SILK ROAD

STORY BY KARIN STORM WOOD

In 2013, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences convened a commission to address a decline in students pursuing the humanities, which is the study of languages, literature, history, law, philosophy, ethics, and comparative religion. In the commission’s final report, it evocatively described the humanities’ enduring value: “[they] are disciplines of memory and imagination, telling us where we have been and helping us envision where we are going.”

Nueva’s eighth grade Silk Road study, a longstanding milestone in our middle school, demonstrates the enduring value of the humanities. The storied trade route—or, rather, a network of routes—spanned 7,000 miles, was in use for 2,300 years, and is considered the first example of globalization. Throughout the unit, students encounter some of history’s leading intellectuals, explorers, and conquerors, as well as religious traditions. As such, it offers our students a view of where humanity itself has been, and one that may help them understand better where it is going.

Starting with an outdoor mapping exercise to convey the geography and sheer scale of the Silk Road, students quickly learned that the Silk Road involved much more than trade. Along its routes traveled not just people and valuable goods, but languages, faiths, and ideas themselves. As eighth grader Meera N. put it: “The people who traveled across the Road were exposed to so many different perspectives and ideas. [This] not only changed the way they saw the world but also helped them find their place in it.”

To unpack these encounters, teachers Cynthia Kosut and Jennifer “JP” Perry introduced the foundational concept of “imagined orders,” articulated in Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens Imagined orders, which spring from humans’ tendency to hold beliefs and create rules, allow our species to coexist and cooperate in large numbers despite not knowing one another.

Analise C. described imagined orders as “the idea that humanity uses shared myths to cooperate on a large scale.” She remarked on the interesting examples that she and her classmates identified in their own lives: “the stock market, holidays, even a calendar!”

Cynthia and JP then asked their students to construct their own imagined orders. They assigned groups of students the task of allocating a single melon to feed a “village” of six people: a religious leader, a teacher, a middle-aged small merchant with a heart condition, a warrior, a sickly girl, and an infant boy. The students had to negotiate and reach a consensus on how to distribute the melon—and then use critical thinking to justify their decision, especially if they granted some people more and others less (see photo on page 30).

Though playful on the surface, the exercise asks students to address a fundamental ethical dilemma that faces all societies: Who in our society deserves the best chance at survival? The students’ responses implicitly assigned different values to people, demonstrating how inequality can be woven into the very fabric of a society.

With so many examples of vastly different religious, ethnic, and cultural traditions coming into contact for the first time, the Silk Road offers a fascinating look at human civilization evolving over many centuries. After reading a chapter from Behave by neuroscientist (and parent of eighth-grade graduate Benjamin ’11 and high school graduate Rachel ’17) Robert Sapolsky, the students contemplated the prevalence

(Data) Mapping

For a programming project in their computer science class with Angi Chau, some eighth graders used datasets collected by Silk Road researchers. They created interactive maps reflecting the spread of different languages and religions over time such as this example, programmed by Natasha M.

of implicit bias, a human tendency quite different from imagined orders but equally hardwired.

“Often, we associate the unfamiliar with bad, and the familiar with good,” said Kaiyan N. “When [humans] travel across wide expanses, they commend places with similar practices to them, as Ibn Battuta did with Persia and other Muslim regions. Bias leads to hatred of the unfamiliar, such as when Ibn Battuta reached China.”

Battuta, along with Alexander the Great, Xuanzang, Empress Wu, Genghis Khan, and Aurel Stein, comprised the unit’s “Silk Road Six”: diverse figures whose identities, travels, and choices the students studied closely in their final culmination projects.

Cynthia explained why understanding conflicts borne of religious difference is particularly important for Nueva students.

“In the Bay Area, we live in a mostly secular environment, but most of the world does not,” she said. “As the students learned how each of the Silk Road Six was influenced by one or more of those religions, they saw that there’s a big difference between religious tolerance and forcing your religion on others.”

JP added, “The most successful religions were the ones that embraced syncretism,” the fusion of different faith traditions (another term that the eighth graders mastered). “They took on local customs. They embraced local languages. Those religions spread the farthest and had the most practitioners, as opposed to rigid faiths that refused to translate their sacred texts.” The students studied syncretism on a trip to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco (see photo on page 19).

Analise captured how the Silk Road study led the class to deep inquiries into the dynamics of human civilization.

“We could draw lines of connection across time to poke, prod, and question the nature of humanity. How do geography and background influence our shared myths? In what ways are religions, beliefs, and imagined orders spread through trade? What does culture mean—and how is it formed?”

The Silk Road’s two-millennium lifespan provided a lens onto questions facing us in the 21st century, sparking “meaningful (and fun!) debates about society—good, bad, or somewhere in between,” according to Analise.

“The semester was full of these little moments: from Xuanzang and his religion-driven journey; to comparing the Declaration of Independence and the Hammurabi Code as two vessels of imagined order; to reading accounts of slavery and talking about prejudice and biases in our world. What linked them together was their reflection of history onto our modern-day society.”

“That's the piece about the humanities that I think is missing in the world today,” said Cynthia. “People don’t know how to look back. But when you do look at something that happened hundreds of years ago, you tend to be more objective. And then you can ask, ‘And how different is that from today?’” Kaiyan agreed.

“Even now, when we have come so far, there is so, so much left to do when it comes to [having] an objective opinion on everything, whether it's race, sex, gender, or political party,” he said. “We still are not objective as often as we’d like to think we are, attacking scarecrows that are truly not representative of the people who inhabit our world.

“Once again, history remains relevant and dictates our life today. We need to examine history to change the world.” [N]

↙← Marketplace Machinations

In a lively and competitive grade-wide activity, teams of students representing the Silk Road’s main geographic regions traded the goods, religions, and technologies native to their respective areas with their neighbors. As the game progressed through three rounds of trading, the patterns by which these commodities spread across the Middle East and the Far East demonstrated how geography determines economics. The winning teams accumulated the most diverse collection of wares, faiths, and knowledge (and the fewest diseases), nicely simulating the Silk Road’s most thriving societies.

↓ Good Reads

The Silk Road curriculum draws from a wide range of recent scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Through curated excerpts, the eighth graders develop an understanding of the fundamental conditions and systems that define human societies, and even civilization itself. “These kids are not reading material written for eighth graders,” said Cynthia Kosut. “These are grown-up books!”

ZOE MONOSSON

San Mateo I-Lab shop manager