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• 17 May 09
  

  Clay Burell

  Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fhistorycoalition.org%2F2009%2F03%2F25%2Fbill-to-reform-teaching-of-american-history-and-civics-introduced-in-the-senate

  history legislation

  • As a US History teacher in a high school, these programs are essential to increasing my knowledge of US History and creating engaging and relevant lessons for my students. Going where the history is reinvergerates me and encourages me to produce the type of history that will also pull in my students. I have participated in the American History Grants for the past two years and have visited Montana to study Vermont’s connection to the West. I was able to not only visit and interact with members of the Crow tribe that related to my Native American unit and my elective course, I was also able to immerse myself in the history of Virgina City and the Vermont connection to the gold rush. Last summer I spent time in Colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown. While I can’t speak for the various academies that will be created in this new bill, those who developed the curriclum for my two trips in the history grants are acedemic historians who pay close attention to not only the historical accuracy of these trips, but its connection to our current Vermont standards. Mr. Pitz I can assure you that they are professionals in ever sense of the word and the strict regulations in which they have to follow leave little room for waste. My hope is that those in Congress will contiue to create these opportunities for teachers so that we can continue to be better educators and historians. Mr. Green, with success of this program, perhaps Congress will see the benfits to extending these academies and opportunities to world history teachers.

  • While the extension of standards and assessments to US history and civics is simply an employment bill for educrats (the National Center for History in the Schools developed challenging standards for US and world history more than a decade ago), I’d like to focus here on the vision underlying the TAH program.

     

    The program is designed to promote something that it calls “traditional US history” (http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg32.html). While this is designed in part to rescue the discipline of history from what the original authors of the bill consider to be the failings of social studies as a discipline, this notion of traditionalism is also used to promote both a politically conservative conception of heritage history that overlooks most of the key developments in the historical discipline since the 1960s and an intellectually retrograde notion of history as the knowledge of objective “truths.” The TAH program is of a piece with a 2006 Florida Education Omnibus Bill, signed by Gov. Jeb Bush, which–according to Jonathan Zimmerman’s HNN blog–states that “The history of the United States shall be taught as genuine history and shall not follow the revisionist or postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth… American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed” (http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/26426.html).

  • It would be wonderful if I could get the funding to help a group of history/social studies teachers develop a more sophisticated understanding of what historians do by guiding them through a month of summer research in, say, the archives of the New York Historical Society. Both the teachers and their students would certainly benefit from this. But the TAH program in its current form seeks to legislate a limited and–in its limitations–problematic approach to the history of the United States. Moreover, as Arthur Green rightly suggests in the preceding post, the very traditional narrative of American exceptionalism that inspired the program is further reinforced by the explicit exclusion from the program of the history of the rest of the world–not because the teaching of world history is superior to that of American history, but rather because promoting the study of other societies would potentially unsettle the political and cultural assumptions that underlie the very idea of “traditional American history.”

     

    For all of the obvious reasons, now is the time to rethink the kind of history that we want our children to be learning, and renewing the TAH program in its existing form will simply perpetuate a program and a vision of history that was never intellectually defensible and that is becoming less so with every passing day.
  • I agree that using the standards developed by the National Center for History in the Schools would be more productive than paying “educrats” from outside the history field to develop national standards. I would put the savings into more TAH grants and add grants for the study of non-US history.ld put the savings into more TAH grants and add grants for the study of non-US history.
  • An active and informed citizenry is critical to its survival. It appears necessary that some sort of Federal standards be put into place in order to force local school districts to include this in their budgets and requirements.
  • believe minimum national standards will help provide a unified education The remainder of the curriculum can allow individual states and local governments to include regional and local history within the curriculum.
  • I have taken part in one TAH grant and found it to be invaluable, particularly as a teacher in the early stages of my career. While the bill is written to encourage the teaching of “traditional American history,” I found the seminars in our two summers at Northwestern to go beyond pre-1960’s historiography.

  • So in answer to your criticism, Mr. Frohman, I believe these grants can be used creatively and usefully to deepen a high school teacher’s understanding of modern historiography. You can even get around the provincial nature of the grant to some degree by teaching about the US role in the world, though I, too, would love to be able to attend a summer institute on world, and particularly Latin American, history. I saw nothing of Jeb Bush’s approach to history as objective truth in my seminars, and I do not teach my classes with the Florida mandate or approach in mind.

     

    I agree that using the standards developed by the National Center for History in the Schools would be more productive than paying “educrats” from outside the history field to develop national standards. I would put the savings into more TAH grants and add grants for the study of non-US history.
  • At my high school we studied US History for 9 of the 12 years I was there and only 2 years of World History. I’m not saying that they should cut back on US Hist, but seeing as for most of those 9 years we just kept starting over with Colonial America and rarely got past the Civil War until my Sophmore year, I think what we really need is to rewrite the curriculum so that history can be taught more efficiently so that more material can be covered. That would also allow for more time to be spent on World History, which is often of more interest to those students who study history by choice rather that because it is required. Also, forcing students to spend so much time on US History isn’t going to make them any more willing to learn it and will only lead to students becoming sick of the material and disinterested. For example, I’m a History Minor rather than a Major because to get a major I would have to take 6 hours of US History, which I am sick of; after discussing it with other minors on campus, I have found that at least 80% of the History minors here also chose to only seek a minor because they don’t wish to study US History.

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