History For Homeschoolers is part of The Australian Homeschooling Net.  It is designed to provide  information, ideas, resources and links for those wishing to develop a rich and rewarding history curriculum in a homeschooling context.

Unlike many  sites that deal with history related material, History For Homeschoolers is not just concerned with sharing resources specific to particular historical topics or points-of-view.  It looks at the study of history in holistic terms.

History is not simply a study of  what happened in the past.  It is the study of historian’s reconstructions of the past and the values that animate these historical models.  All of us are historians: who we are today and what we will be tomorrow are influenced by our past experience.

During the 1950s in the United States, a young woman was hit by a vehicle, and as a result, she lost her memory.  With no identification on her, she was given the name “Jane Doe” in imitation of the 1930s film “John Doe” in which actor Gary Cooper played a man who had lost his memory.  Not only could Jane not remember her name, she had forgotten how to eat and speak -- in short, she had to rediscover all that she had learned since she was a baby.

Our values, attitudes and beliefs are all historically conditioned.  What we like, what we don’t like and how we see the world in general and those around us are all heavily conditioned by past experience.  In the words of that sage of ancient Rome, Cornelius Cicero, “ To be ignorant of what happened before you were born, is to always remain a child.”

History is part of who we are -- we cannot escape the net of history.  When we begin to walk the path of the historian, we begin our first steps into a new world of discovery  in which we ourselves are transformed by  the experience.  To be well versed in history is to be morally and philosophically literate.  For, without these guiding lights, history will not reveal her true secrets.

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