Year: 2004
Type: article
Abstract: Americans have never considered learning history to be an end in itself. Instruction about history and the development of political institutions (civics) has always been justified as an exercise that would produce better citizens, however blandly defined. Yet educators have never successfully explained how the content of history or civics curricula promotes the stated goal of good citizenship. Even when educators duck this problem of means and ends and treat history and civics instruction as an end in itself, they have no realistic expectations of what students should learn. Most definitions of student proficiency are corrupted by nostalgia for alleged past achievement levels that never existed. What is more, educators cannot make up their minds about whether history instruction (and hence its assessment) should be “broad” or “deep.” This is also true in other fields (it has become commonplace for experts to say, for example, that mathematics curricula are “a mile wide and an inch deep” and are thus flawed), but the problem is compounded in history because ideological and political disputes distort pedagogy. All partisans insist that they want both depth and breadth, but in practice the Left prefers depth and the Right prefers breadth. Since nobody is satisfied by assessments that inevitably take sides in this dispute, these conflicts cannot be resolved by educators alone. In this essay, I will discuss these problems—lack of clarity about the purpose of history instruction, fanciful definitions of student proficiency, and debates about historical facts versus historical thinking—in that order. I conclude that we are not ready to assess history performance. In 1994 Congress adopted eight education goals for the year 2000. They included having all young children ready to learn, raising the high school graduation rate to 90 percent, and becoming “first in the world” in mathematics and science. In social studies, students were to “demonstrate competency over challenging subject matter in civics and government, economics, history, and geography, so they may be prepared to exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.” The naïveté (or cynicism) of the endeavor was breathtaking. Unsurprisingly, the goals had been barely approached by the deadline. With regard to preparing youth to exercise citizenship, voting participation of recent graduates remains embarrassingly low. Observers also bemoan low levels of participation in the voluntary institutions of civil society.1 Predictably, assessing the fulfillment of such unrealistic goals has also been flawed. States have set high academic standards with little consideration of how they relate to desired outcomes. For example, what evidence is there that students who meet a state's history standards will be more likely to exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship? Partly because states never face up to this question, their tests that purport to uphold high standards actually measure lower levels of achievement. States whose standards call for students to assess multiple perspectives regarding historical controversies administer tests that require little more than recall of names and dates or the placement of history passages in context. And state accountability systems cannot fairly distinguish whether students are making progress even toward the lower objectives that tests implicitly adopt. Imprecision in thinking about the goals of history and civics instruction has its own historical roots. In the mid-nineteenth century, the education reformer and public school advocate Horace Mann argued that if children could appreciate political history, they would later exercise their franchise only for the common good and without “caprice, wantonness, malice or revenge.” But in Mann's era as today, adults did not agree about constitutional propriety or about the motives of historical figures. Mann worried that if schools taught political history, partisan indoctrination could result. His solution was glib—schools should teach only interpretations on which everyone agreed—and he never wondered whether such a sanitized and boring curriculum would motivate active and responsible citizenship. This conundrum still haunts history and civics instruction today. We expect teachers to discuss highly charged issues without straying from consensus viewpoints. Our inability to improve on Mann's solution helps explain why contemporary curricula and assessment of them fail so miserably.2 Mann's instrumental view has been a recurring theme; state constitutions and statutes now require that good citizenship be a central goal of public education. In 1893, the National Education Association (NEA), an organization of public school teachers, appointed the Committee of Ten that made sweeping recommendations for higher academic standards, including increased time for history and government courses to prepare students for “the exercise at maturity of a salutary influence upon national affairs.” In 1918, a new federal government commission reacted to the Committee of Ten's perceived elitism, announcing “cardinal principles” for adapting schools to a more socially inclusive student body. But the cardinal principles concurred with the earlier view of history instruction, adding a political objective, namely, that knowledge of history ought to breed loyalty: “While all subjects should contribute to good citizenship, the social studies—geography, history, civics, and economics—should have this as their dominant aim. . . . History should so treat the growth of institutions that their present value may be appreciated.”3 In the American High School Today (1959), the former Harvard University president James Bryant Conant urged the tracking of talented math and science students into a college preparatory program. But for history and civics (he called it social studies), Conant insisted that all students should discuss and debate in heterogeneous classes, to become “intelligent voters, [who] stand firm under trying national conditions, and [who will] not be beguiled by the oratory of those who appeal to special interests.” Certainly, one observer's special interest is another's commonweal; as Mann anticipated, history instruction can easily become a form of political indoctrination.4 In more recent memory, the Reagan administration's report, A Nation at Risk, insisted that three years of high school history and other social studies “is requisite to the informed and committed exercise of citizenship.”5 Nonetheless, instruction in history and civics, at least as they have been taught for the last one hundred fifty years, has had little apparent impact on the quality of citizenship. No research ties any curricular program to subsequent voting participation. A scholarly consensus is that “the formal civics curriculum or its equivalent is all but irrelevant to citizens' knowledge of and engagement with politics.” Yet domestic and international tests show that students who are actually taking a civics course, or took one