My opinion on history is that it does not matter which set of dates you learn. But it matters that you have learned some set of dates, so that you have context for facts you encounter. Having that context gives new facts more meaning and ability to shape your world view.

Let me give a random fact to illustrate this principle. Mexican silver mining started in 1531, and by the early 1600s Mexico was the source of about 1/5 of the world's silver production. (This happens to be true. And Peru was an even richer source of silver for Spain.)

Suppose you learned a fair amount of American history, as I hope my children will growing up in the USA. This fact gives context for how late the founding of the early English colonies really was.

Suppose you learned something about English history, as I did growing up in Canada. This fact provides context for the English history of privateering, which was one of the causes of the Spanish Armada.

Suppose you learned about central European history. This fact gives context for Spain's wealth, which played an important role in their involvement in the Spanish Netherlands and the Thirty Years' War.

But if you learned no history, this fact has no connection with anything, and has no possible fate other than being forgotten.

Use primary sources.

Have individuals or teams look at an original primary source, interpret it, then discuss with the class, who all interpret something from a related source. Students put their heads together, discuss/debate and post some interesting original research to the Net.

In mathematics?

Primary sources are way above the level of most college mathematics students, much less high school or younger students. Almost anything written in the last 50 years requires very advanced mathematical ideas, while anything written before that uses outdated notation which is very difficult to understand. Moreover, the primary sources for common ideas are often spread out over huge periods of refinements - going from a small idea to a general notion over the course of years, perhaps involving dozens of papers by multiple authors. One notable exception to this: Euler's papers. These might be readable by some students, yet when I see them presented in college courses, they are often presented by a secondary source for clarification.

The other thing I don't agree with is your use of the word "interpret." I don't think that it is common to find a mathematician who believes that mathematics is open to interpretation.

Lastly, original research in mathematics is hard. It's not the interpretation of previous ideas (although it is occasionally relating concepts previously thought to be unrelated - some consider this the most important type of mathematical result, but it is much harder to do than you might think), but the formulation of new ideas. Even to know if an idea is new requires a great deal of mathematical training.

Perhaps I'm wrong about this, but I think that for young mathematics students your ideas are unfeasible. Remember that the original sources for a lot of basic mathematics are hundreds of years old. Even Euler's famous writings on geometry (the exception that I said might be workable) were largely a rewriting of previous ideas into a coherent whole - basically a textbook - and could not really be considered an original source.

Edit: my apologies, I misunderstood. I did not realize that we were talking about teaching history, in which case I defer to someone of greater experience.

shou,

alain94040 asked what we would change about the way History is taught.

I wholeheartedly agree with the idea of primary sources, and of studying mathematics historically in general.

The Elements of Euclid is a model of clear, concise, beautiful mathematics which is easily accessible. Archimedes as well. Follow that up with Apollonius, Ptolemy, some Descartes, and then Newton, and you have a junior high and high school curriculum in mathematics that would give students a real advantage over the rote "here is what Disembodied Authority says you should know" learning.

Note -- I am not advocating the study of mathematical history in junior and high school, but rather the study of mathematics historically. It gives access to mathematics as a branch of the humanities, less focused on the answers, and much more focus on the questions and how some really smart people have addressed those questions in the past, which gives a good guide on how to address new problems that will come up in the future.

When it comes to history specifically, as the OP asked, I would still agree with going with some of the great works of history. Historiography can be left for college, but give the kids access to the letters and diaries and personal accounts of people who were at the scene of history, as well as the great works of history that have been written (Thucydides, Herodotus, all the way to Toynbee, Gibbon, and, hell, even Spengler). Drop the mundane and milquetoast textbooks.

I always missed the historical context in high school, especially with chemistry and to a lesser degree physics.

You always knew that the current model you were being taught was "kinda wrong" or not the current state of knowledge (Rutherford's atomic model, Bohr's atomic model, and so on), but you never heard anything about the motivations of the people developing it.

At St. John's College in Annapolis, science is taught by reading Darwin, Maxwell, Newton, and so on. It's a mixed bag.

My high school physics teacher went to St. John's. We discussed one short part of an original source in physics every Friday.

Notable downside: he didn't know whether purple or red has longer wavelength.

Primary sources can be rather dry/difficult reading. I'm fairly intelligent, but it's just not easy for me to grok older style language.

I have had some experience with reading primary sources though. I had an excellent history teacher in high school who had us read The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin to prepare us for American History. Now, Benjamin Franklin is a fascinating person, and he did plenty of extremely interesting things, but I had a lot of trouble getting through the style it was written in. I love learning about the things he did, but the language and style of his autobiography just did not work well for me.

Primary sources are an option, but it doesn't work for everyone.

Strongly agree with that one. I've always hated history going through school. Then I took an american literature class in college where we read primary sources from the early colonies up to the founding of the US. I enjoyed every minute of it. I learned more about history in that one class than probably the last 14 years of education combined. History should all be taught this way.

primary sources is known to be one of the worst way to study any field, especially when you are not familiar with it, because you lack the context, and because they are rarely written for the profane. This is all the more true for maths: have you ever read a math books from the XIXth century ? This is almost impenetrable, if only because of the formulation

cdavid,

I am talking about History. Pick up some letters from a soldier. The teacher can still give some context.

I would have hated that.

I think there's huge potential for computer games to influence how history is taught.

Imagine an RPG set in a slice of medieval Europe, where you experience daily life (in a variety of roles, from peasant to king) and hear about events occurring around you and confront choices, with every detail as accurate as we know it. Imagine that this game is actually fun to play, and that it's not teaching information via walls of text or memorization games, but making real information an integral part of the game world.

That's the future, IMO. Or part of it, anyway. Talk about the topics after the students have experienced it first-hand.

It doesn't use the medium's full potential, but Oregon Trail is actually moderately successful imo at imparting basic knowledge about: 1) the existence of this episode in history; 2) some of the geographical information and landmarks along the way; and 3) a few basic pieces of information about period travel.

There's a lot more that could be done, and it's not clear it imparts only accurate information, but for me at least, it's where I learned that "fording a river" was a thing that existed; that Chimney Rock is a landmark; that there was a period in history when wagon trains were regularly heading out west along this lengthy route; etc.

Have you seen the Victorian Farm, Edwardian Farm, Victorian Pharmacy or WW2 British House shows?

That's how history should be taught.

From what I can see, history teaching seems to doing pretty well in the UK at the moment (I have a 12 year old son) - they do a lot of visits to pretty interesting places and do a lot of re-enacting of things (e.g. what it was like in a Victorian classroom).

Of course, this approach does rather depend on having a lot of reasonably interesting historical resources within easy reach.