The latest bulletin from the Bureau of “We Get It, We Get It”:
A recent study called “The Nation’s Report Card” said less than one quarter of all students is proficient or shows a solid academic performance in American history.
Shockingly, while most quizzed could identify a photo of Abraham Lincoln, hardly any could say why he was an important president.
If there’s anywhere students would be able to answer a question about Lincoln, many would think it would be at the Lincoln memorial, in Washington DC.
But the study and a field trip made it clear that kids aren’t learning history.
Interesting that kids could ID a picture of Lincoln but couldn’t say anything significant about him. Lincoln’s face is one of the most visually distinctive in American annals, so on a perverse and twisted level, it sort of makes sense. For kids weaned on reality TV, historical figures are not unlike modern pseudo-celebrities, famous for being famous. “Hey, isn’t he that guy from the $5 bill?”
That furious clickety-clacking you hear is the sound of keyboard commandos announcing the discovery of yet more evidence that history teachers are incompetent and our school systems irreparably broken. That’s because they haven’t read the rest of the story, or they have read it and they don’t care.
Why that’s the case, and how to fix it, is up for debate.
Possibilities include apathetic students, how history is tested, and the No Child Left Behind Act squeezing history out of the classroom in favor of math and reading.
As crazy as it sounds, lousy testing standards and policies that minimize history requirements may actually contribute to the problem of historical ignorance. History teachers have to play the hand they’re dealt, and that hand isn’t always pretty.
Past in the Present 