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Life, liberty, and the pursuit of ignorance
In 2000, ACTA's report on historical illiteracy among American college students, Losing America's Memory, documented a shocking degree of ignorance among the brightest and best educated of this country's young adults. Noting that there was not a single school among America's top 55 colleges and universities that required students to take a course in American history, the report reflected on the wider implications of elite college and university seniors' inability to pass what was essentially a basic high school-level test, one whose questions were heavily drawn from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests given to high school students: "Few students leave high school with an adequate knowledge of American history and even the best colleges and universities do nothing to close the 'knowledge gap,'" the authors observed; "if a hostile power wanted to erase America's civic heritage, it could hardly do a better job--short of actually prohibiting the study of American history--than America's elite colleges and universities are doing."
It's still true that you don't have to take U.S. history to graduate from college--though increasingly you are required to take courses in foreign cultures, and to balance those with courses on cultural diversity in the U.S. The American higher education establishment is making a massive effort to ensure that students graduate with an appreciation of "difference" as defined in terms of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, and it is doing so because administrators and policymakers nationwide agree that appreciating these kinds of differences is essential to a proper liberal arts education. But the problems posed by American undergraduates' documented ignorance about the founding principles and general history of their country are being ignored. The result is frightening indeed if we take seriously Thomas Jefferson's comment that "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free it expects what never was and what never will be."
But if colleges and universities are able to disregard the serious potential consequences of failing to produce historically aware graduates, the pressure is on for high schools to begin graduating students who have some understanding of what it means to be a citizen of this country. At a Senate hearing last Thursday, educators and historians argued for legislation that would expand national testing to include U.S. history.
National history and civics assessments show that most fourth-graders can't identify the opening passage of the Declaration of Independence, and that most high school seniors can't explain the checks-and-balances theory behind the three branches of the US government. Testifying in favor of proposed legislation, the history specialists--including renowned historian David McCullough--told a Senate education subcommittee that most of the country's schoolchildren lack sufficient knowledge to become informed voters and don't understand why they enjoy rights like free speech and freedom of religion.''I think we are sadly failing our children, and have been for a long time," said McCullough, America's preeminent popular historian and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for biographies of presidents Harry S. Truman and John Adams. ''I think to bring testing assessment of performance in the grade schools and high schools of public schools nationwide is long overdue."
The American History Achievement Act would budget $14 million so that ten states could test eighth-graders and twelfth-graders. The idea would be to use those tests to draw national attention to the need for more intensive and systematic history curricula in K-12 education. The NAEP, whose questions so brutally stumped college seniors in 2000, would conduct the tests. Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander, who introduced the legislation in April with Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy, explains it in detail here.
Link via Joanne Jacobs.
Posted by acta online on July 03, 2005 at July 3, 2005 12:58 PM
Comments
As an historian, it is perhaps foolhardy of me to cast a skeptical eye over any paean to teaching history or criticize efforts to raise the visibility of teaching history.
But I'm skeptical, for four reasons.
1. The rhetorical declension claim in the 2000 ACTA report is a red flag to historians who know something about the last 100 years of higher ed. Yes, undergraduates today know too little history. I'd bet quite a bundle that undergraduates 50 years ago also knew too little history. Is there any evidence in the ACTA report to the contrary? (I have similar questions about declension claims about the general-ed curriculum, not because it is fabulous at my or any other institution but because we shouldn't glorify the past structure of college curricula.)
2. The 2000 report and the call for more testing is, to be honest, a cheap copy of the last 22 years of educational-reform rhetoric. Even the jeremiad-like rhetoric in the 2000 report, repeated above—"If a hostile power wanted to erase America's civic heritage, it could hardly do a better job - short of actually prohibiting the study of American history - than America's elite colleges and universities are doing"—is darned closed to plagiarizing the A Nation at Risk report from 1983: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today,..." Let's see: other subjects are tested. Let's test in history. Right... this way, we'll have national tests in everything that might be deemed important, including civics, art, music, English literature, American literature, physics, chemistry, biology, three foreign languages, and ... The call for more testing in the academic crisis du jour has become tiresome.
3. Given the heavily politicized response to the national history standards—notably by Lynne Cheney, whose assistants evidently didn't read the report very carefully (or think about the inconsistency in Cheney's calling for affirmative action for Paul Revere)—why should anyone trust that a national history test wouldn't be equally politicized?
4. There is no connection between this proposed set of tests and the problem noted in the entry about the general-ed curriculum. So what if we test high school students in history within a few years? I don't see how that will encourage colleges to require American history.
Posted by: Sherman Dorn at July 3, 2005 05:04 PM