BOOK REVIEW : An Eloquent Defense for the Study of History

Historical Literacy: The Case for History in American Education, edited by Paul Gagnon and the Bradley Commission on History in Schools (Macmillan: $22.50, 320 pages.)

A 1986 survey of 17-year-olds in America revealed that two-thirds did not know that the Civil War took place in the last half of the 19th Century. Seventy percent did not know that “Jim Crow” laws were intended to enforce racial segregation. And 30% could not find Great Britain on a map of Europe. The sad conclusion is that Americans are mostly ignorant about their own history.

Historical ignorance is the problem that caught the attention of the Bradley Commission on History in American Schools, one of those worthy blue-ribbon commissions that deliver themselves of voluminous but mostly unread tomes.

But “Historical Literacy,” the official report of the Bradley Commission, deserves a better fate. In 17 essays by about 25 American educators and historians, “Historical Literacy” offers an eloquent argument in favor of the study of history as a discipline that serves democracy and civilization.

As contributors Kenneth T. Jackson and Barbara B. Jackson point out, the history curriculum in the American classroom was one of the early victims of the educational turmoil of the ‘60s and ‘70s--they bemoan the “ ‘Balkanization’ of the history curriculum” and the resulting “do-your-own-thing formlessness of social studies.”

And, according to the late Hazel W. Hertzberg, the failures of public education have been reinforced by American television, the “omnipresent educator” that is specifically anti-historical: “Television is, I believe, destructive not only of our sense of history but of the democratic process itself.”

A centerpiece essay by Diane Ravitch, professor of history and education at Columbia, calls our attention to the academic torpor that currently afflicts the study of history in American schools, where the substance of history is sacrificed for a kind of earnest but soft-headed game-playing.

For instance, she reports on one exercise in an American studies class where the students broke up into groups of 10 to deliberate on the Dred Scott case for themselves.

“Ten minutes later, no surprise, each little Supreme Court recommended that Dred Scott should be a free man, and the class ended,” Ravitch writes. “They did not learn why Chief Justice Roger B. Taney decided otherwise, nor did they learn the significance of the Dred Scott decision in the antislavery agitation, nor its importance as a precursor to the Civil War.”

According to the Bradley Commission, the task is to restore history to its proper place in the education of American children. Each of the contributors to “Historical Literacy” argues for the beauty, the utility and the transcendent social and political importance of history.

For example, Charlotte Crabtree, professor of education at UCLA, cites the successes of a pilot program that introduces young schoolchildren to the Odyssey and the Aeneid, and calls for “a curriculum that returns to classrooms the pleasures of stories worth telling, of ideas worth pursuing, of adventures that capture and hold children’s attention and lead them into the historical perspectives that help each find his or her place in the long sweep of human history.”

Why study history at all? At its heart, “Historical Literacy” is a magnificent attempt to answer that question, in all its complexity.

And the most readable and memorable essays--including, notably, a short memoir by Stanford historian Gordon A. Craig on “History as a Humanistic Disciple”--transcend the workaday business of the Bradley Commission. They are elegant testimonials to the uses of history as a source of inspiration and enlightenment, democratic values and social progress.

But I came back to Diane Ravitch’s essay, where I found the most stirring reply to the rhetorical question. Indeed, her words are a credo for every student and teacher of history and deserve to be chiseled in stone (or, more to the point, painted on stucco) in every school and university in America:

“Properly taught, history teaches the pursuit of truth and understanding; it establishes a context of human life in a particular time and place, relating art, literature, philosophy, law, architecture, language, government, economics and social life; it portrays the great achievements and terrible disasters of the human race; it awakens youngsters to the universality of the human experience as well as to the particularities that distinguish cultures and societies from one another; it encourages the development of intelligence, civility, and a sense of perspective,” Ravitch reminds us.

“These are values and virtues that are gained through the study of history, values and virtues essential to the free individual exercising freedom of mind. Beyond these, history needs no further justification.”