“Don’t Know Much About History”

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

I come away from my year as president of the OAH more impressed than ever by the vitality of histor ical practice in all of its varied sites. The annual meeting in Boston promises a cornucopia of intellectual pleasures. Hundreds of OAH members are participating in collaborations funded by the Teaching American History grant program created by Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-West Virginia), and, in the process, building bridges between professional historians, historical agencies, and precollegiate history teachers. The OAH is becoming both a bigger tent and a more agile organization, as it seeks new ways to share the excitement of historical research with a younger generation and a broader public. Yet neither the dazzling research on display at our annual gathering nor these innovations make good news bites, nor do they seem to register with die-hards eager to stir the embers of the so called "culture wars."

The culture wars burst into the news with the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy (1987). The brouhaha engulfed history when the National Endowment for the Humanities invited a broad group of precollegiate teachers and college and university historians, led by former OAH President Gary Nash, to devise guidelines for the study of history in the nation's schools. We knew we were in trouble when, on the floor of Congress, Senator Slade Gorton (R-Washington) summed up the attacks on this effort by posing a choice that he saw as a key to the survival of democracy as we know it: “George Washington or Bart Simpson,” he asked—which represented a “more important part of our Nation's history for our children to study” (1).

No such media attention has attended the release of recent reports on the state of history education by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the Albert Shanker Institute. But I want to draw your attention to them nonetheless. Effective State Standards for U.S. History: A 2003 Report Card and Education for Democracy (2003) differ somewhat in tone and content. In each, critics mix valid concerns about the state of history education with recycled stereotypes that do little to advance our common project: to help teachers marry up-to-date, research-based content with sophisticated pedagogical practices that guide students toward thinking critically about the past and its legacy for the present.

In a few weeks, we will make available on the OAH web site a survey of history education (including history teacher certification requirements, history content standards for teachers and students, high school history graduation and exit exams requirements, and standards-based assessments in history) in each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia. We will also mount a summary of the Fordham and Shanker reports, along with a number of other perspectives on the issues at hand and links and citations for further reading. Prepared by Laura Micheletti Puaca, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, this compendium is designed both to reprise an old controversy and to alert you to a new round of polemics that may roil the waters of history education in the months and years ahead.

As you will see, these reports make a number of points with which most historians would agree. The necessity of requiring formal training in history for history teachers and of strengthening American history as a separate subject within the core curriculum are two points of agreement that leap immediately to mind. The critical importance of historical consciousness for democratic citizenship is another. More generally, these reports signal a renewed attention to historical education that most practitioners would applaud.

It would be a mistake, in any case, to frame this discussion as us vs. them. In fact, professional historians often share a number of the critics’ more problematic habits. Among these are the tendency to mock students for what they don't know, denigrate or ignore the work of education researchers, and—at least until recently—treat teachers on the front lines not as full-fledged partners but as part of the problem or as beneficiaries of our intellectual largess (2).

In a recent article in the Phi Delta Kappan, education researcher Richard J. Paxton skewers the “pop quizzes” that periodically inspire a round of hand-wringing about “historical illiteracy” among pundits, parents, professors, and politicians alike. College seniors in a 2000 survey, for instance, scored an average of 53 percent on multiple-choice questions. These “dismal” results set off a flutter of lamentations about “collective amnesia” and “civic ignorance.” Doing what historians are supposed to do—bringing a historical perspective to bear—Paxton looks at such surveys over time. He finds that the United States has a long tradition of assessing students' knowledge of the past through “recall-on-demand” telephone surveys, the results of which have been remarkably consistent. From 1917 to the present, students have dredged up correct answers to approximately the same percentage of the questions put to them—and this was as true of the “Greatest Generation” that went on to win World War II as it is of the much larger and more diverse student body of today. This consistency, Paxton argues, reveals more about the surveys than it does about what students know: “If standardized tests do a poor job of capturing the full spectrum of student ability and knowledge, then what can be said of surveys in which a telephone rings and an interviewer quickly begins asking unexpected questions?” (3)

Using such surveys as a starting point for debate diverts us from the real challenge at hand: how to use what students do know—the ideas and identities they glean from family stories, museums, historic sites, films, television and the like—to engage them in the life-changing process of learning to think historically (4). To meet that challenge we need to draw on the revolutions in historical knowledge that have taken place over the past forty years; on new developments in public history and history education research; and on the ideas and experience of precollegiate teachers.

For an excellent introduction to such fresh thinking, see Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History, an anthology inspired by the Teaching Division of the AHA and funded by the Spencer Foundation. One development stressed by this volume is the “cognitive revolution” that alerts us to how the frameworks students bring with them to the classroom influence, indeed often determine, what they take away. Another is a heightened interdisciplinary interest in history “as a distinct form of knowing and understanding.” We can also benefit from new understandings of how collective memory “takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects,” including but hardly limited to—and astonishingly understudied in—the classroom. Taken together and combined with a new spirit of boundary crossing, these developments can point us toward fresh collaborations, understandings and practices (5).

Yet all the fresh thinking in the world can take us only so far if “historical illiteracy” becomes a wedge issue used to promote policies that hamstring creative teachers and punish resource-poor schools. To prevent this result we must do what most professional historians are not very good at doing: translate complex issues into language that makes sense to politicians and the public. We must also work hand-in-hand with front-line teachers and teacher educators. Nowhere is this effort needed more than in the ongoing debates about educational standards and high-stakes testing.

As a voluntary and collaborative project between historians and teachers, the writing and revising of state history standards could contribute to an ongoing, dynamic process of revitalization. Yet the demand for standardization entails dangers as well as possibilities. The greatest of these is the potential link between standards and high-stakes testing. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which couples high-stakes tests in math and reading with punitive sanctions, has not delivered on its promise of new funding for resource-starved schools. That act has, however, disproportionately punished schools with minority populations, undermined teachers' morale, reduced opportunities for students to engage in active learning, and encouraged school systems to distort their graduation rates and test results.

History is not one of the subjects included in these mandatory tests—and that exclusion puts history educators in a double bind. The pressure to “teach-to-the-test” in math and reading could further squeeze history out of the curriculum. Yet inclusion could have devastating consequences, especially in the face of assessment practices geared to rote memorization and not to the more complex problem of measuring the ability to assess evidence, weigh conflicting interpretations, discern causality, develop arguments, formulate comparisons, and trace change and continuity—all of which would seem to be critical to what the Shanker Institute calls “education for democracy” (6).

These are difficult issues. There are no simple answers, and there is plenty of room for serious research, hard thinking and frank conversation. But there is no question about one thing: professional historians must carve out for themselves an active and productive role in national, state and local educational policy debates. In so doing, we are following in a well-established, if often interrupted, tradition. Looking back on the controversies of recent decades, we may see not only sound and fury, but a critical turning point—a moment in which growing numbers of historians turned outward once more. Influencing the world beyond the academy is both a civic and a professional duty. In forging partnerships to vitalize precollegiate history education, we become better teachers ourselves. In promoting analytical, research-based history education, we help to produce engaged citizens while at the same time creating a civic culture that values the work we love.

2. Stearns, et al., 6.

3. Richard J. Paxton, “Don’t Know Much About History—Never Did,” Phi Delta Kappan (December 2003), 265, 270, 272. According to Paxton, the 2000 survey was conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut.

4. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

5. Stearns, et al., 2-5; Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, 26 (Spring 1989): 9. The term “cognitive revolution” was coined by Howard Gardner.

6. Stearns, et al., 472-73.