recently, do better on tests of civic knowledge, have more tolerant attitudes toward dissent and minorities, and express greater intentions to participate in politics as adults. But the effects are weak and fade rapidly. Students who previously took civics but are not currently enrolled in a class seem to do no better on civics exams than students who never studied the subject.6 Some educators believe that the solution is to include in civics instruction not only the history and structure of political institutions but also a direct involvement of students in public life. Community service programs produce better civic attitudes and knowledge, but here too positive effects may fade quickly. Some studies find longerterm impacts but cannot detect independent effects: students who take community service classes may also be those more likely to score well or to participate as adults, absent a school program. Even if service learning does have sustained effects, these may not be politically neutral. For example, implicit in most service learning is a preference for individual charity, not political action. Students are more likely to collect food for the poor than to campaign to increase the minimum wage.7 Similarly, students whose teachers encourage them to express opinions in class have more positive attitudes toward participation in politics than students whose teachers mostly lecture. But whether students whose classrooms were participatory actually participate more as adults is unknown.8 Extracurricular activities—student government, for example—are also associated with greater political knowledge and confidence in the ability to influence public life. Adults are more likely to participate in civic, service, church, and professional groups if they were members of 4-H or similar service clubs in high school. And if adults participate in voluntary organizations, they are more likely to vote. So there is at least an indirect correlation between participation in extracurricular activities and voting behavior. But adolescent club membership may not have influenced later participation. Attributes that dispose students to participate in 4-H and similar clubs may also be those that lead to adult voting and other public engagement.9 Because it is impossible to assign causality in these assessments, the only sure way to answer questions about the efficacy of school programs is to conduct scientific experiments, and we have not done so. In a field trial of community service, for example, some schools might be randomly assigned to receive funds for community service while others receive none. Researchers could then track graduates to see if they participated differentially, as adults, in public life. Similar randomized experiments could also be performed that test alternative history curricula and pedagogies. Careful experiments would require studies of a decade or more to track the long-term effects of school treatments. Yet we have wondered about the efficacy of history instruction, civic education, and community service for decades—if we had under-taken such experiments twenty or thirty years ago, we would have much better information by now. Although there is no evidence that history knowledge leads to better or more loyal citizenship, the relationship seems plausible. But there are reasons to be cautious. Consider that white students get higher scores on tests of history than black students. But black students are more than four times as likely to discuss the national news with their parents as white students are. Which is a better measure of the effectiveness of instruction: test scores or an inclination to discuss public affairs outside theclassroom?10 Further, good citizenship and loyalty are, to some extent, not objective characteristics but attributes defined by partisan objectives. Blacks, who score lower on tests of history knowledge than whites, tend to vote for more liberal candidates than do whites. Children from affluent families score higher on tests of history than do children from working-class families. But upper-income voters tend to be more socially liberal and economically conservative than working-class voters. Are the wealthy better citizens? Participation and political values are related. It is inconceivable that educators can promote the former while maintaining neutrality about the latter.11 Two reports from 2003 illustrate how politicized debates about history and civics curricula must inevitably be. First, the Carnegie Corporation issued The Civic Mission of Schools, which called for more “instruction in government, history, law, and democracy” to enhance “young people's tendency to engage in civic and political activities over the long term.” The report also called for more student participation in community service programs, extracurricular activities, school government, and “simulations of democratic processes and procedures.” But Chester E. Finn Jr., of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, attacked the report for placing too much emphasis on preparing students for “influencing public policy and engaging in political activity” as opposed to nonpolitical volunteer work.12 Several months later the Albert Shanker Institute issued “Education for Democracy, ” a manifesto signed by such notables as Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers; Lee Hamilton, director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and former U.S. congressman; president of the Core Knowledge Foundation E. D. Hirsch; the former U.S. secretary of education Richard Riley; and Ben Wattenberg, senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. The statement lamented American students' lack of history knowledge and found that this shortcoming led to what it regarded as insufficient national unity after September 11, 2001. Yet the manifesto acknowledged that “terrorist movements such as Peru's Shining Path and Italy's Red Brigade were drawn heavily from the ranks of university students and the professoriate. Students were part of Hitler's vanguard. . . . most of the leadership of al Qaeda are university graduates, many of them educated in the West.”13 In any nation—the United States is no exception—political extremists may know more history and achieve higher test scores than a random sample of their age peers. “We do not have all the answers to this complex phenomenon,” the Shanker Institute concluded, “and we may never have.” Lynne V. Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney and former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has been prominent in urging more study of history so that young people will “appreciate how greatly fortunate we are to live in freedom” and, by implication, be more supportive of the response of George W. Bush's adminstration to the terrorist attacks. 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Source: Journal of American History
DOI: 10.2307/3660358
Author: Richard Rothstein
Institutions: Economic Policy Institute, Columbia University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2049524432