David McCullough on the "history gap"
online.wsj.com
David McCullough on the "history gap"
1–10 of 25 posts
Re: David McCullough on the "history gap"
#2I've read some of his books yet I initially read his last name "McClure". I wonder how we'll reflect on our history after a decade of information overload? Seems like our ability to forget will get kicked into overdrive as a coping mechanism. Maybe reading a good history will be therapeutic.
Re: David McCullough on the "history gap"
#3> This week, the Department of Education released the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which found that only 12% of high-school seniors have a firm grasp of our nation's history.
I wonder whether anyone ever wonder about the history of the rest of the world.
Re: David McCullough on the "history gap"
#4>This week, the Department of Education released the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which found that only 12% of high-school seniors have a firm grasp of our nation's history. And consider: Just 2% of those students understand the significance of Brown v. Board of Education.
The "firm grasp" number seems really low, but it could certainly be changed by what that term means. As far as Brown v. Board, that number seems so low that I'm tempted to disbelieve it. Anyone have a link to the report?
Re: David McCullough on the "history gap"
#5> This week, the Department of Education released the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which found that only 12% of high-school seniors have a firm grasp of our nation's history. I wonder whether anyone ever wonder about the history of the rest of the world.
Maybe, but if the numbers really are so low for a relatively constrained topic like the 500 year history of one nation, expanding the scope to the entirety of human history seems like it's going to have even less impact.
Re: David McCullough on the "history gap"
#6Here's the National Assessment of Educational Progess, "The Nation's Report Card: U.S. History 2010" which is the basis for the article.
http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main2010/2011468.a...
Re: David McCullough on the "history gap"
#7> Mr. McCullough's eyebrows leap at his final point: "And they're so badly written. They're boring! Historians are never required to write for people other than historians."
In my opinion, this is probably the biggest problem. History was almost always presented to me as a desiccated list of facts, dates, and sanitized "causes of events" that needed to be memorized so you could pass the test and move on. Few teachers seemed to be able to put any life into the subject, or present the subject as a large single picture instead of tiny disjoint sets of data.
I don't know what approach would have worked best to get a younger me more interested in history. Maybe something in the style of "The Island at the Center of the World" would have worked--I do find that readable and interesting now.
Re: David McCullough on the "history gap"
#8History is a relatively easy subject to teach and learn, once everybody agrees on what bits are important and should be taught. A hundred years ago we had this all figured out --we might have had an excessively narrow perspective on history, but at least we all agreed about it.
With the ongoing "death of God", as Nietzsche would put it, all the old certainties have been swept away without anything sensible to replace them. So the history syllabus has become a political battleground for partisans of all sorts of folks to play with. If students are forced to spend weeks at a time studying the dude who invented peanut butter or some dispute over bus seating, is it any wonder that the big picture gets lost?
As a first step, I would split history into two sections: "overall chronology" and "detailed studies". In "overall chronology" we'd study the basic flow of human history over the last five or seven thousand years, trying not to overly stress any particular event or group of people. Picture a giant wall chart with time along the x axis and all the major human civilizations plotted up and down the y, and then we sit down and learn the dates of key events. Start of the Han dynasty. Fall of Constantinople. Founding of Buenos Aires. Not worrying too much about what they mean, though.
In the second, we could pay attention to the details. Individual people, events, what it was like to live at a given time. We could never cover the entire chart at a detailed level, but at least we'd know the details were still there.
Re: David McCullough on the "history gap"
#9> Mr. McCullough's eyebrows leap at his final point: "And they're so badly written. They're boring! Historians are never required to write for people other than historians." In my opinion, this is probably the biggest problem. History was almost always presented to me as a desiccated list of facts, dates, and sanitized "causes of events" that needed to be memorized so you could pass the test and move on. Few teachers…
The way I was taught history (in Australia), it could have used a whole lot more lists of facts and dates.
Case in point: World War One. We spent weeks on that war. But we didn't learn how it started, or how it ended, or exactly who were the belligerents on both sides, or the key battles, or how it was eventually won. Instead we mostly sat around and read about how awful life was in the trenches for the soldiers -- surely important, but not at the expense of actually understanding the war. "It was a stalemate for years, and then we mysteriously won" sums up the picture of the war that we got.
Re: David McCullough on the "history gap"
#10Is it what we haven't learned, or what we've forgotten? I was taught a lot of history in high school, but like most things that don't get recalled very often, I've forgotten a lot.
Is that really the problem? Perhaps we don't reference history enough in modern society.
On the other hand, I have a lot of knowledge of topics that didn't exist back in a time when people were supposedly more historically literate.