Diane Ravitch, who recently changed her mind and decided to support public schools, took a look at the test, the scores . . . and blew her cork. "The answer was right in front of them. This is alarming."
The test was the National Assessment of Educational Progress given to 20% of our fourth graders, 17% of of eighth graders and 12% of high school seniors. It showed that our students are less proficient in their nation's history than in any other subject. The other subjects? Math, reading, science, writing, civics, geography, economics. No surprise. Students scored highest in economics. That won't, by itself, resolve 21st century corporate--or political--needs.
So why does it matter that kids don't know U.S. history? (Before I go any further, I need to 'fess up. I was an undergrad history major, who also took a bit of political science and econ. Smart advisor guided me. And that was the 1950s.) Sure, the data of historical events, dates, people, cultures, politics, wars and movements helps us understand what's going on in our world today. But there's also a second, far more important reason for understanding history. And it gets practically no press.
My answer to the question tells you why I nearly went bonkers when I read Penelope Trunk's blog telling her readers to avoid the humanities, of which history is one of the major disciplines. She couldn't have been more wrong. I was so pissed that I almost wrote a blog on why a business major is the absolute worst undergrad major to major in. If my daughters had even let business as an undergrad major cross their minds, I'd have indicated that they'd get no money from me for college. What a dumb major for smart kids. Might as well take cheer-leading or basketball. Ninety-five percent of the stuff you'll get at work anyway. The only thing it possibly offers is a faster track to your first job out of college. By your fifth year of work, practically everything you got in it is obsolete. Zip. Nada. Useless.
What history offers, instead, is a phenomenally important, permanent set of critical tools. History forces you to investigate an endless set of highly complex issues [religion, culture, politics, scientific thought (Ben Franklin, Benjamin Rush, David Rittenhouse), media, wealth, taxes (for the unenlightened, "taxation without representation"), natural resources or lack of (Jefferson, Lewis and Clark)] to enable you to figure why something happened, and what else might have happened, if. . . .
In short, there is not a single undergrad major more effective for teaching critical reasoning for a highly complex world. No critical reasoning tools is exactly why 95% or more of business people can't do strategic thinking and legislators have so damn much difficulty with policy-making. Simply no tools in the toolkit.
History is an inquiry-based study and a problem-solving activity. So it teaches you how to ask the really significant questions and deal with the complex problems that business and government people struggle over. (Here's a successful humanities grad who really gets it.)
History requires students to deal with social problems that are poorly structured, very controversial and with all kinds of reasoning and built-in illogic. It requires different kinds of thinking than a student would learn in the well-structured problems of philosophy and basic logic. Furthermore, it forces students to look at conflicting accounts of the same problem (the residents of Boston versus the British military perspective on the Boston Massascre). It also presents students with moral and ethical challenges (were the colonists justified in using violence against British authority?) Finally, students who study these challenges learn to recognize the different biases asssociated with perspectives. (Here's one ninth grader who gets it.) Significantly, they learn to compare their moral suasion against the different persuasions within a historical context.
There's endless stuff about all kinds of wars. Lack of historical tools is a major reason why Iraq, which the Bushies thought would be delighted with their intervention, blew up in their face. Lack of historical tools is why so few understand that you can't take a country like Afghanistan, that's living in the ninth century, into the twenty-first century in just ten short years. Lack of historical tools is why so few understand that the Medicare and Social Security systems impact all kinds of people, businesses, state governments, classes and generations of people in half-a-million different ways. Lack of historical tools is also why so many don't understand the conflicting perspectives and conflicting ethics of the different political parties involved. Lack of historical tools is why the resolution of the problems those programs have given us is evidently impossible to manage.
I think it was Senator Thomas Hart Benton, the first Senator of Missouri early in the 19th century, who commented about a certain decision and a certain legislator, that the decision was not nearly as simple as some simple-minded people would like to think. In today's highly complex world, "don't do nuance" and no critical historical tools can lead a person, a company and a nation into tragedy.
You can't possibly imagine how good it feels to vent my spleen and stick my middle finger into the air on this issue..#!%@!!