In the previous blogs, I reported on the topic of “What Are American Students Learning About US History?” The first blog introduced the two-year study conducted by the American Historical Association (AHA). The second blog provided an overview of the study. The third blog reviewed national patterns which the AHA observed over time in the history social studies teaching. The fourth blog focused on curriculum decision-making. In this blog the focus is curricular content.
Goals and Values
Surveyed teachers were asked to respond on the importance of a series of goals and values. High rated items include
Building a shared sense of national identity among students across social groups
Building an appreciation for diversity
Cultivating an appreciation of the United States as an exceptional nation – 25% said not at all important
Developing informed citizens foe participation in a democratic society – highest rated
Expecting students to confront the role of racism in our nation’s character
Focusing on challenging/controversial topics – 4% said not at all important
Helping students see the role of God in our nation’s destiny – 67% said not at all important, more than double the second place topic
Installing civic pride in the nation
Installing core knowledge of national heritage – 5% said not at all important
Making connections to the present – 93% important/very important, the highest rating
Presenting us history as a consistent fulfillment of the promise of the nation’s founders -30% said not at all important, the second highest after seeing God’s role
Presenting us history as a story of violence, oppression, and/or injustice – 29% said not at all important.
AHA proposes these results are an index of a common national teaching culture among educators (134).
The topics and era that were the favorites to teach include
81% Civil Rights Movement
79% American Revolution and Founding of the republic
74% World War II
70% Great Depression and New Deal
70% Slavery and Antebellum South,
The least favorite were
11% Clinton and the New Democrats
15% The Great Recession and Present Day
16% The Information Age
17% The Counterculture
“This picture doesn’t square with ideological caricatures of politicized classrooms” (136). When there is a problem with the curricular materials it is more likely due to sacrificing detail and complexity in pursuit of streamlining.
Historiography rates low as a skill set. This means that teachers and students do not learn about the behind-the-scene debates which occur over these topics.
The following is a review through the timeline in the teaching of US history. It identifies some of key events and issues in that teaching.
[C]urricular coverage of Native American history is the most likely to blur into generalities and the least likely to reflect recent scholarship from professional historians. Surveyed teachers confess to feelings of inadequacy on this topic (140).
They tend to be grouped together and generalized save for specific acts in history like the Trail off Tears. There is a “sharp drop-off of Indians after the close of the Plains Wars” (141).
It’s as if Indians disappear in the 20th century as historical actors. That disappearance of the “abstract Indian” may be counteracted in state and local history classes were the Indians are rooted in a particular place. The greater the presence of federally recognized tribes the more curricular time will be devoted to them (142).
There is a naming issue. European peoples and nations tend to be named despite their regional and cultural diversity. By contrast, Indian nations and peoples tend to be collapsed into a single entity [You’ve seen one, you’ve seen all – not in the report].
Problems of abstraction and timelessness in Native history have not been solved by various gestures of sensitivity, sympathy, or a decolonized pedagogy… While perhaps well-intentioned, these approaches obscure the political, cultural, and material contexts that shaped Native American societies and empires (145-146).
As you might expect, this leads to problems.
The framing of Native history as a moral quandary for contemporary Americans is a recurrent theme in classroom coverage.
“The most common ideological synthesis among teachers described the founding as an expansive and unfinished struggle” (157) – a work in progress.
John Gast’s painting American Progress is one of the most assigned sources for students studying westward expansion….But the painting is also a handy symbol for the overemphasis on the concept of Manifest Destiny that predominates in K-12 materials” (157).
Indian removal, specifically the Trail of Tears, frequently is taught in this era but often disconnected from the broader story of westward expansion. Rarely do standards or curriculum give much detail about the dozens of distinct efforts undertaken by Native tribes to resist or determine the path of removal. And seldom does the curriculum tie the removal of Indians to other antebellum events, including the expansion of slavery (159).
[S]ome curriculum plans indicate overly general questions and descriptions that give students the wrong impression about the significance of westward expansion (160).
[T]here no longer appears to be any serious controversy among teachers about slavery’s central role as the cause of the Civil War (161).
AHA comments that slavery still could be covered more comprehensively. But it is recognized that it is a uniquely challenging topic due to its potential for controversy (162).
Frederick Douglass’s “the Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” is the go-to text for this period (163).
[W]hile no teachers we spoke to or surveyed apologize for slavery in their courses, their efforts to explain the economic existence of slavery sometimes gives it a sense of inevitability that should not be applied to its existence or its end….[C]urriculum textbooks consistently overemphasize the importance of Eli Whitney and his cotton gin to the spread of plantation slavery (165).
[A]n excessive focus on military history leaves out far too much of the other histories that students should learn about (166).
AHA favors more coherently incorporating the insights of social and economic history (166).
The post-Reconstruction eras are challenging for teachers. Students are uninterested, disengaged, or academically unprepared (167). It may be taught at the beginning of the school year up to three years after the student’s last US history class and with a different teacher. Teachers spoke of the shaky transitions between middle school and high school history classes (168).
It is the time of the masses and not the individual of the earlier American history.
…keywords from both the Gilded Age and Progressive Era form a barrier of anonymity that only the most well-known and elite historical actors, like Carnegie and Rockefeller, can breach (170).
Technology and the improvement of daily like is a common idea (171).
The Civil Rights Movement is the only content area that can be critiqued by still-living participants and witnesses (173).
Local resources can be invaluable here but in general, the story of the Civil Rights Movement is told with a southern accent (180).
Room for improvement clearly remains, most notably in expanding treatment of events outside of the South (181).
This concludes the review of the curriculum. The next and final blog on this topic will report the conclusions of the AHA plus what it missed.
