Diane Ravitch on history's struggle

Ed gets this magazine, but the articles aren't posted online. So I was thrilled to find that the Fordham Foundation has posted a pdf file of Ravitch's recent piece, History's Struggle to Survive in the Schools.

From 1900 to 1925, the most common pattern of historical studies in the high school consisted of a sequence of ancient history, medieval and modern history, American history, and civics. However, in the second decade of the century, critics of history began to demand that history be replaced by social studies. And their criticism was effective. By the mid-1920s, English history had almost disappeared, and enrollments in ancient, medieval, and modern history began to decline as well. A new course appeared called world history, which combined in a single year what had previously been a three-year sequence.

From that time until the present, U.S. history has been the only course that was almost universally required of high school students (3). After 1925, high school history entered a period of decline. At the same time, the teaching of history in elementary and junior high school began shrinking and in many districts nearly vanished.

To understand the sudden contraction of the history curriculum, it is necessary to recognize the intellectual transformation of the universe of professional pedagogy just before and after World War I. The ideal of democratizing culture, of giving all students access to the ideas and historical events of other cultures, took a back seat to a fervent belief in the goal of social efficiency. Critics of the academic curriculum were outspoken in their attacks on teaching not only history, but algebra, literature, and almost everything else that did not prepare students for their future lives. Some of these critics thought of themselves as progressive educators, but they relied on a narrow and distorted version of John Dewey’s ideas about democracy and the social role of the schools. Dewey’s writings, however, provided inspiration for the anti-intellectual movements (both the social efficiency experts who wanted everything to be geared toward utility and the romantic child-centered progressives who wanted to abandon curriculum and the dead hand of the past altogether)(4).

As the high school population grew by leaps and bounds, it became conventional among professional educationists to speak of schools as places to sort the population in preparation for their roles in society. And enrollments did soar: public high school enrollment more than

[snip]

Educators who considered themselves modern and progressive espoused the gospel of industrial education and curricular differentiation. [ed.: differentiation!] Efficiency experts John Franklin Bobbitt of the University of Chicago, David Snedden of Teachers College, and W.W. Charters of the Carnegie Institute of Technology complained that too much time was wasted on scholastic studies. All considered disciplinary subjects like history to be useless. Bobbitt lavished praise only on vocational subjects. Snedden (who was also commissioner of education in Massachusetts) ridiculed the study of history; he told the New England History Teachers’ Association that the only reason to teach history was to train students for good citizenship, which he defined as “submission to established political order [and] cooperative maintenance of same” (6) Charters argued that the goal of education must be “usefulness,” not “comprehensive knowledge,” and that what children learn should be based on what they need to know to function as adults. In this climate, proponents of history and other academic subjects found themselves on the defensive, struggling against anti-intellectualism that pretended to be progressivism. [ed.: not sure I would say "anti-intellectualism" has to "pretend" to be progressivism...]

[snip]

Once the AHA abdicated its commitment to improving the teaching of history in the schools in the late 1920s, the subject had no advocates. Many state curricula were revised in the 1930s to emphasize social studies themes (like transportation, housing, and commerce) instead of chronological history. From the 1930s through the early 1950s, social studies courses incorporated studies of current events, and problems of social living for teens. U.S. history survived in the high schools, and some states and districts continued to offer or require a Europe-centered world history course. But no state established a coherent, sequential history curriculum. In many states, one could become a social studies teacher without having taken any college courses in history.

In most elementary schools, history was quietly shelved in the 1930s. Gone were the biographies of pioneers and heroes that had once been standard fare in the early grades. In their place was installed a curriculum from K-5 called “expanding environments” or “expanding horizons.” From kindergarten through fifth grades, children studied a curriculum consisting of “me, my family, my neighborhood, my community, my town, my state, and my nation.” The National Council for the Social Studies believed that this approach was appropriate to the needs of young children. States, districts, and textbook publishers accepted it. Typically, social studies textbooks for the elementary grades consisted of little more than stories about shopping in a generic supermarket, meeting a generic police officer, and learning how families eat dinner together. Not until the 1980s was there sustained criticism about the content-free, vapid, trivial nature of this curriculum and its accompanying textbooks (15).

It would require an article even longer than this one to describe the events in the 1980s and 1990s that led to a revival of support for history in the schools. The 1980s were a period of scathing complaint about curriculum and standards, including the national report A Nation at Risk (1983) and the jeremiads of Secretary of Education William Bennett. In 1985, Bill Honig, the elected state superintendent of schools in California, assembled a group of teachers, administrators, and historians (I was among them) to revise the state social studies curriculum. The new history-social science curriculum established a sequence of history courses, restored historical studies in the elementary grades, and added three years of world history. The new state curriculum was approved by the State Board of Education in 1987.

Ed was part of that effort; he ran the California History Social Science Project, under Bill Honig.

Gary Nash, who wrote the National History Standards was a UCLA colleague and a good friend.

The only good news about the history standards is that after Lynne Cheney pulled the rug out from under them they were adopted by a handful of states, including New York.