An article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on June 15, 2001 with the headline “Students Stumble Again on the Basics of History.” Those educators who have been following the trends in standardized testing aligned to No Child Left Behind Act should not be surprised. Classroom teachers are charged to focus on getting the students prepared to take the tests and those tests focus on essentially two subjects – language arts literacy and mathematics. Thus a subject like social studies gets put on the back burner and is not taught as it should be. According to the WSJ article, for example, fewer than 25% of US twelfth graders knew that China and North Korea were allies during the Korean War. Students had a difficult time with historical time lines or the US Constitution.
I recently attended a lecture in Washington DC give by noted historian David McCullough. While he was promoting his latest book, The Greater Journey, McCullough lamented during the question and answer session about the decline in the teaching of social studies in America classrooms. Although the article was recent, the issue of what America school children should know about their country and its history is not new. E.D. Hirsch, a highly regarded professor at the University of Virginia, published quite a controversial book in 1987. Cultural Literacy- What Every American Needs to Know was an attempt to quantify the body of knowledge that Americans needed to understand in order to successfully participate in society. Hirsch developed a “list” of 5000 names, phrases, dates and concepts that transcended many disciplines- art, music, mathematics, civics, and history. What Hirsch discovered was that social status had a great deal to do with what a student’s general fund of knowledge was. Children who were exposed to museums, plays, concerts, and books, were better readers and had a higher rate of cultural literacy that more underprivileged (read minorities) students. Hirsch and his colleagues went on to publish the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy and a series of books for each grade level (e.g. What Your First Grader Needs Know). These are part of the Core Knowledge Series that spawned from an organization that Hirsch helped to establish.
It behooves us as educators to be the guardians of social studies, the arts, and others school subjects that are on the endangered list. We need to make sure that such subjects remain a part of the school curriculum. We need to stress to our students that history and music are important and deserve their attention. Those of us in the profession need to develop materials that are both engaging as well as challenging. As always your comments and input are welcome.
(Note: The Great Journey and Cultural Literacy are available from Amazon.com and can be ordered from this site.)
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