David McCullough on the "history gap"
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
History, though, is only part of what you are concerned with, as a high school teacher, and increasingly it is not the most important.
Take, for example, my student teaching experience. When I asked a supervisor whether I should focus on Industrialization or Urbanization, or whether I would have enough time to take a detour to discuss the "robber barons," I was told that it didn't matter what I taught them. It didn't matter if I never got to the Cold War, as was written in the curriculum map, and it didn't matter if we covered Vanderbilt but not Edison, or if I spent a week on the First World War but only a day on the Civil War.
"The only thing that matters is that you teach them how to write," she said.
You see, our school was being examined by the state (Connecticut), and our standardized test scores were low. History teachers were openly referred to as "secondary english teachers," and our purpose was to teach children to write essays with thesis sentences. Every week, we were to devote class time to writing lessons, go over things such as topic sentences, conclusion paragraphs, editing, grammar, etc. Never mind that the kids have nothing to write about, nothing to say, because they haven't actually engaged with the world in any meaningful way. They could have been writing VCR instruction manuals.
History isn't tested on standardized tests. It isn't tested because no one cares. Writing is important because it gets you a job. History never gets anyone a higher salary (with the possible exception of history teachers), and so who gives a shit?
You have no idea how demoralizing it was to see the subject I love, that I passionately believe in, degraded in this way. Who cares what you teach? It's all a bunch of useless bullshit anyway, right?
Our problem with history is a symptom of our problem with education, which is that we don't know what it's for. We don't know, or can't decide, why we still adhere to the classical, liberal form of education. When little Joan or Sam or Miguel looks up at us and asks why he has to learn about Thomas Edison, the administrators of our school systems have no idea what to tell them. They don't say that the world is more interesting, more vivid, more meaningful, when you understand how it works. They don't say that we only understand ourselves when we understand where we come from. They don't say that much of popular culture has roots in historical precedents, and that understanding historical references opens up a whole new level of cultural understanding. They don't say that all Americans have a civic duty to understand their own past, and they don't say that understanding the past is the only way to avoid repeating our worst atrocities.
They say that it will all help them get a good job.
And that's total bullshit, and the kids know it.
If you are teaching them English writing, then perhaps that is a fault with you, your school, or something else.
Regardless, you still do teach them about what you said so your rant really makes little sense to me.
You can see the detailed question results at http://www.scribd.com/doc/58246319/Brown
The summary is:
82% of test-takers correctly answered the "easy" multiple-choice question (identify the case from a quote) about Brown. 51% correctly answered the "medium" multiple-choice question (identify the case that Brown overturned).
The "hard" question was an essay question that asked "describe the conditions that this 1954 decision was designed to correct." The results broke out as:
47% Inappropriate 26% Partial 2% Complete 23% Omitted 3% Off task
That 2% Complete is the number the article quotes. Which I would describe as "2% of students had enough time, writing ability, and understanding of Brown v. Board of Education to complete a short-answer essay question under time constraints and to the full satisfaction of the scorer."
One good thing that came out of it is drawing attention to the actual study, http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2010/2011468.a..., which shows that knowledge of history is getting better across the board.
In contrast to many federal web sites (census bureau being a notable example), that one is a pretty usable site. It has things like sample tests you can take and ways of examining national results on each test, even including sample written responses to essay questions indicating different levels of acceptability. I went through the 12th grade questions and a fair number of them are pretty hard. The "proficient" level is not easy and that only 1/4 of students are there is not so bad.
With the ongoing "death of God", as Nietzsche would put it, all the old certainties have been swept away without anything sensible to replace them. So the history syllabus has become a political battleground for partisans of all sorts of folks to play with. If students are forced to spend weeks at a time studying the dude who invented peanut butter or some dispute over bus seating, is it any wonder that the big picture gets lost?
As a first step, I would split history into two sections: "overall chronology" and "detailed studies". In "overall chronology" we'd study the basic flow of human history over the last five or seven thousand years, trying not to overly stress any particular event or group of people. Picture a giant wall chart with time along the x axis and all the major human civilizations plotted up and down the y, and then we sit down and learn the dates of key events. Start of the Han dynasty. Fall of Constantinople. Founding of Buenos Aires. Not worrying too much about what they mean, though.
In the second, we could pay attention to the details. Individual people, events, what it was like to live at a given time. We could never cover the entire chart at a detailed level, but at least we'd know the details were still there.
The problem with the approach you suggest is that students do not, and will not, care about or engage with material devoid of meaning and context. How will you get kids to memorize the "dates of key events" without getting them to care about "what they mean?" I can barely get my history classes to sit down.
