sources and endeavors to amaze the students with the forms of early communication and to arouse their interest; after all, the inscriptions of the civilizations of Mesopotamia or the Greek linear scripts were written on tablets of unfired clay, which is not a good basis for permanent preservation. In other words, there are also written sources that have only survived incompletely, and these in turn represent only a fraction of the originally existing, inscribed written material. It is possible to learn the difference between texts that seem to convey objective content, such as tax and inventory lists, reports on flood levels, and those that are of mythical, religious, philosophical or individual origin and therefore require an extended critical examination.

The reconstruction of history merely reflects our current knowledge and our current interpretation and judgment of the past. It thus represents a narrative that, due to the constantly growing number of archaeological finds and findings, must be constantly questioned and supplemented or modified by new scientific findings. If this can be made clear and recognized in the classroom, then much has already been achieved in the development of historical awareness. This method helps to make the difference between fiction and fact recognizable and to sharpen the senses in the face of media or ideological appropriation. The associated formation of judgment is a foundation that is also practiced and sharpened on the content-related path through history – and thus we are in the middle of the present, and that makes history full of meaning.

Time and being human as categories of consciousness

The course of history from the first human forms known as hominids to antiquity is a learning path that also focuses on the treatment of the cognitive category of time in objective physical existence and individual personal perception. This involves unimaginably long periods of time, sometimes going back several million of years, in which man learns to move from upright walking to mechanical mobility and from a nomadic lifestyle to sedentariness - and these periods of time are just as astonishing in view of the ever faster pace of human innovation processes as the fact that it was only by walking upright that we were able to achieve all these developments. «What makes man human?» and «How does our consciousness develop?» are the resulting questions, which begin with the mastery of fire and the ability to produce tools from stone and later metal and ultimately lead to the misuse of both skills in the weapons industry of the present day. In contrast to this is the creative human spirit of art in its impressive evidence: for example, the almost modern-looking Ice Age paintings in the famous caves of Lascaux and Chauvet in France or the «lion man»” made of mammoth ivory from the Hohlenstein-Stadel in the Lone Valley southwest of Ulm are evidence of prehistoric man's confrontation with himself and his environment.

«Simultaneity of the non-simultaneous»” and «advanced civilizations» as derogatory terms

A differentiated view of the development of humanity also goes hand in hand with an examination of the various possibilities of the beginning and course of history and the traditional evaluation criteria of human cultural development. For history is not the continuous development from the primitive hand axe to the advanced civilizations of Mesopotamia or from the Greek polis to the European Middle Ages and from there to the colonization and Europeanization of the world, but rather the view of different forms of life, development processes, social concepts or cultural characteristics. In other words, cultures or cultural spaces and their communication and the dissemination routes and spaces of cultural practices, products or technologies are considered here, as described by the British archaeologist Barry Cunliffe. A reduced focus on the supposed linearity of cultural and technical developments, on the other hand, leads to culturally chauvinistic and discriminatory judgments, such as those expressed in the controversial cultural anthropological concept of the «simultaneity of the non-simultaneous», with which, for example, people with nomadic lifestyles are labeled in parallel to sedentary societies. In most cases, progressiveness is determined by just a few aspects, as the recently deceased US anthropologist David Graeber and the British prehistorian David Wengrow were able to demonstrate in their book Beginnings: A New History of Humanity, which is well worth reading. For example, «advanced» agriculture was abandoned for a long time by the sedentary inhabitants of the British Isles in the third millennium and the importance of popular sites such as the agriculturally oriented megacities in Mesopotamia was overrated to such an extent that similarly large but culturally and socially completely differently organized communities and urban centers in the Black Sea region or South America were hardly taken into account. And in this way, the common but highly problematic concept of advanced civilization should also be questioned for the mostly urban-oriented and socially highly hierarchical societies that have brought significantly more suffering, war and destruction than nomadic or peasant cultures.

Practice accepting the in-between between yes and no

The topics outlined in this selection make it clear that history lessons in year ten are aimed at certain cognitive processes in which a reflection on current conditions in the sense of a differentiated historical awareness can arise from the observation of the past from an abstract, more distant perspective. The focus is not on the gimmicky presentation of archaeological sensations of the constantly and ever faster appearing ground-breaking research results on the origins of mankind, nor on the boring stringing together of fact-based event-laden historical data. The central point is to take up the ambivalence of the change in human culture and consciousness as a counter-model to the increasingly pervasive, binary compartmentalization of opinions. An understanding (as unprejudiced as possible) of the diversity of global human existence is established here – thus the tools for the interculturality of a contemporary pluralistic society – as well as the perception of the interrelationship between the world and people, in which resources and actors are not set in relation to each other, but to each other. Similar to essay writing in language and literature lessons, this then leads to the ability to form and justify honest and well-founded hypotheses – and to understand them as presumed knowledge of the present.

At the same time, dealing with the prehistory of mankind also poses the challenge of accepting «open ends» of history and thus questions that are not (yet) answered or cannot be answered at present. And that is tenth grade: to realize that causalities and questions, or what is referred to in Waldorf education as «latent questions», can, as experience shows, interest and inspire students in the subject matter and can also be part of creating meaning from a methodological perspective.

Literature:

Barry Cunliffe: 10.000 Jahre. Geburt und Geschichte Eurasiens, Darmstadt 2016.

David Graeber, David Wengrow: Anfänge. Eine neue Geschichte der Menschheit, Stuttgart 2022.

Brenda Hassett: Warum wir sesshaft wurden und uns seither bekriegen. wenn wir nicht gerade an tödlichen Krankheiten sterben, Darmstadt 2018.

James Suzman: Sie nannten es Arbeit. Eine andere Geschichte der Menschheit, München 2022.

James C. Scott: Die Mühlen der Zivilisation: Eine Tiefengeschichte der frühesten Staaten, Berlin 2019.

M. Michael Zech: Didaktische Überlegungen zur vertieften Behandlung von Frühgeschichte an der Waldorfschule. In: Sibyla, Thomas Voß und M. Michael Zech: Göbekli Tepe und der Prozess der Sesshaftwerdung, Kassel 2011, S. 9–21.

M. Michael Zech: Urteilsbildung im Oberstufenunterricht an den Waldorfschulen. Lehrerrundbrief Nr. 104, Februar 2016, S. 35-52.