Everything old is new again: social history, the National History Standards and the crisis in the teaching of high school American history

Journal of Social History, Mid-Winter, 1995 by Barry W. Bienstock

This debate commenced last fall with the publication of National Standards for United States History and World History, but storm warnings echoed years earlier with the report of the Bradley Commission and other joint-sponsored reports on Social Studies in the Schools. Issues related to pedagogy have been even more pressing as secondary school teachers are flooded with material about the student-centered classroom and new delivery systems preparing students for the twenty-first century, as if the very mission of the profession of teaching is as committed to reformatting as the new versions of computer software that appear every month. Workshop leaders talk about the teacher becoming the guide on the side rather than the pilot flying the plane, as though academic teachers were engaged in an athletic activity that relegated the teacher to the status of a coach sitting on the bench while the team moved the ball up the field. We learn that students learn best facing one another, so that it is important to replace antiquated desks with seminar tables or to move those armchair desks into "the circle." We are told that everyone has a different learning style: some students are passive learners and some are active learners - and, of course, there is a gender dimension to learning that must be taken into consideration as well.

We are asked to provide more inclusive, more relevant, more self-referential material to enhance students' self-esteem and to educate students for the coming century. Some teachers say that "the box" is already so filled that the only way we can do that is by lengthening the school year as well as the school day. And we must not forget that the two-parent working family requires a longer school day and year to provide the child the care that the homemaker used to offer. All of which leads to the school's becoming a surrogate parent as teachers are exhorted more and more to provide the ethical guidance that doomsayers tell us is no longer coming from the home.

We are told that we should teach students how to think and not what to think, and so it really does not matter if a teacher lacks the expertise to teach a subject because enthusiasm and pedagogy are more important than content. Or, as my former Head of School once said, when hiring someone who had no training in the subject she was supposed to teach, "We're more interested in the spirit of teaching around here."

Finally, teachers are being urged to have their students do "projects" rather than end of the year final exams or term papers. And as projects replace year-end final exams in the student-centered classroom, students shape the curriculum and design projects that provide "hands-on" activity. Everyone is a historian. Adopt a project, create a documentary, write a novel, put a historical figure on trial, hold a constitutional convention, host your very own Congress of Vienna.

The central issue that has been lost in much of this debate, and one directly addressed by the National Standards, is that too much emphasis has been focused upon pedagogy and not enough on content. What the Standards offer are a solid grounding in American history as well as pedagogical suggestions that offer the best promise yet of a balanced curriculum. My views on the subject are tempered by chairing a department for five years, interviewing job applicants, attending workshops on the East Coast and keeping up with the literature in the field. If one issue has become more compelling to me than all others, it is the lack of academic content in education schools and in much of the teaching that goes on in our schools. Not all that long ago, I interviewed a M.Ed. from Columbia University's Teachers College who indicated that one of her only content-oriented courses was on historiography in which she wrote a historiographical essay on slavery. I asked her to talk about Winthrop Jordan's White Over Black and Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom. She hadn't heard of either work. Since most public school systems require certification, which can only be obtained in education schools, and this experience focuses more on pedagogy than content, is it any wonder that high school students seem to know little about their nation's past and that teachers seem threatened by efforts to encourage a core of knowledge? How are high school teachers to acquire the historical grounding to instruct their students in an engaging, meaningful history?

High school teachers writing in the special issue of the Journal of American History on "The Practice of American History" repeatedly comment that they act in isolation and that most students dislike the subject.(1) Therefore, many teachers think of social history as a convenient way to spice up their classes, serving it in easily-digestible bites that do not cohere to a larger narrative. One colleague assigns a student to teach a class on all of women's history from Seneca Falls to Roe v. Wade, while another is asked to instruct his classmates on the entirety of African American history from Reconstruction through the modern Civil Rights movement in a single class period. He thinks this is what it means to be "inclusive." The achievement of the National Standards is that they integrate social history into the larger political and economic narrative, in the process asking students to formulate questions, interpret data and assess sources in a way that should satisfy critics who think social history is simply fluff.