At its best, teaching history helps our students recover their bearings in a world that increasingly makes it difficult to see and love the life we have together. Like being and nature, history is a concept of unity by which we get our minds around the whole of things: in this case, the whole of our existence as the past, the present, and the future. As a discipline within the humanities, history is the study of change in society as it moves in time. Change is a given, not an end. In order to grasp the significance of change, students of history must see the past in its pastness, neither as the present writ small nor as the occasion to condemn the past for not rising to their demands for what it should have been. In other words, they need to study the past observationally and sympathetically, free from anachronisms and moralizing.

Finally, history is a way of interpreting our existence as a community that consists of the dead, the living, and the yet to be born. It is a way of seeing how we are responsible for one another across generations. To forget that unity is to lose ourselves. To remember it is to see ourselves as recipients of the life passed on by our forebears and as givers of life to our neighbors and to future generations.

Andrew J. Zwerneman serves as Cana Academy’s President and as one of our Master Teachers. For 39 years, he has taught and consulted in secondary schools that emphasize classic humanities. For 19 years he headed schools—2 at the public charter school, Tempe Preparatory Academy in Tempe, Arizona, 17 at Trinity School at Meadow View in Falls Church, Virginia.

He is the founder and owner of The Academy Project, LLC, which wrote the curricula and trained faculties for Thomas MacLaren School in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Trinity Academy in Portland, Oregon. Education: B.A., A.B.D., University of Notre Dame; M.A., St. John’s University. He is the author of "History Forgotten and Remembered" (2020) and "The Life We Have Together: A Case for Humane Studies, A Vision for Renewal" (2022).

This lecture was delivered live at the Fall Classical Summit, a regional classical conference held at Thales Academy Rolesville Junior High-High School on October 6, 2023.

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Theme music is Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" and the Wichita State University Chamber Players, available here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHUWnB10_4I&list=PLdqEepE4oj9Y277Dn6MBDIn2AktxD2WUo