History is all about meaning and context. Dates are inherently meaningless; it's the stories that history tells us about ourselves that give it worth. We need dates, and we need chronology; it just seems like your approach would lead directly to me (a history teacher) getting beaten up.
Instead of following the historical figures that you know best, such as King, it follows the students who were the ground troops in the civil rights movement. What Halberstam makes abundantly clear is how dangerous what they were doing was. Simply, they could have been killed. Some of them very nearly were. And there were people killed, but they obviously weren't around for Halberstam to interview. The corollary to that is he drives home how naked some of the violence against the protestors was.
Something I took away is how sanitized the teaching of the civil rights movement has become. By doing that, we diminish what those young people actually did, and we conveniently forget how cruel humans can be.
Personally, I think history is best taught when it has a narrative. Hence, textbooks are not good at teaching history. Books with a focused topic - which hopefully implies a focused narrative - are much more compelling. I recognize that's probably not helpful to a high school teacher. I started reading history books, on my own, in college.
I disagree. Teaching history as a narrative is the most dangerous thing you can do with history, because there's always the temptation to shoehorn it into a narrative. Good guys vs bad guys. Heroes and villains. Plucky underdogs vs arrogant empires. The human mind is stupid, and there's only a certain number of narratives which "feel" right to us, and the moment you start reducing reality in its vast complexity so it sounds like a good story, you've lost most of what was going on.
For example, what you just said:
What Halberstam makes abundantly clear is how dangerous what they were doing was. Simply, they could have been killed. Some of them very nearly were. And there were people killed, but they obviously weren't around for Halberstam to interview. The corollary to that is he drives home how naked some of the violence against the protestors was.
What about the violence committed by the protestors? Were there no evil acts committed by folks on the "good" side of this conflict? I assume there were (there always are) but these get left behind in the search of the simplified one-liner version of the "Civil Rights struggle" narrative.
History as narrative is more entertaining than real history, but it's also a lot less accurate. You might as well just watch Star Wars.
He does, however, give rather complete biographies of many of the people involved, and they were not saints. Several suffered from depression, one's behavior with women earned him scorn, and another's naked political ambitions were distasteful to many others. (That "one" was Marion Barry.)
Reading one narrative is potentially dangerous. But when you read many books on a single subject, it allows you to compare and contrast what different authors say about the same thing.
Anyway, history textbooks are distilled from the kinds of books I'm talking about, so I find your complaint rather odd.
Every year a different teacher would ask us about something from early 20th century, and we'd say we never learned that. Cause we hadn't. I had three different classes between middle and high school that kept covering the same historical periods (poorly) and the teachers mostly weren't really interested in it anyway.
I certainly can't imagine that institutionally things have gotten better. What I do envy now is kids who have the whole world at their fingertips, but I suspect the majority of them aren't being exposed to the learning and information potential available. They're just playing xbox and posting on myspace/facebook, like everyone else.
See, memories are bad too :P
In my opinion, this is probably the biggest problem. History was almost always presented to me as a desiccated list of facts, dates, and sanitized "causes of events" that needed to be memorized so you could pass the test and move on. Few teachers seemed to be able to put any life into the subject, or present the subject as a large single picture instead of tiny disjoint sets of data.
I don't know what approach would have worked best to get a younger me more interested in history. Maybe something in the style of "The Island at the Center of the World" would have worked--I do find that readable and interesting now.
Case in point: World War One. We spent weeks on that war. But we didn't learn how it started, or how it ended, or exactly who were the belligerents on both sides, or the key battles, or how it was eventually won. Instead we mostly sat around and read about how awful life was in the trenches for the soldiers -- surely important, but not at the expense of actually understanding the war. "It was a stalemate for years, and then we mysteriously won" sums up the picture of the war that we got.
Is that really the problem? Perhaps we don't reference history enough in modern society.
On the other hand, I have a lot of knowledge of topics that didn't exist back in a time when people were supposedly more historically literate.
I wonder whether anyone ever wonder about the history of the rest of the world.
The "firm grasp" number seems really low, but it could certainly be changed by what that term means. As far as Brown v. Board, that number seems so low that I'm tempted to disbelieve it. Anyone have a link to the report?
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2010/2011468.a...
"So... Apparently we had a war with America."
"Really, who won?"
"I... I guess they did."
Another friend (Japanese) visited the Holocaust memorial in Portland with me. She didn't know what the holocaust was, or that Jews had any involvement in the story of WWII whatsoever.
So, it could be worse.