Our interviewer, Beth Battle Anderson, is President and CEO of the Core Knowledge Foundation. Cleopatra was the last active ruler of ancient Egypt and one of history’s most famous queens. You can meet her in the Free Library or CKHG Unit 2 in Ancient Rome, free to download here.
Beth: Every fall, Core Knowledge teachers everywhere brace for the same happy problem: how do you make Ancient Egypt or Ancient Rome feel alive to a room of ten-year-olds on day three of the new school year? This month, I got a head start by sitting down with one of the most beguiling characters herself, Cleopatra VII, last pharaoh of Egypt, fluent in nine languages, and (still, apparently) allergic to being kept waiting.
Beth: Your Majesty, thank you for making time.
Cleopatra: Two thousand years is a long wait for a good conversation. So, what do people still want to know?
Beth: Let’s start where the textbooks usually don’t. You weren’t just beautiful or bold; you were formidably educated.
Cleopatra: (laughing) Ah, beauty. It’s always the opener. People have always found it easier to talk about my looks than my education. I read Homer in Greek. I was the first ruler in my family to learn Eqyptian in three hundred years. I could talk with visitors from Ethiopia, scholars from Judea, generals from Parthia, all in their own language. That wasn’t just to be seen as welcoming and warm; it was disarming, and it’s how I survived.
Beth: You became queen at eighteen. That’s younger than most of our high schoolers heading off to college!
Cleopatra: (a slow smile) And I came from a family where power changed hands constantly, and rarely gently. My own father lost his throne once and had to buy it back. I did not have the luxury of learning as I went. Everything I knew, I had to know before I needed it, whether it was the history of every kingdom near mine or the temperament of every Roman general who might one day bring an army to our shores. Knowledge gave me confidence and power. It was both my armor and my sword.
Beth: That’s exactly where I want to go. There are folks in education today who think we should just focus on teaching children generic “skills” like critical thinking and foundational skills like “phonics,” trusting that the knowledge part comes along sometime later, or may not even be as necessary because we have all this technology that puts “knowledge” at our fingertips so we can just ‘look it up.’
Cleopatra: (eyebrows raised, amused) Really? People really believe and argue about this?
Beth: Constantly, I’m afraid.
Cleopatra: People mistake knowledge for information. It is not. Knowledge is the thread that ties a thousand facts together. Knowledge allows you to read a treaty, find the one word Caesar’s scribe quietly changed, and know his intentions before he speaks them. I didn’t just have a feeling about Rome, I had studied it, for years. You can’t navigate your way through an empire you’ve never bothered to understand. And I don’t think you can ask a child to have a confident understanding of a whole world nobody has shown them.
Beth: This is the idea at the heart of our curriculum at Core Knowledge: if children know more about the world, they can understand what they read, make connections across ideas, and learn new things more easily. They’re prepared to navigate their world. That’s the whole premise of a knowledge-building education, and it’s why it’s free through our Sequence and our Free Library. No child should be locked out of the kind of knowledge that let you outmaneuver two Roman generals!
Cleopatra: An unusual philosophy. In my world, knowledge was guarded because it was power.
Beth: And in my world, we know what it costs when children don’t have access to it. Some begin school having heard thousands of words and stories at home. Others arrive with far fewer opportunities to build that background knowledge. A knowledge-building curriculum tries to give every child the same rich foundation to build on, regardless of where they started.
Cleopatra: (quiet for a moment) Then you are doing something I could not. I could gather knowledge for myself, but I could not place it within the reach of an entire kingdom of children I would never meet.
Beth: That’s the goal. So, deal? Knowledge first, skills follow?
Cleopatra: We agree. Give the children the whole map before you send them out to find their own way. That is all I ever asked of my own teachers.
Beth: I’ll have that embroidered on something.
Cleopatra: (smiling) Good. And tell your teachers, when they tell my story, please don’t introduce me as a beauty or a scandal! Introduce me as proof of what a well-stocked mind can do. I ruled a kingdom for two decades in a world built to see me fail. Not because of how I looked. Because of what I knew.
Beth: Consider it done!
Cleopatra: (rising, already halfway out the door) And do bring me back for the fall of Rome. I have opinions about that, too.
Editor’s note: Speaking of characters with opinions – if your students have been asking about a certain shipwrecked Greek making headlines this summer, Cleopatra’s not the only one waiting for them in the Core Knowledge collection. Odysseus took the long way home about a thousand years before she took the throne; our Core Classics edition gets him there faster.