Last week’s release of the Nation’s Report Card in history brought worrisome, if unsurprising, news. Unsurprising, because students have never scored well in history. From The New Yorker:
“And yet it may be that, while kids aren’t getting better, they’re not getting worse. The history of history-education evaluation is littered with voguish pedagogy, statistical funny business, ideological arm wrestling, a disproportionate emphasis on trivia, and a protocol that insures that each generation of kids looks dim to its elders. ‘We haven’t ever known our past,’ Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford, said last week. ‘Your kids are no stupider than their grandparents.’ He pointed out that the first large-scale proficiency study—of Texas students, in 1915-16—demonstrated that many couldn’t tell Thomas Jefferson from Jefferson Davis or 1492 from 1776. A 1943 survey of seven thousand college freshmen found that, among other things, only six per cent of them could name the original thirteen colonies. ‘Appallingly ignorant,’ the Times harrumphed, as it would again in the face of another dismal showing, in 1976. (And it’s not just Americans: an infamous 2004 survey revealed that a small percentage of Britons aged sixteen to twenty-four believed that the Spanish Armada was vanquished by Gandalf.)”
Read more, here.
Never having known “our” history continues to place much of the current curriculum as the norm and the assessments as the problem, instead of taking a deeper look into what is taught. How much of the so-called hidden or null curriculum plays into why students have historically (no pun intended) scored so poorly? Could it be that the lack of relationship of the student to what is learned, or how the content and skills apply to today has contributed to these scores. When instructors have a love of the topic AND are willing to not only provide the dates and events, but agitate students into questioning what we call “our” history, I believe students score better. In my classroom, I have proven it.