We Are Failing To Transmit Our History To the Next Generation
By
Allan C. Brownfeld
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If
the philosopher George Santayana was correct when he declared that,
“Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” The
contemporary American society seems exactly the kind of time and place
he had in mind.
The
latest results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)
indicate that only 13 per cent of the nation’s eighth graders were
proficient in U.S. history last year, and 22 per cent were proficient in
civics. This marks another decline in performance during the
pandemic. The findings show a five-point slide since 2018 in the
average NAEP history score. In civics, eighth grade scores fell two
points, the first decline ever recorded on the tests, which cover the
American political system, principles of democracy and other topics.
Peggy
G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics,
referred to the results as “a national concern.” Patrick Kelly, a 12th
grade government teacher in South Carolina and a member of the National
Assessment governing board, notes that the results reflect the way that
social studies instruction has “in many ways been marginalized,” and
where state officials focus on accountability systems that measure
progress only in reading and math.
Chester
E. Finn, Jr., president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a
conservative think tank, enumerated what he sees as contributing factors
to low scores: poor state standards, poorly trained teachers, limited
instructional time, uneven curriculums and the lack of an accountability
system.
In Finn’s
view, “The ideal takeaway is: ‘This is one of those Sputnik moments
that says we’ve got to say the schools aren’t doing their part to
prepare American citizens.’ This should be an alarm bell, a call to do
something different.”
A
story in “Perspectives On History” magazine by University of North
Carolina Professor Bruce VanSledright found that 88% of elementary
school teachers considered teaching history a low priority.” The
reasons are varied. VanSledright found that teachers didn’t focus on
history because students aren’t tested on it at the state level. Why
teach something you can’t test.
A
teacher in Brooklyn told The New York Post: “All the pressure in lower
grades is in math and English language arts because of the state tests
and the weight that they carry.”
New
York Post reporter Carol Markowicz writes that, “As the parent of a
first grader—-it’s my daughter’s third year in the New York City public
school system after pre-K and kindergarten. She goes to one of the
finest public schools in the city. Yet she knows about George
Washington exclusively from the soundtrack of the Broadway show
‘Hamilton.’ She wouldn’t be able to tell you who discovered America.
So far, she has encountered no mention of any historical figure except
for Martin Luther King, Jr. This isn’t a knock on King, obviously. He’s
a hero in our house. But he can’t be the sum total of historical
figures our kids learn about in even early elementary school.”
What lessons can we learn from history? Among them, historians point out, are:
*Why some societies thrive and others fail.
*Why humans have gone to war.
*How people have changed society for the better.
William
H. McNeill, president of the American Historical Society, points out
that, “Historical knowledge is no more and no less than carefully and
critically constructed collective memory.”
Writing
in the American Scholar, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Walter
McDougall sums up three important reasons for studying history: “It
encourages intellectual growth, as well as serving an important civil
and moral function: history is the grandest vehicle for vicarious
experience. It truly educates young minds and obliges them to reason,
wonder and brood about the vastness, richness and tragedy of the human
condition.”
Professor
McDougall believes studying history provides a context in which to fit
all other knowledge. He calls history “the religion in the modern
curriculum, when teens learn about the values of the country they live
in, the wars that were fought to protect certain ideals, the triumphs
and failures of different leaders and societies—-they can better
understand how their own society was shaped and what their role in it
is. With a knowledge of history, young people have the opportunity to
learn from the tragic mistakes of past individuals and societies and
prevent the same mistakes from being made over again. They can also be
inspired by great figures of the past to dream bigger dreams and do
greater things in their own lives.”
In
a survey by Common Core, a group working to bring comprehensive
instruction, including history, to American classrooms, it was found in a
national survey of 17-year-old respondents that nearly a quarter could
not identify Adolf Hitler and less than half could place the Civil War
in the correct half-century. A third did not know that the Bill of
Rights guarantees freedom of speech and religion.
It
is high time that we turn our attention to our failure to transmit our
history to the next generation of Americans. We may face serious
consequences as a result.