History's history

I found myself reading a CNN article online called Subject Matters: Why students fall behind on history. History as a subject is one of my favorites because of the way it impacts everything we do. With a good understanding of history, we have a much better understanding and appreciation of how our world, country, state, etc. work.

The article states how history is being shortchanged because it is not a mandated No Child Left Behind subject and even though it is a growing subject, because history is new yesterday and will be new again tomorrow, the history classroom gets no additional time to cover the subjects. One individual commented below the article that history classes cover basically colonialism to World War II. I would consider that a sizable amount of information in a two semester course.

What I found to be, in my opinion, very sad was what one teacher was quoted as saying. He said, "I think they (students) learn information by itself, in isolation, but putting the big picture together is not happening." I would argue that when students learn history in isolation it keeps them from learning the big picture. My experience has shown that teaching history in the context of other disciplines like English, music, and art help students to understand the cultural values of the people they are studying, which in turn helps them to place the events of the day in time. Integrating history also helps students to understand why people reacted and passed policies, started wars, migrated. The photographs and discussion of the photographers of the 1930's help students to understand the people and conditions. A study of the music and poetry helps students to understand the Great Migration of the 1920's. And an understanding of the rise of cities and industrialism, in turn, helps us to understand why the poetry and music changed.

When I taught an American Studies, combined US history and American Literature class, my co-teacher and I enjoyed challenging the students to think and discuss, what affects what. Does history impact literature or did the literature affect the history. Sometimes it was clear and sometimes it was not.

The article mentions that teachers use history as a "throw in" (in quotes because that is how I interpreted it) to help improve reading skills. A noble attempt; but if we want to confuse students as one teacher was quoted as saying that students could identify an event like the Declaration of Independence but they could not identify the century it happened, we should continue just "throwing in" history to "improve" reading. Agreed that most of the state testing reading selections are non-fiction and some are historical, others are scientific, and others are literary. The answer to improving student test scores is to teach reading in all subjects, not just English class.

I have traditionally been opposed to a national curriculum, but articles like this make me realize that maybe we (the teaching community) cannot prioritize. We struggle, not because we lack professionalism, not because we lack passion, not because we lack know-how, but because we lack leadership. Perhaps it is time for the education community to take decision making out of non-teacher hands. It has been a mystery to me what qualifies a elected officials to make decisions about what should be taught and tested. Elected officials should oversee schools, the money, and hold schools accountable, but educators should be in charge of the what and how.

I have ideas, but I don't have the answers. I sure would like to see some real discussion on a national level. History class is not the problem. It is one of the many problems. What do you think?