Standard Standards

My kids - a daughter in seventh grade and a son in fifth - know who Winston Churchill was, why Richard Nixon left office, why the Cold War ended, and why Bill Clinton was impeached. They've heard of Churchill's Dunkirk speech, Kennedy's Moon speech, Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall" speech. They're fuzzy on James Madison, but they do know something about why the Constitution was written and what the Bill of Rights are.

Problem is, it's for damn sure they didn't learn it in school. It's a safe bet that the tiniest possible percentage of their classmates know - or have even heard of any of these things.

They and all their classmates are perfectly literate, however, in the history of Martin Luther King. Not to knock that, of course; King was a pivotal American figure, and his importance can't be underestimated. Leaving aside his social importance, his skill as an orator is something to study from a purely technical perspective.

The other day, someone played a snippet of the "I Have A Dream" speech on TV. My son recited it along with the footage, word for word; he can't even recite lyrics from the Top 40 that faithfully - and it reminded me of an episode of Ira Glass' "This American Life" in which a white social studies teacher from Chicago (I think) arranged a trip for his almost-entirely African-American students to the Washington Mall.

The teacher brought them to the exact spot where Rev. King had stood, and started playing the speech on a large boom box.

And he was shocked at the students' reaction.

They were bored stiff.

It was just another speech - one they'd heard hundreds of times in their inner city school - and, other than playing over footage of water cannon and soldiers escorting black student school, it seemed to have little meaning to the students. King's speech seems to have come to float above history, a self-contained moment that has become isolated from meaning in the process two generations of being taught as a Great Event in its own right. Students know the speech. They know that the speech had something to do with black people not having had the same rights white people had. Before that...?

Which is exactly why I am so happy that a group of Minnesota academics - including the my fellow Northern Alliance muj King Banaian of the SCSU Scholars - have issued this letter supporting Governor Pawlenty's initiative to revamp the state's social studies standards.

This piece in the lede expands on the example of the King speech:

But part of the problem stems from a curricular philosophy that makes Social Studies a field unto itself, with history and geography coming into play only insofar as they supply materials for discussing contemporary issues. For the new Minnesota Standards, by contrast, Social Studies means the four specific fields of knowledge for which the Legislature has mandated standards: History, Geography, Civics and Government, and Economics. Schooling does indeed prepare students to be citizens, but the best preparation is broad-based, not issue-specific; students who have a sense of who and where they are in the world – a template of human time and space – have a framework for accommodating new questions, and making their own judgments.

Exactly.

Leave aside for a moment the fact that I have doubts about the current model of education in both public and mainstream private schools - that's fodder for another post. The professors are right - you can not teach history, politics, geography and sociology in a vaccuum, divorced from the society that creates the things that you study.

Posted by Mitch at January 23, 2004 07:38 AM