10/10/2026
A Headmaster's Perspective: “Lessons in History are Best Learned Outside the Classroom”
I recently had the privilege of taking our eighth-grade U.S. History students from Mars Hill Academy to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where we spent the day walking the ground on which one of the most consequential battles in American history unfolded.
We began at McPherson’s Ridge, following the events of July 1, 1863, through Oak Hill and Barlow’s Knoll. From there, we traced the battle to Culp’s Hill, where we also considered the human tragedy of war through the stories of Jennie Wade and Jack Skelly. We continued to the Wheatfield, the Peach Orchard, Devil’s Den, and Little Round Top, examining the decisions, sacrifices, courage, and consequences that shaped those terrible three days.
We concluded at Evergreen Cemetery, reflecting on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and his remarkable ability to place the sacrifice of so many within the larger context of our nation's founding principles.
This is what experiential education offers that a textbook alone cannot. There is something profoundly different about reading of a battle and standing where it was fought. Distances become real. Terrain becomes significant. Military decisions become understandable. And the staggering human cost of war becomes something more than a statistic.
But there is an even greater purpose to such experiences.
At Mars Hill Academy, we study history not merely to accumulate knowledge about the past, but to cultivate wisdom for the present and the future. We want our students to understand that they are inheritors of a civilization, that ideas have consequences, and that the decisions of previous generations continue to shape the world in which they live.
Winston Churchill once observed, “The greatest advances in human civilization have come when we recovered what we had lost: when we learned the lessons of history.”
That is precisely why we take our students to places like Gettysburg. We want them not simply to know what happened, but to understand why it matters.
And sometimes, the best classroom has no walls.
