We "Don't Know Much About History" and Never Did
We "Don't Know Much About History" and Never Did
Earlier this week The National Assessment of Educational Progress reported that 8th graders in the United States scored lower on their History and Civics assessment than they have since the Department of Education started testing for this in 1994.
No one seems to know why students did so poorly. Some are blaming the impact of the pandemic while others have highlighted the decreased time now spent in the study of history in many schools across the country. And, of course, Republicans and Democrats have their own self-serving explanations. On one side we are supposedly witnessing the results of “wokeness” and on the other restrictions imposed on teachers in Republican-controlled states.
I suspect that all of these factors have played some role to different degrees, but what I find interesting is that no one has pointed out that, from a historical perspective, there is little that is new here.
Students in the United States have always done poorly on standardized history exams. In 1917, 1,500 students in Texas from elementary school through college were tested and the results were dismal. They were able to identify 1492, but not 1776; confused Thomas Jeffeson with Jefferson Davis; and linked the Articles of Confederation with the Confederacy.
In the middle of World War II the New York Times published on its front page an article titled, “Ignorance of U.S. History Shown by College Freshman.” Just over five percent of students could identity the thirteen original colonies, while less than twenty-five percent could name two contributions from Thomas Jefferson. Abraham Lincoln both “emaciated the slaves” and was father of the Constitution.
I could go on and trace this pattern through the rest of the twentieth century, but the point I am trying to make is an obvious one. Every ten years a report is published highlighting how little our children know about American history and we throw up our hands thinking that this is the end of democracy as we know it.
According to Sam Wineburg:
A sober look at a century of history testing provides no evidence for the ‘gradual disintegration of cultural memory’ or a growing historical ignorance.’ The only thing growing is our amnesia of past ignorance. Test results over the last hundred years point to a peculiar American neurosis: each generation’s obsession with testing its young only to discover—and rediscover—their ‘shameful’ ignorance. The consistency of results across generations casts doubt on a presumed golden age of fact retention. Appeals to it are more the stuff of national lore and wistful nostalgia for a time that never was than claims that can be anchored in the documentary record. (p. 15).
It’s unclear to me as to why we place so much stock in these test scores. The parents and grandparents of the current generation of students didn’t perform any better on these tests.
There is no prima facie evidence that how well students understand American history, or for that matter any history, translates into a clear indicator of the overall health of the nation.
Given that the teaching of history has always been politicized, I suspect that the emotional responses of many are simply a reflection of their broader political world view. In other words, poor test scores—regardless of whether you are a Democrat or Republican—offers another opportunity to confirm to yourself and to others what is wrong with the other side.
None of this is to suggest that I don’t believe the teaching of history is not important, but rather that I stopped worrying about test scores a long time ago.
I hated history through most of my primary and secondary school years. It was only later that I was mature enough or in the right head space to appreciate the value of thinking historically. It would be interesting to know when in life and under what conditions people tend to turn to history for intellectual fulfillment.
For now, let’s put aside our concerns about test scores and political bickering and come together around something we can all embrace:
There is nothing more American than scoring poorly on a standardized history test. :-)
I seem to recall taking a course called World History in 7th grade, a course called Washington State history in 9th grade and a course called U.S. History in 11th grade. My World History teacher was a fellow named Lynn Gurley whose chief claim to fame was having attended Washington State University to become a teacher where his college roommate had been a fellow named Adam West, aka, Batman, which first aired in January 1966, coinciding with my second semester of World History. Because I didn't sing and couldn't play an instrument I had the option of taking a course called General Music, which I did, and it was also taught by Lynn Gurley. The course had a strong emphasis on opera which meant listening to records and then learning the names and personal histories of the composers of the different pieces of music we had heard and gaining an appreciation of the fact that there had been famous operas composed in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, mostly in Europe and often telling stories far more remotely anchored in history. The World History course simply followed the text book. Read the chapter, answer the study questions at the end of the chapter and turn them in as homework, memorize as many names, dates, places and historical events as you could in preparation for a quiz, use the corrected quizzes to prepare for periodic tests and, between episodes of Batman, Get Smart and The Man From Uncle, select a topic and write a five page research paper about that topic using sources from the school library and from a field trip to the Seattle Public Library. Nearly all of the quizzes and tests were multiple choice or fill in the blank format. I wrote my research paper about the Crimean War. My U S History course in 11th grade was taught by my Debate coach so I was in that classroom two hours a day. Our teacher, Ron Gillespie, was a guy whose father was superintendent of the only school district in the county larger than the school district where I lived. The entire county was essentially one large naval installation, on land leased by the federal government from local Native American tribes, and comprised mostly of nuclear powered aircraft carriers and nuclear powered submarines that were too top secret to discuss aloud. We lived with a sense of assurance that in the event of a nuclear war we would be among the first vaporized. Our textbook that year, 1969-70, was new and it featured primary documents from the history of the country that the text was an attempt to contextualize. For instance, a chapter might be built around several excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville's 'Democracy In America' and serve as a basis for discussions of French attitudes about democracy from the perspective of an aristocrat concerned about things like frontier justice and penology. Enough debaters, myself included, were in the history class with the added burden of helping to facilitate class discussion. My debate partner and I, our school's #1 team, had the honor of staging a debate in class with our school's #4 team on the topic of whether the United States should declare independence from Great Britain. The #4 team was given the advantage of choosing which side of the issue to debate and erroneously assumed that history was on their side. The class as a whole got to vote on which side had prevailed and it was determined that declaring independence was still a half baked idea that was not quite ready for prime time. Our debate topic that year for interscholastic competition was Resolved: that Congress should prohibit United States unilateral military intervention in foreign countries. My debate partner and I had a winning percentage of slightly over seventy percent that year. As juniors and first year debaters we competed in tournaments at five different college campuses where we could have competed as novices, but didn't, so we often faced opponents who were 2nd, 3rd or even 4th year debaters. I was really looking forward to my senior year in debate when I got the news that my dad had been offered and accepted a full professorship at the University of Houston in Texas where he was hired to direct a Graduate Training Program in Clinical Psychology. My senior year in high school would be in a district adjacent to NASA's Mission Control. That was also the year I was required to register with my local draft board in Galveston, using the lucky number, 29, I had drawn in the draft lottery on the basis of my birthday.
Fascinating to know that an overall lack of historical knowledge is not a new trend. My interest in history, specifically the Civil War began with the centennial celebration of that war when I was in elementary school. I had a 5th grade teacher that made history fun. But my secondary education made history boring, especially my US history teacher in my senior year. He was just phoning it in as his retirement was approaching. It was college and post graduate classes that revived that love of history that remains today.