~a column by Colleen O’Brien
A demand that grade school and high school teachers in the U.S. concentrate on math and literacy was written into law and passed in 2001 via a federal education bill called No Child Left Behind. That bill got left behind in 2015 when the Every Student Succeeds Act was passed. This bill also directed teachers to test to math and literacy so the federal government can figure out how much to give the schools.
Because the students must be tested in math and literacy, these subjects are concentrated on in the classroom so the test scores will be high. Some educators believe that U.S. history is being left behind, no longer a priority. This is a shame, of course, because history is so interesting, and I would even say vital. If we don’t know where we came from and how we got to this place in the history of the world, it seems we are operating with half a brain, like amnesiacs.
And there a belief that if the leader of a country doesn’t know history, the whole country will be doomed to repeat it. The best presidents we’ve had were history buffs and sometimes history authors – Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Truman, Kennedy, Obama.
Renowned historian and biographer David McCullough (1776, John Adams, Truman) has said that American school students have a lack of the basic understanding of the history of their country. This is not good news, and it makes me nervous. If we’re not taught history, do we think we were plunked down here on this planet to watch TV, play sports and buy stuff? Do non-history learners know what a planet is?
Results from the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress (collects all information of school testing in America — “the nations’s report card”), show that 13 percent of U.S. high schoolers showed proficiency in American history, 18 percent of eighth graders and 22 percent of fourth graders.
I’ve read that what little teaching of history survives in grade schools is often concentrated around holidays: kids learn about Puritans and a dinner of thanks with Indians; and then they learn about Martin Luther King and his “I Have a Dream” speech. Does that cover it unless they learn about Nov. 11 as Veteran’s Day? Because the rest of the patriotic days are outside the school year calendar: Memorial Day is at the end of May and then there’s the Fourth of July smack in the middle of summer. I’m not sure right wingers consider Labor Day patriotic, but it doesn’t matter because it shows up just before school starts in the autumn.
I learned quite a bit of history in school, enough to intrigue me to read on. It was always one of my favorite subjects because despite the dates of battles that we were forced to memorize (always a mystery to me, although I still have so many of them in my head . . . to what use I don’t know), there were exciting stories – Johnny Tremain and the American Revolution, Betsy Ross and the American flag, David Bowie and his knife.
I supplemented this learning by reading biographies of early Americans and the Westward Ho movement via Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of Little House on the Prairie series. I wanted to be Laura Ingalls because I read of all the things she had to do, all the running around on the prairie she got to do – I was learning a culture of a period long before I was alive, and I could relate.
Once in college I was taught more realistic history from diaries of pioneers. I understood that I had grown up a bit, and I was therefore being introduced to a more precise version of history – much too hard a life for me to want to have plunged into it like my ancestors had. Reading beyond, going deep into history, was humbling; could any of us be pioneers, I wondered?
Recently I read a novel called Days Without End by Sebastian Barry. It revealed the life of an Irish immigrant who fought in the Indian Wars and the Civil War. It was startlingly graphic but so beautifully written, I now consider it my favorite book. There were many things I didn’t know about those wars, and it reminded me that students assigned to outside reading, both fiction and non-fiction, to fill in their lack of proximity to the discipline called history, were led to stirring tales, to stories that inspired us to love this country and its immigrants – our grandparents and great-grandparents.
This exposure through outside reading happened to many of us who grew up in Jefferson in the 1950s and ‘60s. Because of Miss Gustava Price’s sophomore history class, we had to partake of eye-opening reading about the Second World War and the concentration camps in Poland, Germany and Russia. Grad student Lisa Cunningham, teaching in Iowa City high schools, said that if you learn something new . . . “If you learn that Columbus founded America versus there was an African presence before 1492, your orientation is going to be very different; you will have very different ideas about the world.”
Which means that history is important. I hope that teachers are teaching history. I hope that students are inspired to read beyond class. I hope that new David McCulloughs and Sebastian Barrys are being brought into the fold to inform us, titillate us and augment our knowledge of history that we received – or didn’t – when we were in school.
