Connie Eccles wrote: "Teach Family History in Schools! ...and our kids will learn to love history"

Yes, teach family history for sure. But what about teaching community history as well? Family history is a place to start helping students understand the value of critically exploring a past that is close to their own lives but it does not go far enough. While your family may be interesting to you it probably has little or no interest to me. Sorry, that's just a fact of life. Family history, in the end, provides students with little more than the ability to learn about primary source documents and how to analyze those documents. Fitting that family history into a broader context is what makes it interesting. My family immigrated to the United States from eastern Europe in the late 19th century. That fact alone is dull and uninteresting except to me and the rest of my extended family. Were I to connect the story of my great grandparents and grand parents to the larger story of immigration I might have an interesting history to explore.

Nice as far as you go Connie, but in order to have a lasting influence you have to go a little but further than you did.

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