Recently I asked one of my students to name a country.
“Europe,” she said.
The young lady is a junior in high school. Last semester, she got an A in my class.
Instead of crawling beneath my desk to sniff glue, I said, “No, Europe is a continent.” Then I pointed the same request— “Name a country”— at another kid.
“France,” he said. “That’s one, right?”
Most of you are probably expecting me to launch into a rant about education, declining standards, and Kids Today. Normally, I’d be happy to deliver. But not this time. Rather, I’d like to ask: What happened? Why do kids know so little about history?
Across the board, students don’t know as much as they used to, but with other disciplines, it’s easy to understand why. Religious knowledge has plummeted because fewer parents take their children to church, and because references to faith have been chased out of our culture. Literacy has declined because kids have more access to screens and other diversions. On those screens, grammar is ignored, so student writing suffers. Math has been rendered defunct— smartphone calculators chaperone kids wherever they go. I don’t know much about students’ scientific knowledge, but in one area— computers— it’s gotten better. Kids may be worse at biology and chemistry, but if so, their scientific knowledge has been re-configured, not diminished.
Unlike math, English, and religion, it’s unclear why kids know so little about history. And it seems like historical knowledge has taken a harder hit than anything else. That judgment is limited (I’ve never taught math or English) and biased (been a history geek since sixth grade). Still, the amount that my students don’t know is shocking. It shouldn’t be possible for statements like, “I don’t know the names of any wars besides World War II,”1 to come from a seventeen-year-old at a private high school. Yet I heard that last week.
Part of the problem is that, nowadays, history curricula emphasize “skills” over facts. This approach deprives kids of knowledge and makes history off-putting. I saw this when I taught seventh grade. Here’s a sampler from that curriculum:
”Students will analyze how humans2 in the United States adapt, exploit, manipulate and protect the environment by:
• Analyzing the regional impact of agriculture, industry, and transportation on the environment in the United States.
• Determining the competing social, economic, and political priorities between natural resource use and environmental sustainability.
• Evaluating the range of responses by government, institutions, and industries to human interaction with the environment.”
The curriculum continues on with “essential questions” about language diffusion, industrialization, population density, cultural geography, and other such shit. If I were paranoid, I might think that educrats had conspired to make kids hate history. I couldn’t create a duller curriculum if I tried. Who could blame a kid who didn’t want to learn about this? If, as an adult, I was forced to learn about “the effect of digital communication on the perception of place,”3 I would hate it too.
Instead of spending a year boring my students (and myself), I ignored the curriculum and taught juicy stuff: Columbus, Cromwell, the French Revolution, World War II, Vietnam, nuclear warfare, etc. Occasionally I’d weave in terms from the curriculum, to protect myself, in case an administrator took issue with my approach. But I didn’t need to. I was never reprimanded, and I got a lot of positive feedback from parents. The gist of what most parents said to me was: “Thank you for getting my child interested in history.”
That’s not a brag; I bring it up to make a point. A teacher’s job is not to transmit information, it’s to provoke curiosity. A teacher succeeds when students leave class wanting to know more. When that happens, a kid will pay more attention in future classes, take electives about the subject, and use leisure time to continue learning about it. Whereas, if students grow to hate the subject, whatever they learned will fade, and that knowledge won’t be replenished.
Why do students lack knowledge of the past? Because the history they’ve been taught is lifeless, utilitarian, and repellent. Which is a shame. History is interesting— it doesn’t take an exceptional teacher to make it so. Adventures, mysteries, moral quandaries, villains, saints, atrocities, heroics— this is what history is made of, and this is what we should teach about. Even if the particulars don’t stick, kids will want to hear more, which will lead to learning that lasts.
Isn’t a “World War I” implied?
Who uses the word '“human” like this?
Direct quote from the curriculum. I wish I was kidding.
Fight the good fight! Totally saw this teaching literature and the lack of context kids had for books, and they often ended up being really interested in the history I gave that was relevant to whatever classic text