9th grade humanities, an interdisciplinary approach

​

Did you ever notice that people in the 21st Century, people who have i-pads and cellphones, who surf the net and their cable stations, who have braces and triple-bypass operations – in other words, people like you – often follow traditions and texts that originated thousands of years ago?  Businessmen in India model their lives after a character from a two thousand year old story. Students in Japan mourn their grandparents according to beliefs first articulated even three hundred years earlier. Politicians in the United States pray to a god revealed in texts as old as a thousand years before the birth of Jesus Christ. People in my neighborhood attend churches, synagogues and yoga classes that derive their practices from the ancient world. What gives these text and traditions such staying power?  Should I check this out? 

 

 

Humanities 9 is a course designed to investigate these questions. A vigorous study of these texts and traditions will not only give us a compass to navigate cultures that can seem strange or opaque, but they will provide ideas to help us think about what is important in our lives and decide what is the best way to live. 

​