7.8.11 History is History
Don’t know much about History! OMG!!
A lot of people were concerned when the “National Report Card” was released last week by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It revealed that, across the country, our worst subject by far is History. Just 20 percent of fourth-graders, 17 percent of eighth-graders and a depressing 12 percent of 12th-graders performed at a “proficient” or “advanced” level. Less than half of all 12-graders know the answer to basic questions about things like the Constitution’s 3/5 rule, who our enemy was in Korea, and the effects of Brown vs. Board of Education.
That led to a justifiable round of hand-wringing among educators and pundits alike. And many of them pointed to some recent embarrassing history gaffes made by our leaders to illustrate what happens when we don’t know our own History. Michele Bachmann mistakenly put Lexington and Concord in New Hampshire. Sarah Palin claimed that Paul Revere rode to tell the British, “they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms,” an interesting way to misrepresent History to suit her own gun-rights agenda. Joe Biden claimed that when the stock market crashed, FDR went on the TV to explain why it happened. Which is interesting considering Hoover was the President at the time, and nobody had any televisions. Even the President, in perhaps the most highly-vetted speech imaginable, the State of the Union, wrongly claimed that the automobile was invented in Detroit.
But the pundits got it backwards. Our leaders’ historical mistakes are not the EFFECT of bad history schooling, they are one of the primary CAUSES. And our students aren’t stupid, they are brilliant. Kids don’t study History precisely because we’ve clearly signaled to them there’s no downside to getting it wrong. After Bachmann’s gaffe, she doubled down and claimed that all the Founding Fathers were against slavery, and that one of them was John Quincy Adams. And her approval ratings just kept going up. Following Palin’s mistake, her supporters simply went on Wikipedia and revised the Paul Revere page! Nobody called Obama on his error. And Biden, well he’s just a loveable dope, who cares about all the mistakes he makes? It’s not like he’s a heartbeat away from THE MOST POWERFUL OFFICE IN THE WORLD or anything…
When kids get signals like this, who can blame them for ignoring the topic? And here’s the biggest signal of all: as a country, we fundamentally, functionally treat History as a second-class topic. The National Report Card is given every 2 years for Math, Reading, and Sciences. But only every 4 years for History. And, unlike the other topics, the History test isn’t standardized in a way to allow easy diagnosis of the results. So not only do we not know our History, we don’t even know how badly we don’t know our History. And, honestly, nobody cares to know. Y’know?
So here’s what we’re telling our kids: Okay guys, time to study History…um…seriously…if we don’t learn History we’ll be doomed to repeat it…ahem…you need to honor those who went before you…ah…do was we say, not as we do…hello?…oh, never mind.