Last week, members of the U.S. Senate put aside their disagreements and, in a remarkable show of unity, voted 99 to 1 to pass a sense of the Senate resolution. The resolution and debate got very little media attention, and that's too bad because the senators were talking about something that is vitally important to all of us. They were debating the kind of history our children should learn and, specifically, the validity of the standards for American and world history that were recently proposed as models under Goals 2000: Educate America Act.
Senators were concerned to see that the proposed history standards tend to diminish our country's accomplishments instead of encouraging youngsters to take pride in them. They did not demand that history standards ignore or whitewash the mistakes the U.S. has made; they were calling for a reasonable balance between our country's achievements in creating uniquely democratic institutions and our failures to live up to our ideals. And senators with views as different as Paul Wellstone and Phil Gramm were in agreement about this.
I agree with the senators, too. Telling the truth about our warts does not mean ignoring our successes in securing rights and freedoms for our citizens -- or trivializing important battles we have fought on behalf of our ideals. I'm thinking, for example, about the treatment of the Cold War. The history standards call this conflict "swordplay" between two great powers -- as if the whole struggle were merely a duel between equals, and a rather quaint one at that. They talk about U.S. "interference" in many parts of the world, but the only moral argument that comes up in connection with the Cold War is leveled against McCarthyism rather than the former Soviet Union. And a reader of the standards who didn't know better would undoubtedly conclude that anyone who was an anti-Communist was also a McCarthyite.
Another problem with the proposed standards is in what they expect students to know and be able to do. The introduction says the standards will "promote active questioning and learning rather than passive absorption of facts, dates and names." Now, nobody thinks that rote learning is all that history should be, but this statement denigrates the acquiring of facts, dates and names, which are a basic part of historical knowledge. How can youngsters engage in "historical thinking" -- one of the announced goals -- when they don't have this knowledge? The problem with many youngsters today is not that they don't have opinions but that they don't have facts on which to base their opinions.
However, it is important to keep in mind that these are one group's proposed standards. Under Goals 2000, states -- not independent groups and not the federal government -- determine what standards their students will be expected to reach. As a way of providing guidance to states that seek it, Goals 2000 has created a review process for certifying high-quality standards. The proposed history standards would probably have failed this review anyway. But even if a set of proposed standards earns certification, states can debate the standards and modify and use them in any way they choose -- or ignore them if they see fit.
There are critics who say that just having standards around with a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, which is what certification amounts to, would make them dangerous. They fear that some states or school districts -- and probably textbook publishers -- would simply accept and use these standards without question. So some senators and other critics now want to junk not only the history standards but the whole idea of national standards and the process of standard-setting called for by Goals 2000.
That's a bad idea. Goals 2000 offers a mechanism for setting high standards against which we can measure what U.S. students know and are able to do. Our education system needs this if we hope to raise the achievement levels of all our students. Furthermore, getting rid of the standards process will not save students from being exposed to the kind of stuff we see in the history standards.
There are already lots of curriculum materials around and in use that are as bad as the history standards -- and worse. If you toss out the standards-setting process, the biases we see in the proposed history standards will end up in other textbooks and curriculums that will be adopted on a school-by-school basis and used by kids all over the country. The difference is, there will be no public debate and few people will notice.
The Goals 2000 process makes sure that the standards our kids are expected to meet are debated out in the open -- the way they were in Congress last week -- instead of behind closed doors. As a result, we will end up with a much better and more honest set of standards than we could possibly get without the process. The history standards are not an argument against Goals 2000 and the standards-setting process; they are a vindication.