Student Travel and History

Why should students take a field trip into the past?  It is a question that is often proposed to teachers who have no direct interest in history.  The answer to that question is simple – history is who we are and what we want and it is full of stories and mysteries.  The best reason for taking a field trip into the past is that history satisfies curiosity.  History also provides us with the pleasure of an incredible experience.  It opens windows into a variety of human experiences and reveals human nature not in an abstract philosophical way but in the concrete actuality of what human beings think and do.  History tells us how diverse human beings and their societies can be.  If we study history more attentively, it should make us more tolerant of people unlike ourselves.

Typically, most students believe that history is hardly more than a collection of names and dates to be memorized and repeated on examinations.  If they have written a paper about history in school, they have usually chosen a broad subject, gone to the library, looked up several articles in outdated textbooks or encyclopedias, and stitched together a paper of secondhand thoughts without ever imagining that they themselves were supposed to think about the data.  However, it is the job of educators to teach these students that history becomes more exciting when primary sources are studied to try to make sense of them and tell a story about them.  Simply put, a field trip focusing on history is a good place to show students that they have worthwhile thoughts and can use them.

The view of history as the product of the ideas and actions of all men and women, coupled with the desire to show history as a dynamic process, leads to four fundamental aspects of the historical process: (i) Expectations, (ii) Constraints, (iii) Choices and (iv) Outcomes.  Through the historical process history examines the variety of expectations people held about their futures; the constraints of time, place and multiple social and economic factors that historical figures faced; the choices they made, given the circumstances of their lives; and finally, the expected and unexpected outcomes produced by their decisions.  At Discovery Tours we believe this approach to history offers an idea by which students are able to understand the past as a rich human experience; a strategy that we implement in all of our student tours.

Too often, students come away from history with the impression that people in the past behaved very differently from people in the present.  Unlike themselves, their friends, their parents or their nation's leaders, the historical women and men they encounter seem never to be confused by the decisions they face or uncertain about the consequences of their actions.  Indeed, a mood of inevitability hangs over the lives of these past generations, as they live out their roles as actors in a drama written for them by destiny.  Students find it difficult to relate to these earlier historical figures that seem to inhabit a world with too many simple answers and too many clear solutions.  Presenting the past in this manner may make it more manageable but it does not make it good history.  Thus, as educators, it is important to offer students a way of thinking about history that scholars themselves employ as they research and reconstruct the past.  Instruction of history should be accomplished in a manner that will reinforce the reality of history as a dynamic, uncertain process, increase the students' empathy for the men and women of the past and help them to analyze critically and retain what they have read (history should not be an endless, inevitable procession of people, places, dates and events).  This focus on history as a process encourages students to think historically and become citizens who value history.

Overall, history is the fascinating story of a nation's past, told by scholars and instructors who have a genuine enthusiasm for retelling the story to others.  As a student travel company with a passion for history, we create our itineraries so students experience earlier generations in a manner that is not lost in an overly abstract style.  In brief, we continually strive to provide integrating and supportive learning aids to help those fully understand the entire historical process.  It is important to tell the ‘story’ clearly, and people it with men and women who are depicted as individuals rather than representative figures and as complex historical actors rather than simple heroes or villains.

Why should students take a field trip into the past?  Because the subject of history integrates new scholarship, raises questions about causes and consequences of historical events and provides analysis of historical developments.

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