Philadelphia Inquirer, July 20, 2011
The recently released findings of the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress provided another opportunity for the usual hand-wringing about how little American kids know about American history these days. An Inquirer article reported that only 13 percent of the high school seniors who took the test “showed a solid grasp of the subject.”
Sounds dismal. But before we give up on this generation, we should ask ourselves a few questions.
First, what constitutes “a solid grasp of the subject”? A half-century ago, quite a few American schoolchildren could recite the Gettysburg Address by heart, list all of the presidents, and throw in the state capitals for good measure. Today’s students would likely fail those tests.
On the other hand, almost none of the students of the 1960s were familiar with the early family-planning activist Margaret Sanger, the American Indian Ghost Dancers, or Frederick Douglass’ autobiography. So did they have a solid grasp of the subject?
That students today are weaker on the details of the standard, presidents-and-wars version of American history makes sense given the broadening of the curriculum. Our courses now include more of the history of African Americans, women, the working class, and socialists, among others. The number of school days has not increased over the last 50 years, but the amount of historical material considered worth covering has.
Which leads to a second question: What’s on these tests? Of the nine samples that appeared in a New York Times article, every single one had to do with political history.
According to the author, less than a third of the students who took the test knew that “in some regions many people did not support the War of 1812.” Should we be concerned about that?
The War of 1812 was a comedy of errors from the beginning. New Englanders were so unhappy with it that they made noises about secession. Its most famous battle, New Orleans, was fought after the peace treaty was signed. And it dragged on until early 1815.
If the War of 1812 must appear on the test, couldn’t the question about it be more engaging? How about asking students to come up with a better name for the war? That would give them a chance to think creatively and defend their reasoning. They might even remember such an exercise.
The assessment also raises broader questions: For example, does it still make sense to separate high school history courses and tests by country and region?
Not too long ago, American kids took Western-civilization courses to learn how the Greeks and Romans influenced the development of European societies. They took European history to set the stage for settlement of the New World. And U.S. history was presented as, more or less, the grand finale to the two millennia that preceded it.
Thankfully, the current trend is toward a more global approach to history education and should be encouraged. Knowing the details of Shays’ Rebellion, in post-revolutionary Massachusetts – another example from the national assessment – may be less useful than learning how historians define rebellion and discussing how a rebellion becomes a revolution. The Arab Spring comes to mind.
And while we’re reworking our curricula, we could also reassure our fellow citizens that things are rarely as bad as they seem – including the state of our students’ historical knowledge.
Among the best answers to the question – Why study history? – is to gain a more clear-eyed, less alarmist, view of the present. Any good history course should make that point.
Mr. Caulder:
I enjoyed your essay in today’s paper (Thursday, July 20) and totally agree wit=h you about the choice of material we teachers are asked to feed our student each school year. =A0I teach both Social Studies and Media Literacy at Phoenixville Area Middle School. Though i am asked to follow the curriculum like a movie script, I have to admit to some improvisation whenever the opportunity presents itself.
At the end of this past school year, I had my classes watch the 1984 Apple Macintosh Super Bowl commercial once again. It was interesting to learn how keen they were in noting that all of the colorless people marching to Big Brother’s beat, would be wearing iPods if the commercial were made in 2010. And the Big Brother face would now be that of Steve Jobs. This was a better lesson than Animal Farm to show how quickly the oppressed can become the oppressor.
A few years ago, one of my intuitive sixth-graders pointed out to me that wars can be useful.” Something to think about when you consider that it has often taken a war to settle an argument. Nothing really shapes a country or a society like a war. My wife, a Brit who tends to view America from outside the fish bowl, believes that every American political decision is still influenced in some way by Vietnam.
And of course, my very first lesson of the school year will always be this: “History is always written by the winners. The word “winners” infers a fight, or a war.
I wish PDE would allow us to develop an Inquiry Method for learning history rather than being forced to use fact-filled text books. That way students could decide for themselves what they think is important.
In the end, what is important to know about history could depend on how it effects a someone personally.
As a history major (a long long time ago), I always hated those idiotic questions on tests that favored rote memory over analysis of events or understanding of cultural, ethnic, economic, religious and generational differences. I loved your idea of renaming the War of 1812. How about the Peace(?) Treaty of Versailles? Should we all remember its date or understand the disastrous consequences of establishing “war guilt” and excessive punishment.
My better name for the War of 1812 would be “The War of Comedy and Errors”.
My better name for any war would also be The War of Comedy of Errors. They could be numbered starting with Cain bashing Abel.
As someone who used to be able to recite Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, before senile dementia introduced itself, I can tell you that almost no one in my 5th grade class circa 1952 was able to memorize The Address let alone the Presidents and the State Capitols. The trouble with identifying “a solid grasp of history” can be pondered by meditating on Schopenhauer’s dictum that to understand “history” all one need do is read Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian Wars and never think about “History” again. Keep up the good work of making the younger generations aware of the Ghost Dance movement and Frederick Douglass.
Fascinating to hear your recollection that none of the kids in your grade school class managed to memorize the Gettysburg Address, presidents or capitals.
My sense is that the Gettysburg Address fad peaked earlier in the century.
I’ll have to see whether I can find some mention of it in the newspapers of the time.
Schopenhauer’s dictum is “a classic.” I will be sure pass it on to my students.
Now that I think about1952 I must admit I wasn’t the only one in the 5th grade that was able to memorize The Address, the Presidents(there were fewer then of course) and the State Capitals(fewer of them too) ; by the 7th grade about 13% of all 7th graders were put in a class of kids who were able to memorize something or about 13% of kids who had a “solid grasp” of anything.
