The Core Knowledge Blog

“Maybe if we start listening, history will stop repeating itself.” — Lily Tomlin

A pair of researchers asked 2000 high school juniors and seniors from across the country to “write down the names of the most famous Americans in history.” The top three most-cited names were Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman. “Three of the top five — and six of the top 10 — are women,” reports USA Today. “It suggests that the ‘cultural curriculum’ that most kids — and by extension, their parents — experience in school,” writes Greg Toppo, “increasingly emphasizes the stories of Americans who are not necessarily dead, white or male.” According to USA Today, the researchers involved in the project believe the prominence of black Americans signals “a profound change” in how students view history. “Over the course of about 44 years, we’ve had a revolution in the people who we come to think about to represent the American story,” says Sam Wineburg of Stanford University, one of the study’s two authors.

A less charitable explanation is that American students have been so deprived of even a rudimentary knowledge of their own history that it doesn’t strike them as odd to name Oprah Winfrey, #7 on the list, as one of the most important people in American history. Other names cited most often by students in the study are Susan B. Anthony, Benjamin Franklin and Amelia Earhart. Marilyn Monroe, not incidentally, beat out both Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein.

By coincidence, Joanne Jacobs posted yesterday about another recent study in Great Britain. A survey of 3,000 teenagers revealed that one in five think Winston Churchill was a fictional character, while a majority believe Sherlock Holmes (58%), King Arthur (65%) and Robin Hood (51%) were real people. The Beatles so effectively immortalized Eleanor Rigby for picking up rice in the church where a wedding has been that 47% believe she’s a real person, too. The U.K. study was not academic research, but a survey done for British TV. Still, it doesn’t take an Einstein, or even a Marilyn Monroe, to connect the dots and be alarmed by what the London Telegraph correctly called teens “extraordinary paucity of basic historical knowledge.”

Or maybe it does. Google “Winston Churchill fictional,” and you’ll find plenty of commentary from Brits who are exercised by how little their kids know about their own history. Over here, meanwhile, a professor at one of our most prestigious universities tells USA Today, apparently with a straight face,”There’s a kind of shift going on, from the narrative of the founders, which is the national mythic narrative, to the narrative of expanding rights.” Putting aside Marilyn and Oprah, who symbolize our expanding rights to God knows what, our ignorance is not embarrassing, but a virtue—a shift in the narrative.

Another shift occurred long ago. From schools where a basic knowledge of history was considered a vital precursor to effective participation in our democracy, to an anti-academic orientation that views history as unimportant, useful only as a means of correcting historical injustices, or perhaps something that will be nice to get to after the literacy block, math, and test prep, if time allows.

When I would ask my South Bronx fifth graders to chose a prominent African-American for Black History Month projects, the overwhelming majority chose Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King. Unless you count contemporary athletes, actors and rappers, those two were practically the only names available when they rifled through their mental duffle bags. So last year I did the unthinkable, the forbidden, the thing-that-must-not-be-named: I assigned biography subjects. The posters, timelines and two-page reports (reports!) represented some of my kids’ best work of the year, and the majority of my students took pride in their expertise about previously obscure figures like Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, Matthew Henson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Jesse Owens and others. We created posters about our newly discovered heroes based on the U.S. Postal Service’s Black History stamp series, and hung them in the hallway outside our classroom, which we shared with the school’s art teacher.

I left those posters up for the rest of the school year, long after they became tattered, so when the other classes lined up for art, the younger kids might have a few minutes to look at them, and perhaps become familiar with names like W.E.B. DuBois, Scott Joplin, Booker T. Washington, Joe Louis and Ralph Bunche. It was a safe bet they weren’t going see or hear them anywhere else.