Why ancient history teachers are so important to the education firmament

Too often the centrality of ancient history to contemporary human endeavour – whether it be in politics, physics, philosophy, or architecture – is overlooked.

A piece of advice I often give to those looking to get into my own line of work, is that if you truly want to understand contemporary politics, you must study Ancient History.

Whether it is examining the events that led up to the signing of the first documented peace treaty between Egypt and the Hittite Empire, examining the origins of state driven monotheistic religion during the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten – or interrogating the ontological foundations of political realism as laid down by Thucydides, our ancient past still informs contemporary domestic and international politics.

One thing that has always fascinated me is the way in which so much of Western thought is derivative. It is based upon the intellectual foundations laid down by the thought leaders of antiquity.

Indeed, understanding Plato’s transcendent ideals and his duality of forms – and understanding Aristotle’s thoughts on logic and the structured cosmos, are prerequisites for comprehending the modern mind. They are essential for understanding the philosophy, theology and scientific thought that dominate the epistemological norms of the 21st century.

By imparting knowledge of Ancient History to students across NSW, our Ancient History teachers are in a unique position to give students rare insight into why contemporary society is so complex.

This is because history is teleological. It is impossible to understand the present without understanding the past.

This is perhaps best demonstrated through examination of the core tenants of Hellenic thought – without which we would never have had the renaissance, the scientific revolution, or the industrial revolution.

The Ancient Greeks were the first people to view the world as an ordered cosmos open to rational empirical analysis. They were the first to understand that knowledge is depth ontological rather than transfactual – that understanding the world’s underlying structure and meaning entails the employment of a multiplicity of cognitive faculties – rational, empirical, intuitive, aesthetic, imaginative, mnemonic, and moral.

The Ancient Greeks were also the first to speculate that the causes of natural phenomena are impersonal and physical – and that all supernatural explanations of the observable world should be excluded from causal explanations as subjective opinion – thereby laying the philosophic foundations of the scientific method.

As Richard Tarnas notes, Classical Greek thought provided almost every single piece of theoretical equipment needed to produce the renaissance – and then the enlightenment: Pythagorean mathematics, the Platonically defined problem of the planets, Euclidean geometry, Ptolemaic astronomy, the Neoplatonic exaltation of the Sun, the atomists mechanistic materialism, Hermetic esotericism, and Aristotelian and pre-Socratic empiricism, naturalism and rationalism.

If you are a student of almost any subject offered at any school or university across Australia – you can know that the pedagogical roots of your discipline are based in Ancient History.  Ancient History teachers are custodians of this knowledge and its revelation, making their role as educators so important.