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What Happened to History?
I’d like to do an informal poll, open to participation by anybody in their early thirties or younger, or thereabouts. It’s a pretty simple question, with some possibly grave implications, depending on what kind of answers we collect.
When you were in school (anything before college, in this case), how far did you get in your history classes? That is, what date did you get up to? Specifically, I’m interested in American history for the purposes of discussion, but world history or European history could work as well.
In my own experience, through 12 years of public schooling, we never got past World War II. And even that we breezed through like it was unimportant. I’ve been asking around people I know, and so far, across the board people are saying that they would “run out of time” in their school year before ever getting into recent history (ie, last 50 years). I’ve asked maybe about 8 or 10 people so far, and they all gave this same answer.
Whether or not it indicates anything other than poor curriculum design, the widespread nature of this phenomenon is extremely startling. It’s not limited to one school district or one region of the country. It happens everywhere, and is still happening. Even among my most educated and intelligent friends in my age bracket, none of know more than a few passing details about anything that happened between 1950 and 1975. What little we do know seems to have been collectively gleaned from music, television and movies - and most of those, in turn, are of a counter-cultural nature.
I recognize the practical impossibilty of this massive generational oversight being a conspiracy filtered down from the top levels of government. But at the same time, I also think it’s important to recognize the very high level of usefulness in having a generation of young people who know little or nothing about the struggles and dreams of their parents for freedom and progress. How could this have happened? How could everything that a whole generation stood for (and against the powers that be, no less) have so completely gone up in smoke? Who traded in history for That 70’s Show and is it too late for us to track the bastard down and trade him back?
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March 13th, 2006 at 3:13 am
I took AP American History in high school, which may skew the results a little.
We got up to Watergate. We also studied quite a lot on the Civil Rights movement. (That may have been because our teacher was a good old card-carrying leftist from back in the day…) When studying Watergate, we were admonished that “this isn’t history yet, people are still debating on the meaning of these events…”
I didn’t really get it back then, but I think that’s become a lot more clear to me in the last couple of years.
March 13th, 2006 at 3:18 am
Unfortunately, my school didn’t offer AP American History (that I knew of anyway) but I did have a fucking amazing American History teacher, who you can read a bit more about here.
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/about-me/
Even with one of the best teachers I’ve ever had though, we still didn’t get to most of this stuff. We got part way through the fifties, and I remember delivering a seminar on how McCarthy was used and then dropped when he got out of control. But the whole section there was completely rushed. It seems crazy that we only tend to have one solid year of American history that seems to be required in most areas.
Very interesting line. Makes me wonder then if there’s really any such thing as history at all, if that’s how we define it - as a fixed meaning attributed to past events.
March 13th, 2006 at 6:09 am
I had a terrible history program in school, and essentially every year the curriculum never really got to the “meat” of any era. I swear the most I ever learned about history was in elementary school when we did endless projects and field trips. And then after that felt like one Civil War lesson after another until one day we were finally studying about WWII in middleschool, then we did a lot of mindless stuff in highschool, barely any of which I remember. Lots of bills and treaties and extremely rushed geography lessons that seem meaningless to me now, and I think we too got to Watergate and talked about that for a week… but then the history books got slimmer and slimmer as we approached present day, as if present day didn’t really have much to teach us. Blah blah blah oil blah blah blah Saddam blah blah Utopia…
March 13th, 2006 at 6:16 am
Sometimes I wonder if I was taught to really hate history. Because, well, I never wanted to take a history class again after all of that BS…
March 13th, 2006 at 8:18 am
My view isn’t the one you were looking for but I’ll give it since I find it ironic. I’m currently studying Year 11 History and I live in Melbourne, Australia. Our focus for this year is mainly America in Post WWII, including subjects like the Vietman and Korean War. Currently we are ‘investigating’ the murder of JFK, which is sort of pointless because we are given the information and not allowed to use other sources. Last year we covered 1900’s to the end of WWII. The weird thing is that no-where in our schools History program do we study anything to do with Australian History, save the ANZAC’s landing at Gallipoli in WWI.
March 13th, 2006 at 11:29 am
Wait, maybe I DID take AP American History. Now I totally can’t even remember that. Maybe I just have a really bad memory…
Anyway, in regards to Thoth’s comments above, I was talking about this with a friend who said he’d discussed something similar in the past with some British students. They claimed to never have been taught anything about the American Revolution. Interesting.
March 13th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
I took AP History in 1994-1996. We got all the way up to and a little past the Reagan Era. The only reason this was the case is because my history teacher was not only a good teacher but a good organizer too.
It’s bizarre that one justififciation for not emphasizing near-term history is that it hasn’t happened yet with implication being that we are going to have a better idea of the “truth” as time passes. That’s like saying we should have a better understanding of the surface geography of Pluto than we do of Earth. In any other subject, proximity is valued as a device for discerning the truth. Of course, this is assuming that “truth” is what those in power want us to learn.
