Every year or so for more than two decades, researchers release a new study showing that American students are woefully ignorant of basic history and almost clueless about the literary and cultural references that for centuries were the common inheritance of Western civilization. The latest such report, by Common Core in conjunction with the American Enterprise Institute, emphasizes again just how dire the situation is. As the Common Core report notes, “absent shared reference points, it may be more difficult for young Americans and new immigrants alike to find their common identity as citizens.” We’re less diplomatic: Americans who are ignorant of where they’ve been won’t know or care where they are going or where they are being led.
Clearly, good citizenship is at risk when one-third of 17-year-olds do not know that the guarantees of free speech and religion are found in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, or why so much blood had to be shed to secure those sacred rights. And historical understanding — the ability to make sense of past and present world events, to put them into context — is seriously threatened when more than a quarter of these adolescents think Columbus sailed for the New World after the year 1750. And so on.
Who is responsible? The public education monopolies, especially the National Education Association, whose president seems more concerned about opposing the war in Iraq than the crisis of historical ignorance in the classroom. One searches the NEA Web site in vain for recognition of the critical importance of teaching history. Instead, there is a flood of educationist jargon about “achievement gaps” and “collaborative” learning. No wonder Common Core reports “the amount of weekly instructional time devoted to history … fell by 22 percent between 1988 and 2004.” And the NEA vociferously and continually demands that more tax dollars be spent on its members.
Fortunately, a few states, Virginia among them, require a rigorous, grade-by-grade, content-specific curriculum for history, civics and the like.
Lil Tuttle, a former member of the Virginia Board of Education who helped develop the original standards in 1995, told The Examiner that states must reject the “mysterious brew of sociology, anthropology and maybe a little history” that is called “Social Studies,” in favorof actual, honest-to-goodness history. “It is the story of history that is compelling,” she said. “It is incredibly interesting. Kids ought to know where they came from. They must understand what [acclaimed history professor] Paul Gagnon called “the glory and the agony of the human struggle.” Other states ought to follow Virginia’s lead.
Unless, that is, they want an ignorant citizenry to make history of the wrong kind.
