David McCullough on the "history gap"

"So... Apparently we had a war with America."

"Really, who won?"

"I... I guess they did."

Another friend (Japanese) visited the Holocaust memorial in Portland with me. She didn't know what the holocaust was, or that Jews had any involvement in the story of WWII whatsoever.

So, it could be worse.

The problem with the approach you suggest is that students do not, and will not, care about or engage with material devoid of meaning and context. How will you get kids to memorize the "dates of key events" without getting them to care about "what they mean?" I can barely get my history classes to sit down.

History is all about meaning and context. Dates are inherently meaningless; it's the stories that history tells us about ourselves that give it worth. We need dates, and we need chronology; it just seems like your approach would lead directly to me (a history teacher) getting beaten up.

History, though, is only part of what you are concerned with, as a high school teacher, and increasingly it is not the most important.

Take, for example, my student teaching experience. When I asked a supervisor whether I should focus on Industrialization or Urbanization, or whether I would have enough time to take a detour to discuss the "robber barons," I was told that it didn't matter what I taught them. It didn't matter if I never got to the Cold War, as was written in the curriculum map, and it didn't matter if we covered Vanderbilt but not Edison, or if I spent a week on the First World War but only a day on the Civil War.

"The only thing that matters is that you teach them how to write," she said.

You see, our school was being examined by the state (Connecticut), and our standardized test scores were low. History teachers were openly referred to as "secondary english teachers," and our purpose was to teach children to write essays with thesis sentences. Every week, we were to devote class time to writing lessons, go over things such as topic sentences, conclusion paragraphs, editing, grammar, etc. Never mind that the kids have nothing to write about, nothing to say, because they haven't actually engaged with the world in any meaningful way. They could have been writing VCR instruction manuals.

History isn't tested on standardized tests. It isn't tested because no one cares. Writing is important because it gets you a job. History never gets anyone a higher salary (with the possible exception of history teachers), and so who gives a shit?

You have no idea how demoralizing it was to see the subject I love, that I passionately believe in, degraded in this way. Who cares what you teach? It's all a bunch of useless bullshit anyway, right?

Our problem with history is a symptom of our problem with education, which is that we don't know what it's for. We don't know, or can't decide, why we still adhere to the classical, liberal form of education. When little Joan or Sam or Miguel looks up at us and asks why he has to learn about Thomas Edison, the administrators of our school systems have no idea what to tell them. They don't say that the world is more interesting, more vivid, more meaningful, when you understand how it works. They don't say that we only understand ourselves when we understand where we come from. They don't say that much of popular culture has roots in historical precedents, and that understanding historical references opens up a whole new level of cultural understanding. They don't say that all Americans have a civic duty to understand their own past, and they don't say that understanding the past is the only way to avoid repeating our worst atrocities.

They say that it will all help them get a good job.

And that's total bullshit, and the kids know it.

I disagree. Teaching history as a narrative is the most dangerous thing you can do with history, because there's always the temptation to shoehorn it into a narrative. Good guys vs bad guys. Heroes and villains. Plucky underdogs vs arrogant empires. The human mind is stupid, and there's only a certain number of narratives which "feel" right to us, and the moment you start reducing reality in its vast complexity so it sounds like a good story, you've lost most of what was going on.

For example, what you just said:

What Halberstam makes abundantly clear is how dangerous what they were doing was. Simply, they could have been killed. Some of them very nearly were. And there were people killed, but they obviously weren't around for Halberstam to interview. The corollary to that is he drives home how naked some of the violence against the protestors was.

What about the violence committed by the protestors? Were there no evil acts committed by folks on the "good" side of this conflict? I assume there were (there always are) but these get left behind in the search of the simplified one-liner version of the "Civil Rights struggle" narrative.

History as narrative is more entertaining than real history, but it's also a lot less accurate. You might as well just watch Star Wars.

He does, however, give rather complete biographies of many of the people involved, and they were not saints. Several suffered from depression, one's behavior with women earned him scorn, and another's naked political ambitions were distasteful to many others. (That "one" was Marion Barry.)

Reading one narrative is potentially dangerous. But when you read many books on a single subject, it allows you to compare and contrast what different authors say about the same thing.

Anyway, history textbooks are distilled from the kinds of books I'm talking about, so I find your complaint rather odd.