Lessons of History Not Lost on Educators

Appalled by the gaps in California students’ knowledge of history, state education officials are considering a major overhaul of history teaching that they hope will make the subject students love to hate more comprehensible and exciting.

Next month the state Board of Education is expected to approve a new history framework, a document that is revised every several years and recommends guidelines for local districts to use in developing courses.

The proposed framework, developed over the last two years by a panel of educators, suggests an additional year of world history and outlines a dramatically different approach that emphasizes in-depth study, review and continuity.

It places California at the forefront of a change that educators, painfully aware of dismal history test results, say is urgently needed.

“The biggest complaint we’ve gotten from kids is that history is fragmented, history is not interesting,” said Bill Honig, state superintendent of public instruction, who earlier spearheaded successful drives to upgrade science and mathematics instruction in the state. “But these topics--like the American Revolution, the framing of the Constitution, the fall of the South--ought to be the most interesting topics around.

“Instead, kids are just running through a bunch of facts, and they’re not getting a feel for real events, for the ideas people fought for, and they’re not getting the connections (between past and present). They are losing a democratic understanding of life.”

Chief among the weak spots is a failure to understand the chronology of historical events, such as knowing that Herbert C. Hoover was President before Dwight D. Eisenhower, numerous national and state studies have shown. Without a clear “mental map of time,” educators say, students cannot draw conclusions about cause and effect and the role of historic events in shaping current affairs.

According to the preliminary results of a national study of 17-year-old students financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities, two-thirds of the students did not know in which half of the 19th Century the Civil War occurred, and half were unable to place World War I in the general vicinity of the early 20th Century.

A California test of 300,000 eighth-graders last year resulted in similarly disturbing findings. According to the Department of Education’s annual report on the California Assessment Program test of basic knowledge, the majority of the students not only were “unaware of critical connections” between historic events and the present but were fuzzy on the values and ideals embodied in such seminal documents as the U.S. Constitution.

For example, only 45% knew that the phrase, “A government of laws, not of men” best described the philosophy behind the Constitution--not, “Walk softly and carry a big stick” or, “The buck stops here,” which were other answers given. Slightly more than one-fourth of the eighth-graders knew that trade and banking were the two main activities that “expanded and contributed to the growth in power and wealth of states and nations” during the Renaissance.

According to Lynne Cheney, chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the problem is that most students do not spend enough time studying history and are subjected to poorly organized courses and badly written textbooks that make it hard to develop a cohesive view of the flow of historic events.

“The story to be told (about the status of history education across the country) is mostly grim,” she said. “But the California framework is the one bright spot in an otherwise desolate world.”

According to Charlotte Crabtree, a UCLA education professor who helped oversee drafting of the new framework, what distinguishes the new guidelines is an emphasis on history instead of social studies--a catchall approach popular through the 1960s and 1970s that included history along with a variety of other subjects. The new framework urges the study of world history in sixth grade, in addition to seventh and 10th. Intensive doses of American history are recommended in grades five, eight and 11.

Developing a sense of historical chronology is heavily stressed.

The existing guidelines, written in 1981, organized the curriculum around peoples and cultures, Crabtree said. It did so, however, in a fragmented way that failed to help students visualize “a mental map of time,” thus hampering students’ ability to know, for instance, that Charlemagne, leader of the Holy Roman Empire, came before Descartes, the Enlightenment philosopher.

The new framework was deliberately structured to lead students from one epoch to the next. Thus, sixth-graders will study the ancient world to the beginning of the Middle Ages, and in seventh grade they will pick up medieval and early modern times and go up through the Enlightenment. In the eighth grade, students begin American history with a review of earlier learning about the Enlightenment and how it set the stage for the beginnings of self-government.

Selective Review

Each course begins with a selective review that highlights key historic events that influenced the next period to be studied--the key to helping students see the links between epochs, Crabtree said.

The framework breaks up history into manageable chunks, instead of requiring a teacher to teach the whole of American history or world history in one course, by identifying specific years to study. The 11th-grade American history course, for instance, concentrates on the 20th Century, including an extensive unit on the civil rights movement of the 1960s that suggests outside reading from works by Malcolm X and Richard Wright. This change, Crabtree said, will give students more time to absorb what they learn and think about what it means.

“Teachers complain that their students don’t remember what they’ve learned,” Crabtree said. “It’s because there is not enough time to get through all the material, and they just keep rushing on. At the end of the 11th grade, everyone is panting and they’re lucky if they got past FDR.”

Slowing down the pace, Crabtree said, also will enable teachers to weave in other resources such as the literature of the time, biographies and important documents that will “bring the period and the people alive.” Exemplary teachers and teachers of gifted students already incorporate such materials into their history lessons, but it is time, she said, that more teachers do so.

Role of Religion

In large part because of the clamoring of a wide range of interest groups that have closely monitored the drafting of the curriculum guidelines, the framework also gives greater attention to the role religion has played in shaping history, as well as focusing on contributions of women and minorities.

One draft, Crabtree noted, failed to make note of any black Americans in the fourth-grade course on California history. The latest version mentions Biddy Mason, who “was born a slave in Georgia, gained her freedom in Los Angeles, became a nurse and a successful real estate entrepreneur, and served as a civic leader on behalf of the city’s needy.”

During a hearing before the state Board of Education last week, a number of speakers said they were still not satisfied with the framework’s treatment of Latinos, women, Pacific Rim countries and the portrayal of the 1915 genocide of thousands of Armenians by the Turkish government.

If adopted, the framework will make a difference in the kind of history textbooks the state orders in 1990, when new history texts will be adopted.

“The big issue is how to get the textbooks to change,” said state schools chief Honig. Because most teachers rely heavily on textbooks in shaping lessons, Honig and others said, bringing the texts in line with the proposed framework will be a crucial step.