Should students have to memorize names and dates in history class?
This week, the NAEP — also known as “the nation’s report card” — revealed that only 22% of eighth graders were proficient in civics. This, however, is nothing new. There is a perennial fear that students today don’t understand civics, rooted in a belief that students lack essential historical essential facts. Scores of “proficient” on civics tests regularly hover around 25%, although many of these tests focus on memorizing discrete facts.
Should the focus of social studies education be on understanding fundamental facts? And if so, what are those fundamental facts? Do all students need to know that Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president? Do all students need to know who Frederick Douglass was? While I am no proponent of multiple choice tests–which often reduce history down to memorizing individual, unrelated facts and take the joy out of learning–I would also be upset if students, for instance, didn’t have a basic understanding of their fourth amendment rights after they graduated high school.
When I first became a teacher in 2015, there was a popular narrative among progressive history educators that students did not need to memorize names and dates and facts because they could simply Google them. At the time, this made a lot of sense to me. I had grown up in the No Child Left Behind era, where the focus in history education at the policy level was precisely the opposite. The things that were easiest to test were historical “facts.”
And so the turn away in the 2010s from rote memorization–especially in the face of more technology in classrooms, schools fully equipped with internet, and ubiquitous smartphones–seemed like the right lens for a young progressive history teacher. Instead of focusing on names and dates, we ought to focus on critical thinking and historiography.
Over the last eight years, though, I have become more conservative in my beliefs. In the wake of the 2016 election and the rise of fake news, there was a huge stir that our students (and for that matter many adults) lacked the ability to discern fact from fiction. Was this a problem of a lack of content knowledge? Or a lack of skill? In his book Why Learn History, education professor Sam Wineburg asks:
“What should history teaching look like when kids can go online and find ‘evidence’ that President Roosevelt knew about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor but did nothing to prevent it? What should science instruction look like when anti-vaxxer sites maintain a ‘proven’ link between autism and measles shots”?
While critical thinking and historical methods are important, these must be grounded in real historical facts. Now, memorizing that Thomas Jefferson was elected in 1800 may not be super useful if you can infer that he was president in the early 1800s. In order to understand historical events and make those kinds of inferences, though, you must have some content knowledge. In other words, a certain amount of historical thinking requires contextualization, which requires historical knowledge.
According to Wilfred McClay (as quoted in Wineburg’s book), we ought to approach this kind of discrete knowledge in history as triage: be purposeful and selective when figuring out what historical knowledge to memorize that helps you build a framework for understanding other historical facts. McClay says:
Memory is most powerful when it is purposeful and selective…..[I]t requires that we possess stories and narratives that link facts in ways that are both meaningful and truthful and provide a…way of knowing what facts are worth attending to…We remember those things that fit a template of meaning, and point to a larger whole. We fail to retain the details that, like wandering orphans, have no connection to anything of abiding concern.
As teachers, Wineburg goes on to explain, we must make “ hard choices about what gets throw out of the story, so that the essentials can survive.”
So, how do you choose what to teach? For me, for instance, it may not be important to memorize every piece of legislation that happened during Bill Clinton’s presidency. But I do spend a lot of time in my civics class talking about the 1996 welfare reform as something that demonstrates the spirit of Bill Clinton’s domestic agenda and the political mood of the 1990s while also explaining economic outcomes for many Americans for decades to come. From a deep understanding of the 1996 welfare reform, students could make inferences about many linked events–like the 1992 and 1996 presidential election and the 1994 midterm elections, the 2016 presidential election and the backlash to neoliberalism; or the Great Society of the 1960s. With that kind of context–and specific training on sourcing–adults may be able to sniff out a story that doesn’t fit into their historical framework. As a history and civics teacher, this is why I particularly like structuring my class around case studies: go very deep into selected events while providing the necessary broad context around these events to understand them.
Civics ought to be a class that helps students understand the world around them–and that requires both the content and the skills necessary for making sense of the world.
Are you a history or civics teacher? If so, how do you balance teaching facts versus skills or analysis?
