Don't blame kids for not learning about history. Blame schools for the way they teach it. But there's hope yet.
Some people's recurring nightmare is falling off a cliff. For others, it's being naked in public. For me, it's high school history (although naked does come in a close second).
I hated history. True, I took it a long time ago, and teachers tell me things
have improved. Not much, though. A study released this year by the education reform group Common Core found stunning ignorance about history among US students. Almost a quarter of 1,200 17-year-olds polled didn't know who Hitler was. Four in 10 didn't know about the Renaissance. I don't blame the students; I blame the way they're taught. In 2004, the Thomas Fordham Institute (an educational nonprofit) reviewed 12 widely used American and world history textbooks and damned them all. "They make history dull," the institute concluded. "Something in the very nature of today's textbooks . . . blunts the edges of events and strips from the narrative whatever is lively, adventurous, and exciting."
I hold one of those books in my hands: McDougal Littell's World History, now in use in Boston's public high schools. Unreadable, with an endless stream of facts, it gives short shrift to the important and is sometimes spectacularly bizarre. The Holocaust, for example, gets four pages. And why, the textbook wonders, does the Holocaust matter for today's students? The main reason given: Hitler's mass extermination "led to the founding of Israel." Amazing. So much for millions dead.
It doesn't have to be this way. Since 1976, Facing History and Ourselves, a nonprofit based in Brookline, has been promoting a different way of learning about the past, by training teachers to link history to ethical questions and by publishing materials that connect yesterday's events to today's students. Facing History concentrates on a few significant events (such as the Holocaust, political refugees, and the US eugenics movement). Using first-person remembrances, it puts students in the shoes of people who lived through those times and pushes them to think about why those people – be they leaders, followers, dissenters, or bystanders – made the choices they did. Teachers rave about it. It "makes kids step into history," says Josh Otlin at Hudson High School. Students learn history is "something that's not predetermined," says Carolyn Smith, who teaches at the Edwards Middle School in Boston. (To see this in action, visit Facing History's exhibit, "Choosing to Participate," now at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square through May 20.)
The program has a worldwide reach, with an estimated 1.6 million students taking its courses annually and 24,000 teachers trained in its approach. Indeed, most Boston middle schools are in the process of implementing a Facing History program on the integration of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. Yet Facing History is a supplement to, not a replacement for, traditional history courses. (My eldest daughter, a senior at Boston Latin Academy, took the course as an elective.)
You're probably thinking this is OK, that kids need grounding in history – typified by the year-long survey course – before they can focus on specific moments of the past. I disagree. Survey courses are themselves the problem. It is impossible to teach well all of American or world history in a year or two; individual events become a meaningless blur.
By contrast, we don't use the same method when we teach high school literature. We don't compel students, for example, to learn the plot lines and main characters of the top 1,000 books ever written. Rather, English courses concentrate on perhaps five or six volumes – a work by Shakespeare, The Great Gatsby, and a few others – and explore them in depth.
That should be how we teach history. This isn't Facing History's mission (its focus has been on issues of racism and intolerance), but its approach shows the way: It is better to learn a few things well than many things badly. Doing so would require changing state curriculum standards, allowing teachers to dwell on a comparatively small number of topics. What we would get in return might be genuine understanding – and a sense that history is not something that simply happened to other people, but rather stories about choices and consequences, the same kinds of choices and consequences that we face in our lives today.
Originally published in The Boston Globe Magazine, April 27, 2008.