A friend once asked, when questioning our decision to Home Educate our son: "Certain subjects it's all very well. But, what about history?"
I replied…
"We have just returned home from visiting my Grandmother. We all sat around the table to share some food at supper time. She started recalling her time growing-up in Wien. She told me something, that, I had never heard before, that, her and her sister would go about the city putting anti-fascist poster up at night.
Stunned at hearing this. Her reasoning was, that, they were teenagers and that they didn't know what we subsequently knew. 'We just didn't like the politics of the right and we didn't like our city being invaded'.
She, also, pointed-out dates of German troops arriving. Parading and drilling on the market square outside her family home. These dates pre-date the single date historians record as the time Austria was occupied.
This shows two things:
i) How life trickles along, merges with past and future. It isn't a single defined date given by historians.
ii) How much more our son learnt from hearing, first-hand, real events in history.
This was more valuable, than, an hour in a stupid classroom!"
