Over the past few weeks, several events had made clear the challenges facing communities to maintain their individual identity. The beloved Guinan’s Pub in Garrison closed it door after being a community institution for 49 years. Neighborhood bookstores in Cold Spring and Hastings-on-Hudson read the handwriting on the wall and it was red for deficit. Of course, times change and the old makes way for the new, but it is important to step back and realize what is being lost.

Quick: if you are at a Starbucks in a Marriott near the interstate, what state are you in? If the only place people belong is online then we will have created a “Matrix Generation” that belongs nowhere except when it is connected.

One way to address the problem is through education. Our public schools provide an opportunity to link history and the young, including the history of the very community in which the young live.

Too often, in the quest to improve reading scores, history and reading are pitted against each other in a zero-sum game so any time spent on history/social studies detracts from the effort to improve reading scores. Intelligent educators know that an engaged mind is an eager mind, eager to learn more about the topic of interest, eager to read on his or her own because it is a pleasurable experience. That topic of interest can be one’s neighborhood, one’s own community, one’s own world -the one that is traversed on a daily basis.

As it turns out, teaching local, community and state history is required under New York state Education Department standards. Are we successful in fulfilling this requirement?

1. How are teachers instructed in the content information related to the teaching of local, community and state history?
2. Are teachers required to demonstrate proficiency or competence in these areas?
3. How can statewide testing account for local and community history?
4. If American history can be taught in elementary, middle, and high schools, then why is a student visit to a local historic site in fourth grade considered sufficient?
5. In schools where both the teachers and the students are new to the community, will they consider local historic sites to be part of their own heritage and worth preserving and maintaining?
6. In a time of globalization where people are linked via the Internet to people and places around the world, including to people they may never have met, how do we root people in their own communities?

Practically every time period that schools are obligated to teach can be “observed” in our own communities in the Hudson Valley – if we only take the time to look. But that is not the way the curriculum is designed.

Addressing these questions will require a cooperative effort among officials of the New York state Education Department, graduate schools, historians and independent scholars. There are actions that communities can take on their own. But no one group can solve the problem alone, and it is a problem worth solving. After all, if we don’t know where we are, how will we know who we are? If we belong nowhere, then what will we care about? If our past disappears from our memory, then how will we build a better tomorrow?

Peter, thanks for sharing… great article. The State Archives Student Research Award program sees quite a few entries each year that deal with local history…. they are generally excellent entries because students researched in historical records in their communities – access to the records is easier with local topics. And, these topics tend to have a broader impact on the school, village, and towns where these students are from. Its great to see. But, with so much at stake with testing these days, what’s taught in the classroom very often does not appear to include local history.—Julie Daniels