America desperately needs to become a “water cooler nation” again, with a common set of cultural references, says historian Richard Norton Smith. “It shouldn’t be Britney Spears or the latest celebrity divorce or even last week’s box office grosses,” he notes in an interview on the Public School Insights blog, but rather ”Gettysburg and Rosa Parks–and an endless source of possibilities. And I think the common culture, the popular culture, has both a lot to answer for and, correspondingly, a lot to give.”
Claus von Zastrow, Executive Director of the Learning First Alliance, asks Smith if American students are getting enough civic and history education. Smith, a reknowned presidential historian and biographer, offers a weary laugh then replies, “No. They are not.”
And the moment I say that, I qualify it with an expression of sympathy for any teacher, at any level, who is competing with a mass culture that encourages historical and civic illiteracy, if indeed not illiteracy generally. It’s important to get that right up front. No, they’re not. And the evidence of that is to be found in every survey that’s been taken for as long as I can remember….The evidence is overwhelming that we are not imparting to young people a sense of not only where we came from, but, as a result, who we are. And who we might become.
Smith makes a passionate case for teaching history as a means of enhancing civic engagement. “I have always been bewildered by people who say, ‘Oh god, history, it’s so dull.’ Now, maybe it seemed dull because, to be honest, maybe it was taught badly. Maybe it was reduced to mind-numbing treaties and irrelevant battles and dates. But that’s not history. That’s a calendar. History is the most colorful, dramatic, emotional, inspiring, outraging subject I can think of. It is life. And if we walk away from it or if we minimize it or over-simplify it, it seems to me we’re doing a great disservice to ourselves.”
Great stuff. The full interview is available here. A edited transcript is on the LFA blog here.
History is dull because you can’t change it. There are no exciting outcomes or surprise endings. When we read about Pearl Harbor, I wasn’t on the edge of my seat, biting my nails, “Can we beat the Japanese? the Germans? What can I do to help?”
History was more useful in the past when wide communication was more difficult — it was necessary to use history as a cultural reference because you couldn’t know whether distant relatives and foreigners would have the same news and recent data available.
In 1700, it was unlikely that my visiting relatives would know about a scandalous politician local to me. Now, we all have common, immediate knowledge of news. Now, we all know who Britney Spears is, and her ups and downs -are- a valid cultural reference. Though she’s (shockingly) not mentioned in any history textbook I’ve used, we are able to learn from her life — perhaps those who don’t know about Britney Spears are doomed to repeat her struggles?
Historians who argue passionately (or “with a weary laugh”) for the value of detailed knowledge of history are niche specialists trying to gather support. Treat them with the same skepticism you give to early adopters of technology.
I’m not sure about the “again” part…
I have my issues with the thinness of content in the elementary grades, and not just in history. My 7th grade daughter asked me this morning why the Moon was up in the day time, and said, no they’d never talked about this in any science class.
But I wonder if the idea of a “water cooler” nation isn’t partly looking backward through rose-colored glasses to a time when people who gathered at water coolers tended to be more culturally homogeneous.
This may mean we need the shared knowledge learned in school even more, since we don’t bring as much from home. But the “it was so much better in the old days” arguments seem dubious to me.
There is a quote in this post that I want to attack, or at least discuss. I did read the transcript of Smith’s interview and I realize I am taking a bit of a tangent, but I think it has some importance. The quote is this, speaking of history: ” . . . . . maybe it was taught badly. Maybe it was reduced to mind-numbing treaties and irrelevant battles and dates. . . . .” I’m not disagreeing with Smith that history can be taught badly. Indeed I suspect it often is. But there are many ways that history, or any subject, can be taught badly (and perhaps many ways that it can be taught well). My concern is what type of thinking might follow this quote. If we say we don’t want to let history be reduced to mind-numbing treaties and irrelevant battles, we are perilously close to saying that facts are not important. I am sensitive to this from personal experience. When I took history as a freshman at the University of Missouri in 1961 we were told exactly that. Facts are not important. We got that from the lecturer in the course (speaking to an auditorium full of students), and then we had it repeated, with feeling and conviction, about every week from the lab instructor (speaking to a class of about 25). I felt at the time we were being subjected to a lot of rhetoric that was probably counterproductive.
I didn’t care too much for the course. I felt it wasn’t a very good course and I wasn’t getting much history. But it was an “honors” course. By the end of the semester I had decided I didn’t care to take any more “honors” courses – too much rhetoric. They were going “to teach us to think”. That sort of rhetoric doesn’t appeal to me. In fact it irritates me.