March 13th, 2006 at 12:35 pm
wow, that’s totally true! we stopped in AP history– wait, no, actually, we did go all the way to recent times, but when i think about it, we didn’t cover anything *in depth* after world war ii. we just breezed through everything from about 1960-1990, covering like a decade every two days or so.
i wonder, though; does recent history get ignored because of limitations of time, or because it hasn’t been codified enough yet? like, from about vietnam on, there isn’t so much ‘accepted agreement’ on what happened historically, but there’s a kind of accepted story-system for history up until then (which is hideously wrong in many cases).
here’s a question: i come from st. augustine, fl, which has like this insanely rich history, going back to 1565. our curriculum in school was that we did the history of st. augustine in fourth grade, the history of florida in fifth grade, us history in sixth grade, ’social studies’ in 6th, 7th and 8th grade, then back to american in 9th grade, economics in 10th grade, world history in 11th grade. anything beyond that was elective– we didn’t have a history requirement in 12th grade. did anyone else have any kind of odd, stilted history coverage like this?
March 13th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
Good question you bring up here.
In my experience, however, an even more important question is where our history lessons begin. Reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn totally woke me up to the fact that all of my history lessons in school had been concerned with (what I’ll call) “civilizational” history — we learned nothing of what human life (or life on earth, in general) was like for the thousands and millions of years before our dominant “civilizational” culture.
This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but it becomes one when its called “world history” and it is assumed implicitly that nothing worth mentioning ever happened before the rise of earth-dominating civilization. We cannot be taught to think “outside the box” (outside of the framework of civilization) if we’re never presented a view of human life outside of our current condition.
To teach “up to the current day” would imply critical thinking of what will come next (in 5 years or 50 years)… and that is something that schools in general don’t seemed concerned with. In regard to history, however, what could be more important?
March 13th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
We had this thing called “current events” which was a valid topic for informal discussion in just about every class. Our more informed teachers (often history or English teachers) would, when they could, relate these discussions to their historical context. This was all done in the midst of telling students (such as myself) to ’shut up’ or ‘put that away before I take it from you’ or ’see me after class, young man.’
Remember that famous moment when Carter got those two middle east jokers to sign that peace accord and then they shook hands?
http://www.sowega.net/~plainsed/kidsite/kidimages/handshake.jpg
There was a picture of that in my 10th grade history book. We never got to that, though.
I think grade schools, at least in the US, are more concerned with laying down a nice base of context before sending kids off to college to learn about more recent history. It takes a long time to explain the “powder keg of discontent” to 35 psychotic teenagers. And that’s just one of many important concepts that you need under your belt before you can even begin to understand why there’s a coup in the Phillipines every 12 years, or British magistrates still wear those silly-ass wigs.
So, I think the phenominon you describe is really just a matter of history being a truly huge topic that has to be shoe horned into kids’ minds as best as possible in addition to mathematics, physics, basic language skills etc. etc. And it’s a subject that can only really be taught in chronological order, more or less. Hence, ‘modern’ history is left up to the college-level.
March 13th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
As I read this, I was eating lunch. About 30 seconds ago, I read my fortune cookie: “Imagination is more important than knowledge”.
Anyway, I was in HS back in the ’70s, and we didn’t get past WWII. Cool teacher for the modern stuff, but the experimental interactive stuff (very big in the ’70s, and we aren’t talking video games here because we didn’t have any) took a lot of time and didn’t do much for us. Spent several weeks wargaming as factions leading up to WWI and all I knew at the end was that the assasination of the Serbian Archduke was the trigger but not the cause of the war.
My solution: I teach my kids about recent history, often in terms of my age at the time or music that they know of (Beatles, mostly).
March 13th, 2006 at 3:02 pm
I’ve been thinking that it would be an interesting way to teach history by doing it backwards. Start with right now and look at current events, trace them back to their source. And then weave multiple strands together. I really don’t get why it’s *not* taught that way…
March 13th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
i think it’s cause we’re still stuck in this pseudo-aristotelian ‘unmoved mover’ mindset. plus, we still operate under the societal/scientific illusion that we’re somehow ‘progressing,’ moving from a state of ignorance to a state of advancement. start at the end? how absurd! we must start at the beginning!
March 13th, 2006 at 3:53 pm
I live in Belgium, Europe, and we pretty much quit at World War II as well. From 5th grade onward it seems 80% of our history classes were about medieval times, which bored me to tears.
Coincidentally, the other day I was thinking there ought to be a place for “prehistoric history” (hah) in school, even at around the fifth grade level. I was only ever thought that people evolved from monkeys and lived in caves. I’d love to see kids being thought about our psychological/social evolution somehow - how we got from hunter-foragers to the technophile control-crazy societies we have now, and how odd that really is. I think I would have appreciated that even as a kid.
