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 report. The third blog reviewed the national patterns observed by the AHA in the teaching of social studies. The fourth blog examined the decision-making curricular materials. The fifth blog surveyed the issue of curricular content in the teaching of social studies. The sixth and final blog covers the AHA conclusions plus an analysis on what was omitted.
AHA CONCLUSIONS
AHA noted the highly visible controversies in the public arena … and also the lack of evidence behind those debates. As AHA began this study
…we realized that tensions and conflicts within a school community rarely matched the conflagrations depicted in national and social media (182).
AHA strongly supported the teachers who they found to be strongly committed to keeping their contemporary preferences from skewing how they teach. They are committed to teaching students how to think and not what to think (183).
Overall, “the edifice of secondary history education in the United States rests on solid foundations” (183).
AHA found that the typical tensions derive from fundamental struggles over authority and autonomy: with adolescents who aren’t necessarily motivated by what teachers have to offer and with administrators’ expectations (184).
The AHA strongly supports history-rich professional development for social studies teachers. The cancellation of the Teaching American History federal grant program in 2011 was mentioned. AHA says there is a desperate need for renewed professional development opportunities for K-12 teachers. Teachers want access to the high-quality content-specific programs essential to maintaining their qualifications as historians and their enthusiasm for history (185). The licensing to become a social studies teacher in the first place requires passing a test and typically taking history courses (192).
For two centuries, the basic rational for teaching US history I public schools has been consistent: to instill in students a sense of belonging to the nation and to prepare them for participation as citizens of a republic (185). History is a thrilling way for students to learn about their communities, whether understood locally, nationally, or globally (186).
CRITIQUE
A class in civics on paper does not mean that students and students who are now adults are knowledgeable about American history or how the government operates.
For example Shelly Mayer, my state senator and chair of the New York State Education Committee was just interviewed (November 29, 2024, Westmore News) for my local weekly newspaper. The following comes from the notes of the Westmore News reporter as presented by the op-ed writer:
New York’s per pupil spending has been the highest in the nation since about 2005 with mediocre results and very little, if any academic improvements for decades. The changes in graduation requirements just approved by the Regents will require a massive overall of the entire system.
The purpose of public education has been changed from raising academic achievement for all students (No Child Left Behind) to Equity defined as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Is this what parents, businesses and colleges want given the divisiveness DEI has caused in the workplace, in colleges, in the military, such that it is being cut back, and even eliminated in many places.
What is the cost? It is likely to cost millions if not billons. There has been no public discussion of how much or where it will come from. How many hires to work on transformation of high schools? What about professional development?
According to Senator Mayer, when she goes to visit schools and is introduced as a State Senator, the students are usually baffled. They know about Senators but they are in Washington!
It was at this point we all shard a collective frustration about the lack of civics education and the dangers of turning out an ignorant electorate.
Note: My local newspaper closed December 20, 2024, which will be the subject of another blog.
One should keep in mind that we have a Senator from Alabama who did know what the three branches of the government were and who were our allies and who were our foes in World War II. One might add given Supreme Court decisions on presidential immunity and Seal 6 teams and the lack of commitment to the Constitution, determining exactly what civics is and what it is not are problematical.
We also live in a time of school closings not expansion or stability. These closings are due to demographic declines and the post-Covid growth of private schools and homeschooling.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers said “At the end of the days, kids need to be together in community” (quoted in “The Unequal Effects of School Closings,” Alec MacGillis, The New Yorker, August 26, 2024).
Despite the rosy picture painted by the AHA there is a death of American Exceptionalism.
Among the young, that belief is rapidly dying. The surveyed students indicated a positive response by 27% in 2022 (“The Death of American Exceptionalism,” Jean M. Twenge, The Atlantic, October 15, 2024).
Even the belief that the founding of the United States was a positive development seems to be on the way out (Twenge).
Four of 10 Gen Zers identified the Founder as “villains.” What is the explanation for the disillusionment? One explanation is the mental health of depressed teens. Negative news is king. The death of newspapers which printed both sides of an issue has contributed to this perpetual negative spin (Twenge).
Twenge suggests another reason may be in shifts in high-school American-history curricula. In some states, especially the liberal ones, more time is spent on the deplorable facts of the nation’s history. That includes the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the massacre of Native Americans, and the ownership of slaves by the Founders. As a social psychologist Twenge expressed concerns about the impact these conditions are having.
The call for more professional development for history teachers is exactly right. However that raises the question of which history by the “experts” will be taught.
But since the 1960s, academic historians have splintered into narrow subfields that speak only to one another in increasingly esoteric jargon, while the public has become incurious and incapable of reading anything longer than a few paragraphs. Popular history has come to mean political biography and military history, two fields that academic historians often avoid or even disdain (“Uses and Abuses,” Scott Spillman, Popular History 33, September 29, 2024).
This topic has been the subject of multiple blogs for many years. Spillman extends kudos to Jill Lepore and Heather Cox Richardson. He also notes the impact of the 1619 Project which the teachers in the survey specifically downplayed as a source.
Spillman comments that to achieve popularity, a book needs to be interesting and fun to read. The problems with academic books is not that the authors are terrible writers on a sentence-by-sentence level [this excludes German writers where a sentence can be a paragraph or page long!], but that they are overwritten. The popular postwar historians who did not write like that were not primarily historians.
There was a need for a new narrative synthesis of American history. Spillman provides examples of 18 such books from the 1980s to 2009 that fit the bill. “Taken collectively, these books told the whole story of the United States from the colonial period to the present, defying the conventional wisdom that professional spurned synthesis, narrative or the reading public in these decades. Left unsaid in the AHA report is when are teachers expected to have time to read these books assuming of course that they can identify them in the first place.
Spillman observes a change has occurred.
A generation earlier, in the previous round of culture wars, the battles over American history ultimately died away because almost everyone involved still agreed that the American story was fundamentally a story about the promise of freedom, even as they disagreed over whether and when that promise had been achieved. By the 2010s, that had changed.
Spillman complains that the books “often lack any acknowledgement that people of good faith might hold conflicting ideas about the story of American history or hat, even if they agree about the basic story, they might draw starkly different lessons from it.”
One area not included in the AHA report is the effect of influences from outside the classroom. Teaching United States history does not exist independent of family and community. Take for example, slavery and the Confederacy. In addition to the prominent monuments which have been toppled there are Confederate streets, parks, buildings, battlefield re-enactments, family traditions and mementos right inside the home … to say nothing of Gone with the Wind and decals on a whole range of items. A Confederate flag was even waved inside the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection which the incoming President calls a day of love. So regardless of what happens inside the classroom, teachers are not teaching in a vacuum.
Now since October 7, 2023, the issue of anti-Semitism has come to the fore. True, the AHA report predates that event, but the issue of contentious topics really was not addressed in it. Here the true measure of the effectiveness of the teaching of social studies may be measured in events outside the classroom rather than curriculum boxes checked off inside the classroom.
To sum up, the AHA report paints a somewhat rosy picture for the teaching of social studies in American education. There may a gap between what is presented on paper and what is learned by the students. If the primary goals are teach students critical thinking, civics, and to be prepared to be adult citizens in the United States more work needs to be done. As we are beginning to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of the country if a growing percentage of the population thinks the country was born in sin twice and is not fit to play a leading role on behalf of freedom in the world, then the consequences will be dire not just for the country but the planet.