Some things never change.
This fleeting bending of time took place in West York, Pennsylvania, a town I’m sure Schopenhauer never pondered.. A film your students might enjoy that I recently saw on DVD in the sanctity of my home about History I think is the Werkmeister Harmonies by Bela Tarr with assistance from the novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Tarr and Krasznahorkai are not kind to “History” but they will reinforce your idea that History is a way of thinking and solidly grasping.
As for thinking the Civil War was passe by 1952, I can assure you that, being so close to Gettysburg, and coming from a family rooted in Virginia on my mother’s side, The Address, was vivid and alive in my mind in 1952. Another aspect of the intellectual life of the time was the steady public drumbeat for the final dying off of Civil War vets. I think the last one died in 1954 or so. There is a painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art I think by Jasper Johns entitled something like “1954,The Last Confederate Vet Dies” . The PAFA is a great place for time warpping to feel how the Civil War haunted the last Century.
I will certainly look for the Werkmeister Harmonies.
Interesting point about growing up as the Civil War veterans were dying. I didn’t know the last one was in ’54.
Just this past spring we had a discussion in class about the last American WWI veteran who died in March or April, if I’m remembering correctly.
The point at which we lose the living links to past events seems to be a significant one.
Hello from the past. My daughters Debbie and Barb Beaser remember you with fondness. I can’t honestly say they remember much factual history but each of them follows the news and each has strong and well supported views on world events. They also know how to study the past to help them make sense of the present – Congratulations on a job well done.
I am a professor at Cabrini college where I teach a course to prepare future history teachers. I look forward to using your op ed as a starting point for the semester’s discussion.
Enjoy the rest of the summer and best wishes for another successful school year.
Shelly
Very little factual history stuck with me from my high school history courses (I still have to relearn a fair amount every year, in fact), but I did pick up on how much fun my teachers seemed to think the subject was and I enjoyed thinking about history with them and my classmates.
As far as I can tell, passing on that interest and some of the skills needed to talk and write thoughtfully about one’s views are the most useful things we can do as teachers.
I’m thrilled that the piece might be of some use in your course.
When Michele Bachmann believes that the first shots of the revolution were fired in Concord and Lexington in New Hampshire and that the founding fathers worked tirelessly until slavery was eliminated, we have reason for concern. Topping that is Sarah Palin, who thinks we lost the “space race”.
Ask anyone who graduated from HS in the past 2 decades what the Vietnam War was about. Ask them about the Pentagon Papers, Kent State, the Tonkin Gulf Incident, the Mai Lai Massacre and the Diem assassination and watch their blank faces.
Better yet, ask people why we went to war in Iraq. That was only 8 years ago.
Those gaffes do make one wince.
I’m afraid most adults don’t remember much from any of the classes they take in school. Whether that’s more true of history is hard to say.
I agree with you that our students’ grasp of recent history is often extremely weak and some of that has to do with the fact that we (history teachers) often can’t bear to skip over the earlier material we must, if we’re going to have any chance of getting to 9/11 by June, as it were.
I graduated from HS in June 1955 but I remember learning in my senior year about the Spanish-American War and the causes of WWI and WWII. Korea was too recent to be included in our text books. It was all so simple. The Spanish blew up the Maine and the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. We were the good guys, riding on the white horse. Then came Vietnam and suddenly many people were questioning our good guy status.
I’m just curious. Could you teach a HS class that there was something called the Mai Lai Massacre and discuss what happened there? Could you, even in a cursory way, explain that the Pentagon Papers revealed that for over 2 decades we conducted a war based on lies, secrecy and deceit? If young people don’t learn these things, how will they ever doubt or question what the government tells them in their adult years?
You’re right. That was a different era.
At least it seemed less complicated.
We do teach about the My Lai Aassacre. One of my students also wrote about it this year in her research project studying the coverage of the Vietnam War in New York Times from ’65 to ’75.
We talk fairly often about secrecy and deceit because it’s fairly often a part of how things happen. Our tenth graders read excerpts from the Church Report on the CIA’s activities in Chile, for example.
Margaret Sanger was an early proponent of eugenics. Or making the American race better through preventing poor people from breeding. She wrote many articles approving of the Nazis. Why is knowing about her a good thing as your editorial apparently believes?
With the advantage of hindsight, we can see that Sanger made some mistakes, but she also fought some impressive battles against long odds. She is effectively the founder of Planned Parenthood and whether one supports the organization’s mission, or not, it certainly plays an important role in our cultural history.
I wanted to thank you for your very thoughtful commentary in today’s Inquirer. As a teacher of African American history at the high school level and middle school World Geography, your essay really hit home. I completely agree that the NAEP does not measure the analytical skills that are most important for 21st century students. You give such strong examples to back up your arguments (exactly what we want to teach our students, right?).
I found it interesting that you didn’t even mention the impact of the Internet on the teaching of history. Teaching students to evaluate the voluminous information at their finger tips now seems more important than making sure that the information is committed to memory. I read recently about some recent brain research that indicates that people are less likely to remember information that they know they can easily find on-line.
I intend to share this piece with my department once we return to school in September–and to enjoy every day of summer until then!
Thanks again for sharing your fresh perspective on the tired notion that American kids know less and less about our history.
Thanks for you’re insightful perspective on history lessons and tests. Your second to the last sentence about exaggerating the significance of currents events was very true. I believe the Bush Administration and the American public could have used this information when they believed that Al Qaeda was such a unique enemy unlike any enemy known to modern man. This concept allowed Bush to push for the Iraq war and totally overstate the real threats. Anyway, thanks again for the article.
Now, how about Geography knowledge? 🙁