But most importantly it shaped my attitude toward history for some years to come. However years later I made an important discovery, important to me personally at least. History can be interesting. I discovered that purely by chance. I have always read various things, and a book on the Spanish Armada somehow crossed my path. It proved interesting enough to sustain my attention, but it did more. It proved to be a beginning of a change in my thinking about history. I discovered that history can be interesting, I mean actually interesting. Why didn’t I discover this in high school, or before?
Looking back over a period of time I was able to see how a chain of unfortunate circumstances did real damage to my education in history. My history teacher in seventh and eighth grade was competent, but had a long-standing reputation in our town for being just plain mean. That doesn’t do much to develop interest. My tenth grade world history teacher was neither competent nor conscientious. He never should have been a teacher, and got himself fired a year or so later for a number of reasons. He gave me no clue that history could actually be interesting. I thought my eleventh grade American history teacher was competent, if uninspiring. History was okay, but not really interesting like some of my other courses were. But years later, after discovering that history can be interesting, I was able to look back and see how he was a victim of the same view of teaching history that was so deleterious in my freshman college history. He had at least some of the perspective, though not the rhetoric, that I didn’t care for in the college freshman history course. Their perspective and rhetoric (”facts are not important”) was not only counterproductive, but I also concluded it was stupid. Facts are important. Of course they are important. How could anyone say otherwise? (Of course this is not to say facts are sufficient, but facts are necessary.)
Of course I am not saying anything heretical on this blog. Information is power, and that includes facts.
I have long been a critic of what comes out of ed schools. Educational theory from the educational establishment is typically shallow and not grounded in reality. However over the years I have learned to expect no better from noneducators when they venture into educational theory. Reporters and commentators, when they write about education, typically are shallow and not grounded in reality. They often think they are reporting on a wonderful new idea, when it is actually an unrealistic ideal that was well developed (perhaps in a different form with different vocabulary) early in the twentieth century. My freshman history professor would be appalled to be put in the same category as the education professors that he would disdain. But in his perspective and rhetoric about the teaching of history he was very much with them.
I can’t accuse Smith of this. He doesn’t go on to talk about how history should be taught. Perhaps he would not fall for the ideals of progressive education that had enduring appeal but little success. Perhaps he would be as put off by my freshman history course as I was. His choice of words, “mind-numbing treaties and irrelevant battles and dates” evokes a strong response in me, but may not at all lead to the follies I encountered in my college freshman history course.
How should history be taught? I don’t know. I’m still struggling to figure out how math should be taught. It is true, I think, that there are many ways to teach a subject poorly, and perhaps many ways to teach it well. I just wanted to get my two cents in on one way to teach history poorly.
At the elementary school level, I wonder if teacher preparation is an important factor. I was a political science major at a state university. In my Intro to American Government class, a portion of my classmates were elementary educators. This was the only class they had to take in American Government. Not only that, but they could chose to take either a semester of American History or the intro American government class. Elementary educators were graduating for college with less American History and Government than most of my friends graduated high school with (AP American Government and AP American History). You can’t teach what you don’t know.
I remember going to the teachers’s lounge one December midday for lunch and relating an episode from my fourth grade class. I had asked the class if anyone knew what important event in history had taken place on this day in history and only two kids in the room knew the answer.
The dozen or so teachers in the staff room looked at me with somewhat of a collective enigmatic expression. None of them, not a one, knew it was December 7.
Dave: If history is dull to those who already know what happened, shall we assume that it’s riveting to the millions who lack that knowledge? For example, the Civil War could be a real cliffhanger for the many people who think it took place after World War I.
But knowing a fact or two about history shouldn’t really necessarily rob it of its luster. Jay Winik’s civil war history, April 1865, was a gripping book, even for those who can boast some knowledge about who fought, when they fought, and who won.
For my South Bronx 5th graders, the real tragedy was not that they didn’t have a grasp of history, but it never occured to them — nor had it been explained — why it should matter. We all have our set piece speeches as teachers, and one of mine was to ask my kids if they thought the world outside their window always looked the way it does today? How had it changed? Why? This goes beyond facts and dates. To have no appreciation of history is to live your life as if you and the world were both born yesterday, with no ability to anticipate its future.
Dave,
If history is dull, it’s because one had a bad teacher or one is unbearably self-important.
Genevieve,
Thank you for having the courage to speak the truth.
I’m not going to disagree with Genevieve, but from the perspective of an elementary educator, if you didn’t learn enough American History in your own K-12 years, it’s hardly the college’s fault if you don’t have the background to teach, say, 4th grade social studies.
One of the tricky bits about elementary social studies (at least in CA) is all the local history that’s mandated. I certainly couldn’t walk into a 4th grade class and teach California history. I don’t think its a bad approach — and my daughter really liked county history in 3rd grade — but it probably does leave many teachers focusing on “themes” rather than “facts” unless they’re really into the subject themselves (which fortunately my daughter’s 3rd grade teacher was).