March 13th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
Fairly similar here. I grew up in a small midwestern town in the states, and we only once broke past world war 2 in a history class. The teacher had been something of a 60s radical in his day, and I think that’s the sole reason we didn’t wind up with another year covering the exact same topics we’d had before.
The funny thing is, until I got to Uni, I ‘hated’ history. But the second I had a chance to actually have it taught as a unified whole, showcasing the permutations of world culture throughout time, it quickly became one of my favourite.
March 13th, 2006 at 9:00 pm
I think we’re all agreeing here that the way they (we?) teach history now is much less than inspiring.
March 13th, 2006 at 9:17 pm
We didn’t have a history class– it was called “Social Institutions” and it went up to the early ’80s (I graduated in 1992).
In my Junior year, a student in my class tried to challenge the status quo– apparently he didn’t feel that we’d had enough history. Instead the CORE educators ended up tacking on a required AP History class for the next year’s Juniors. This made next year’s Juniors very upset, because they were already saddled with enough as it was. Up until then AP History for us was an elective.
The student in my class who raised the uproar didn’t realize that we were already receiving a stellar public education– although I didn’t do the college thing, every one of my classmates who did go on to college told me that the first two years were a virtual repeat of our High School CORE curriculum.
I guess if I ever decide to go back to school, I’ve got a slight advantage over most others.
March 13th, 2006 at 10:31 pm
Starting from now and working back is an investigative method.
Starting from the beginning to middle to end is.. story telling.
March 13th, 2006 at 10:43 pm
I’m British. I don’t remember being taught anything more recent than WWII. And that was pretty sketchy. It was as though it somehow wasn’t old enough to count as proper history yet.
March 13th, 2006 at 11:37 pm
[…] side of time, rather than a historical event. Maybe then the reason why so few of us were taught much of anything about history is not due to low educational standa […]
March 14th, 2006 at 12:15 pm
I took AP History in 1998-1999 and even with 3 hour study sessions after-school each day and 6 hours worth of classes on weekends for the last 2 months of the school year (completely voluntary) we still never made it past WWII. If we hadn’t taken those classes we never would’ve made it past the Civil War. The instructor was trying to be as in-depth as possible with around 8 months of education with the alloted 40 minute instruction periods per day, 5 days per week. Even with the supplementary lessons we were barely able to learn in-depth of WWI and WWII and I am to this day still attempting to bridge major gaps in my education from WWII and onwards to even the issues we went in-depth on.
Global History in NY is however taught in a 2-year time period. This was even more cursory than what was taught on the AP level, because Honors was the highest level we were able to take and it was taught towards the Regents Exam, which a person with even a minimal understanding of the world could excel in nicely.
March 14th, 2006 at 1:07 pm
Oh man, Regents exams - that sure brings back memories. Other states don’t have those, do they? You ought to email me and tell me where you went to highschool in new york. I graduated 1998 on Long Island.
March 14th, 2006 at 8:47 pm
Seems weird to start at the beggining and go onwards to me. I guess it’s theoretically possible in the US (ignoring pre-European pesky native stuff or world events) but it’s not going to happen for people in older countries. At my school in the UK we dotted about back and forth trying to cover important bits. Trying to go from the bronze age to now in depth would be a tall order in basic schooling.
March 15th, 2006 at 12:53 am
I’m in the United States. We didn’t get any further than WW2 in my history classes. I had an AP class that dealt with the structure of the government specifically. That took us a bit further, but more as an investigation the government itself, rather than the history. My classes focused primarily on the United States and dealt very, very little with other countries.
What always confused me was the repetition of it. We studied the 1800 and 1900s in much detail in my middle school years, and that we studied it all over again in high school. I didn’t learn much new in high school that I didn’t already know from the previous classes. Then again, I went to an accelerated middle school, so we were probably a bit ahead of the other schools in the curriculum.
March 16th, 2006 at 5:05 pm
It’s not a new thing. By 12th grade when I was in high school in the sixties, we only got to the 1920’s by graduation. I remember inordinate amounts of time focused on the Louisiana Purchase and the Hawley-Smoot tariffs (sounded like it ought to have been an R. Crumb character). Our ninth grade social studies class was “this is what this particular exotic foreign place is like, with little brown children and tin exports…” and I have zero recollection of any teaching of European history at any time.
When I was a kid, we had state history only in fourth grade, and it’s the same for my kids now. I’ve been working on family genealogy a lot in the past several years, and it frustrates me to be learning about all this interesting local and regional history that I pick up while following the strands of my family history, yet my kids don’t have any context in school that would awaken an interest in the rich local history that surrounds them. It’s like you have to learn local history on the street in an almost transgressive way.