Is knowing history so important?

I know we are about to celebrate the Fourth of July. I have seen the fervent demands for better teaching of history after poor results were announced on the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress history tests . But I wonder if learning the details of our country’s story is as important as we think it is.

That’s blasphemy, of course. After the awful test results The Washington Post editorialized that “civics should be a priority” and schools should demand “that every student not only pass a course with an intense written evaluation but also address a local problem with a civic intervention in his or her community.”

Commentator Patrick J. Buchanan said, “If the generations coming out of our schools do not know our past, do not know who we are or what we have done as a people, how will they come to love America, refute her enemies or lead her confidently?”

Hmmm. A survey of hundreds of high school and college students just before we entered World War I found they did not know what happened in 1776 and got Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis mixed up. In a history test given to 7,000 college freshmen in 1943 only six percent could name the 13 original colonies, and only 13 percent identified James Madison as president during the War of 1812. Historian Allan Nevins said then that such historical illiteracy could be a liability in beating the Nazis.

Somehow we won both world wars. Many of the college freshmen who said we purchased Alaska from the Dutch and Hawaii from Norway were later celebrated as among the Greatest Generation.

Two scholars who have documented our abiding civic ignorance--- Sam Wineburg of Stanford and Richard Paxton of Pacific University---point out many problems with the tests on which we base our eruptions of outrage over bad history teaching. Multiple-choice exams are designed to induce lots of wrong answers. If in piloting the NAEP test it is determined that most 12th-graders can identify Rosa Parks, the purpose of Auschwitz and the main cause of the Civil War, Wineburg said in a recent column, then “these items are all thrown out because they fail to ‘discriminate’ among students.”

Wineburg cited an NAEP fourth-grade question that asked why African Americans originally sang a song urging them to “follow the drinkin’gourd, for the old man is awaitin’ for to carry you to freedom.” Only 42 percent picked the alleged right answer, that the song gave directions to escape from slavery by heading north toward the Big Dipper constellation. Yet the question itself was flawed. Wineburg discovered that the line as rendered in the question wasn’t written until 1947 by legendary folk singer Lee Hays, and there is no evidence the song was sung before the end of the Civil War.

1776 by David McCullough « Every Book and Cranny

Covers what happened in 1776.  The events leading up to the war are barely given the notice of a sentence and not much more coverage is given to the subsequent years of the war.  That said, I closed this book with a heightened appreciation and understanding of the proceedings of that signature year and some of the key players, both American and British.

On nearly every page McCullough boosts his narrative with quotations from diaries, letters, and articles that breathe life into the people and events, and an otherwise detached writing style, allowing the reader to better grasp the impact on soldiers, leaders, and regular citizens.  In school, I remember history being covered far too quickly and often with an emphasis on achievement over actuality.  Battles become abstract concepts and causalities are just statistics.  Overall, I felt that McCullough’s writing flowed smoothly and was easy to read but his style (though definitely more interesting than a textbook) is almost as flat as you might expect from a non-fiction account of history.  That said, his inclusion of these personal anecdotes saved his narrative from being completely emotionless and helped to put a human face on the events.  These were real people after all, with wives and families and farms to tend to.

Devoting his narrative to only one year allows the reader to get a more intimate picture of the war as McCullough was able to give more time and attention to details that might otherwise be passed over.

Throughout the war, desertion was a problem. Early on, men would just lay down their arms and head home.  Not necessarily because they were cowards or had enough or were being defiant (though desertion for those reasons was also common), but because they thought their crops might need tending.  In their minds, if it was harvest time then of course they would go home and help with the harvest, war or no war.  They were volunteers, after all.  McCullough also notes that the men were undisciplined in the military sense, simply not used to being told what to do.  Unlike the British soldiers who typically “had rules, regulations, and traditions down pat,” the American soldiers were often disorderly and untrained, on top of being inadequately armed.

In the absence of being able to rely on quickly snapped and posted mug-shots of wanted deserters, they relied on detailed written descriptions of missing soldiers.

What happened in 1776?, A play for elementary children

What's happened since 1776

Romantic dialogues, Anglo-American continuities, 1776-1862

The churching of America, 1776-2005, winners and losers in our religious economy

What Happened?, An Encyclopedia of Events That Changed America Forever