Teaching History

In a number of previous posts I have mentioned that many of today's ideas regarding the war and post-war situation in Iraq, as well as views on Israel are shaped by people's lack of knowledge of history. A large part of the problem is that high schools as well as universities are largely no longer teaching the history of events, but are instead focusing on history of individuals and groups. There has been a trend in historical scholarship from macro-history to micro-history. Undoubtedly it is interesting to learn the circumstances of ordinary life hundreds of years ago, but when this pushes out the learning of the macro circumstances that shaped these ordinary lives it makes historical study close to useless. For example, on this 60th anniversary of D-Day, many high schoolers in the US do not know the basics of when WWII was, who was involved, and why it occurred. They do however know very well the stories about Rosie the Riveter and the internment of Japanese-Americans.

Tiffany Charles got a B in history last year at her Montgomery County high school, but she is not sure what year World War II ended. She cannot name a single general or battle, or the man who was president during the most dramatic hours of the 20th century.

Yet the 16-year-old does remember in some detail that many Japanese American families on the West Coast were sent to internment camps. "We talked a lot about those concentration camps," she said.
[...]
Among 76 teenagers interviewed near their high schools this week in Maryland, Virginia and the District, recognition of the internment camps, a standard part of every area history curriculum, was high -- two-thirds gave the right answer when asked what happened to Japanese Americans during the war. But only one-third could name even one World War II general, and about half could name a World War II battle.

Diane Ravitch, an educational historian at New York University, said the big emphasis in high schools today is on the internment camps, as well as women in the workforce on the home front and discrimination against African Americans at home and in the armed services.

"Then, too, there was a war in the Atlantic and Pacific," she said.

A similar problem is evident at the university level, where topics like the founding and founders of the United States are not taught, and there are simply no professors who are experts in these fields. Instead, the period is studied primarily from the perspective of a "race/gender/class framework."

All of this is not to say that good scholarship cannot be produced within the "race/gender/class framework." Some surely is. After all, contemporaries of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood and Edmund Morgan produced a brilliant body of scholarship on American slavery. And there is room for more than one kind of history; the problem is that many advocates of the race/gender/class framework want to stamp the other kind out. And one suspects that much of the scholarly work being done on these subjects is unreadable, jargon-ridden, didactic denunciations of Dead White Males and of America as an inherently oppressive society. In other words, garbage. One suspects most students with any knowledge of American history understand that they are being indoctrinated, not taught, and figure out how to give their professors the kind of answers they want and forget the whole thing once they've turned in their exams. But students who enter college without such knowledge - and it is easy to graduate from high school without it - may be taken in.