Commentator Patrick J. Buchanan said, “if the generations coming out of our schools do not know our past, do not know who we are or what we have done as a people, how will they come to love America, refute her enemies or lead her confidently?”
Hmm. A survey of hundreds of high school and college students just before we entered World War I found that they did not know what happened in 1776 and got Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis mixed up. In a history test given to 7,000 college freshmen in 1943, only 6 percent could name the 13 original colonies, and only 13 percent identified James Madison as president during the War of 1812. Historian Allan Nevins said such historical illiteracy could be a liability in beating the Nazis.
Somehow we won both world wars. Many of the college freshmen who said we purchased Alaska from the Dutch and Hawaii from Norway were later celebrated as the Greatest Generation.
Two scholars who have documented our abiding civic ignorance — Sam Wineburg of Stanford University and Richard Paxton of Pacific University — point to many problems with the tests on which we base our eruptions of outrage over bad history teaching. Multiple-choice exams are designed to induce lots of wrong answers. If in piloting the NAEP test it is determined that most 12th-graders can identify Rosa Parks, the purpose of Auschwitz and the main cause of the Civil War, Wineburg said in a recent column, then “these items are all thrown out because they fail to ‘discriminate’ among students.”
A NAEP fourth-grade question asked why African Americans originally sang a song urging them to “follow the drinkin’ gourd, for the old man is awaitin’ for to carry you to freedom.” Only 42 percent picked the alleged right answer, that the song gave directions on escaping from slavery by heading north toward the Big Dipper constellation. Yet the question itself is on shaky ground, since the line as rendered wasn’t written until 1947 by legendary folk singer Lee Hays and there is no evidence the song was sung before the end of the Civil War.
We make much of bad test results and idiotic answers from the young Americans Jay Leno stops on Los Angeles street corners. It’s fun, but it doesn’t make sense. It promotes what Paxton calls “the false notion that the biggest problem facing history students today involves the retention of decontextualized historical facts.”
He and Wineburg, both education professors, say we should decide what history is worth knowing and teach it well. “The thousand-page behemoths that we call textbooks violate every principle of human memory that we know of,” Wineburg said.
Increased emphasis on reading, devoting more school hours to comprehension of the language no matter what the topic, might give us the skills to develop an interest in public affairs when we are ready for it. Many critics say history has suffered because schools are giving more time to reading and math. How then, asks Wineburg, did the most improvement on the NAEP history test occur in fourth grade, where the concentration on reading and math has been greatest?
Even if we haven’t remembered our country’s history so well in the past century, we have learned to appreciate it and act accordingly. This July 4th, that’s worth celebrating.
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