

David McCullough on the "history gap" - grellas
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304432304576369421525987128.html?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_opinion

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enemieslist
I'm a history teacher, with Master's degrees in both History and Education,
and what McCullough says here deeply resonates with me.

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.

~~~
Andrew_Quentin
Well, I guess you were taught to bullshit well too. If the kids at the time
don't know why they are learning something, they find out when they grow up.

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.

------
blatherard
This article paints the worst possible picture. I took a look at the actual
data on the NAEP website for the questions about Brown vs. Board of Education,
which the article claims only 2% of students understand. In fact, a majority
of students were able to answer basic questions about the case.

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."

~~~
bugsy
Thank you very much for taking the time to track that down. The facts are
incontrovertible in this case, the article about the report is a bald faced
lie. This is disappointing on many levels. It's not clear whether Brian Bolduc
the article author or David McCullough the historian being discussed in the
article is the perpetrator of this specific fraud, but it's egregious enough
as to need to disregard all the conclusions of the article, just as we
routinely disregard all the testimony of perjured witnesses. A pity since
maybe there is something to what is being said. We can't use this article as a
source for it though, it is tainted.

One good thing that came out of it is drawing attention to the actual study,
[http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2010/2011468.a...](http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2010/2011468.asp),
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.

------
hugh3
History is a relatively easy subject to teach and learn, _once_ everybody
agrees on what bits are important and should be taught. A hundred years ago we
had this all figured out --we might have had an excessively narrow perspective
on history, but at least we all agreed about it.

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.

~~~
enemieslist
You make some good points, but..."some dispute over bus seating?" I assume
you're talking about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, widely considered to be the
first major victory of the Civil Rights Movement? The one where a young
25-year-old preacher named Martin Luther King first rose to national
prominence? The one where the non-violent protest tactics of groups like the
SCLC, which would go on to dominate the struggle for civil rights until the
1970s, were given their first serious test on the national stage?

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.

~~~
scott_s
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to plug "The Children" by David
Halberstam: [http://www.amazon.com/Children-David-
Halberstam/dp/044900439...](http://www.amazon.com/Children-David-
Halberstam/dp/0449004392/)

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.

~~~
hugh3
_Personally, I think history is best taught when it has a narrative. Hence,
textbooks are not good at teaching history_

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.

~~~
scott_s
The civil rights movement was rare in that the protestors did not commit
violent acts - at least not the ones that were followed. These were people who
were committed to non-violence as a principle. Why this is true is an
interesting discussion unto itself; they spent months studying non-violent
protest and had to mentally and physically prepare themselves to be attacked
and not retaliate. While I did not agree with their reasons all the time, I
have to conclude that in this instance, the tactic of non-violence was
extremely effective. However, I think it's only possible when there is already
an existing culture of the rule of law - or, at least, lip service to it.

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.

------
mgkimsal
I remember discussing this with a friend over 20 years ago when we were just
starting college. Our thought _then_ was that "social studies" and "history"
classes we'd had were, for the most part, garbage. Didn't matter what
year/class it was, you'd inevitably end up at the end of the semester with
about 3 days left and everything from the US Civil War to modern times to skip
over.

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.

~~~
Andrew_Quentin
I guess you know most of the history now though. I wonder how that happened?

See, memories are bad too :P

~~~
mgkimsal
I know a lot more than I was taught, because I went and read up on it myself.
I didn't do it all in school - mostly later and as an adult. However, I think
I largely got a love of learning _outside_ the classroom - very few teachers
actually sparked any interest in learning, regardless of the subject.

------
amcintyre
> Mr. McCullough's eyebrows leap at his final point: "And they're so badly
> written. They're boring! Historians are never required to write for people
> other than historians."

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.

~~~
hugh3
The way I was taught history (in Australia), it could have used a whole lot
more lists of facts and dates.

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.

~~~
whatusername
But we learned how WW1 started. It was when those arrogant/bumbling British
generals sent in the brave ANZAC forces and despite the poor leadership -
through the power of mateship and a donkey - they won the great military
victory at Gallipoli.

------
yesimahuman
Is it what we haven't learned, or what we've forgotten? I was taught a lot of
history in high school, but like most things that don't get recalled very
often, I've forgotten a lot.

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.

------
flocial
I've read some of his books yet I initially read his last name "McClure". I
wonder how we'll reflect on our history after a decade of information
overload? Seems like our ability to forget will get kicked into overdrive as a
coping mechanism. Maybe reading a good history will be therapeutic.

------
eru
> This week, the Department of Education released the 2010 National Assessment
> of Educational Progress, which found that only 12% of high-school seniors
> have a firm grasp of our nation's history.

I wonder whether anyone ever wonder about the history of the rest of the
world.

~~~
rflrob
Maybe, but if the numbers really are so low for a relatively constrained topic
like the 500 year history of one nation, expanding the scope to the entirety
of human history seems like it's going to have even less impact.

------
rflrob
>This week, the Department of Education released the 2010 National Assessment
of Educational Progress, which found that only 12% of high-school seniors have
a firm grasp of our nation's history. And consider: Just 2% of those students
understand the significance of Brown v. Board of Education.

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?

------
blatherard
Here's the National Assessment of Educational Progess, "The Nation's Report
Card: U.S. History 2010" which is the basis for the article.

[http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2010/2011468.a...](http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2010/2011468.asp)

------
georgieporgie
For what it's worth, a friend of a friend (Japanese, very fluent in both
English and Japanese) was walking around during a return trip to Japan. She
happened to be walking behind a couple of high schoolers.

"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.

~~~
oikjhgbpokj
Thats not ignorance so much as politics. In Japanese history they were the
victims of WWII, their army went to china as a peace keeping force and then
they were nuked.

~~~
hugh3
That's a bit of an exaggeration, but yes, it's fairly safe to say that the
Japanese view of World War 2 is a little... well, foreign.

