On October 10th, Will Fitzhugh, creator of The Concord Review, spoke at the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics meeting about using history as literature in K-12 education. For the most part, students aren’t reading or writing about history at all. Fitzhugh recommends that studentsread at least one nonfiction book a year in it entirety and that students begin writing about historical topics – a page per year. So then by 12thgrade, they would be able to write 12 pages on a serious topic. Sounds like a great idea, but Fitzhugh says there are “no takers yet on that idea.” For anyone who thinks high school students can’t write research papers, check out the sample essays on The Concord Review website.
His full remarks are posted below:
Association of Literary Scholars and Critics Notes for 12-minute talk
October 10, 2009—Panel; 1:30 to 3:00 PM—Denver
The K-12 English Curriculum: Challenges and Proposals
Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review
“History as Literature: What High School Students are Not Assigned and Do Not Write About.”
Professor Stotsky has asked me to comment on the recent Carnegie Corporation Report on Adolescent Literacy, and to report on the study The Concord Review did in 2002 of the assignment of history term papers in U.S. public high schools, and to give you my recommendations for reading and writing in our schools. I could say briefly that our study found that the majority of U.S. public high school students are not writing serious term papers and I believe they are not reading one complete nonfiction book before they head off to college either, although I have found no one willing to fund a study to find out. Again, in brief, I would recommend that our high school students all be asked to write a research paper or two and to read a nonfiction book or two before they graduate.
In speaking to an audience of Literary Scholars and Critics, I should admit that I was an English major at Harvard in the late 1950s: I had B.J. Whiting for Chaucer, Alfred Harbage for Shakespeare, Herschel Baker for Tudor-Stuart Drama, Douglas Bush for Milton, and Walter Jackson Bate for Samuel Johnson. In my one year at Cambridge, I attended lectures by C.S. Lewis, F.R. Leavis, and R.T.H. Redpath, among others.
I turned to history when I was given a chance to teach it at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts in 1983.
Since I started The Concord Review in 1987, I have published 868 academic papers by HS students from 44 states and 35 other countries in the only journal in the world for the research papers of secondary students. There is no similar journal for the academic literature papers of secondary students.
My goal has been to find and to publish the most exemplary papers in the world by high school students, and to distribute them as widely as possible, to inspire other students to read more history and to work on serious term papers.
Along the way, I have gained some insight into most educators’ views of the value of such exemplary student work….
David Brooks recently wrote, in a review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers in the New York Times: “As the classical philosophers understood, examples of individual greatness inspire achievement more reliably than any other form of education.” Nevertheless, the current Dean of the School of Education at Boston University, when I sent him this quote, informed me that: “The myth of individual greatness is a myth.”
The Carnegie Report is a result of five years’ of study of Adolescent Literacy. Perhaps Robert Pondiscio made the most useful comment on it, when he wrote that it looks like, instead of suggesting that students learn to read by 3rd grade and then read to learn, as the saying goes, this Report seems to want instruction in reading to continue right through 12th grade. Perhaps their goal is to have students start to read to learn in college?
It reminds me of a letter I got from one of our authors from New York, 12 years ago, in which she said:
“I considered myself a lover of history but a possessor of second-rate writing skills. Part of the reason for my lack of confidence is that I attend a school where students are given few opportunities to develop their talents in this field (it is assumed students will learn how to write in college).”
Quite a few years ago, Sandra Stotsky and Sheldon Stern gave a report on the study they did for the Fordham Institute on state English standards to the MA Association of Scholars. I asked them at the time if any of the state standards included research papers, and they said no.
Finally, in 2001 I was able to get a small grant from the Albert Shanker Institute to do a study of the assignment of history research papers in U.S. public high schools, and Professor Stotsky assures me that this is still the only study that has been done on the subject.
Very briefly, The Concord Review Study found that 95% of the teachers surveyed thought research papers were important or very important, but 62% never assigned a 12-page paper (3,000 words) and 81% never assigned a 20-page paper of c. 5,000 words. The average paper in The Concord Review is now about 7,000 words. The main reason teachers gave was lack of time to guide and assess research papers. We have plenty of time in the high schools for tackling practice for football and lay-up drills for basketball, but no time for teachers who want to work with their students on research papers in any subject.
As I said, I have been trying since 2002 to get funding for a study of the assignment of complete nonfiction books in U.S. public high schools, but I have not found any interest in such a study.
Now, for several basic recommendations. For writing, about 10 years ago, I wrote an article about a “Page Per Year Plan” which suggests, to those who claim that HS Seniors are incapable of writing a 12-page paper, that schools start by assigning students a one-page paper in first grade about something other than themselves, and then add a page a year, so that an eighth grader would write an 8-page paper with 8 sources, and a HS Junior an 11-page paper with at least 11 sources, and then by Senior year, every single student could write a 12-page paper, and in the process come to know more about some serious topic, perhaps, than anyone else in the building. No takers yet on that idea.
For a reading recommendation, I suggest that students read at least one complete nonfiction book a year. This is, of course, a dangerously revolutionary idea, but it turns out that there are lots of very good biographies of really significant people which little kids can read. I have my own suggestions for history books for high school kids, but no one is interested in those recommendations yet, either.
I would also recommend that someone be funded to do some more studies of the state of the HS term paper and perhaps even the first study of the state of the assignment of complete nonfiction books in the high schools.
I will conclude by claiming that reading and writing are the most dumbed-down parts of our current schooling, and that if we can have better national standards for those, we might make it possible to have fewer than one million of our high school graduates in remedial courses when they enter college each year.
When I think of how many English teachers have kept their students in the ruts of reading only fiction, and doing personal or creative writing in school, I recall a good story about not thinking out of the rut:
In Viscount Sir William Slim’s book about the Burma campaign in WWIII, he tells this story about a Gurkha burial detail:…
Visiting the site of the battle a little later, I was struck by the way in which several Japanese gun crews had obviously been shot and bayoneted while serving their pieces in the open at point-blank range. While this was going on, another party of the enemy broke into 63 Brigade area at Bishenpur and entrenched themselves in the mule lines. Our troops surrounded them and, with the help of tanks in several days’ fighting, wiped them out. The slaughter of Japanese, and, unfortunately, of mules, was also heavy. Bulldozers had to be employed to bury both.
It was here that some Gurkhas were engaged in collecting Japanese corpses from the corners inaccessible to bulldozers, when one Japanese, picked up by a couple of Gurkhas, proved not to be as dead as expected. A Gurkha had drawn his kukri to finish the struggling prisoner, when a passing British officer intervened saying, ‘You mustn’t do that, Johnny. Don’t kill him!’ The Gurkha, with his kukri poised, looked at the officer in pained surprise, ‘But, sahib,’ he protested, ‘We can’t bury him alive!’”*
Not to beat the theme to death, but it seems to me that our educators are now working hard to keep too many of our students buried alive intellectually in our schools…by preventing them from reading books and writing papers.
*[Defeat into Victory: Battling Japan in Burma and India, 1942-1945. Field-Marshall Viscount William Slim. New York: Cooper Square Press 2000, p. 336]