The proposed Virginia social studies standards, which were published earlier this year, have been greeted warmly by conservative parents. They are pleased by a "back-to-basics" approach that focuses on the details of history and requires kids to learn names and dates and plenty of other facts. But professional educators call the standards rigid and old-fashioned and say they will discourage student learning. Who is right? Both sides are, but both are also missing something important.
On the one hand, critics are right that the proposed standards ask young children to master material that is far too demanding. It's hard to see how second graders can possibly absorb "historical highlights of ancient Greece and Rome" along with "the rise of two world religions" and "the discovery, exploration and settlement of America."
Some superintendents are also criticizing the proposed standards for having grade-by-grade requirements, which they say are too inflexible. These requirements are one of the strengths of the Virginia standards. When systems do not have grade-by-grade requirements, teachers don't know what new students learned the year before--whether the kids came from across the state or across the hall. Teachers have to waste valuable time making sure that everybody is beginning at the same place. Grade-by-grade standards allow every class to start learning the year's material on the first day of school.
But the big dispute is the standards' focus on learning facts. Does it make sense to ask fifth graders to "trace and locate major European explorations of the 16th century and explain reasons for the exploration and settlement of the New World"? What about requiring high school seniors to "summarize precedent-setting Supreme Court interpretations of the U.S. Constitution concerning First Amendment freedoms, due process, equal protection of the law, and government powers (e.g., Marbury vs. Madison, McColloch vs. Maryland, Gideon vs. Wainwright)? Some critics say these requirements fly in the face of educational research and will keep kids from learning to think. Others ask, what's the point? If students need to know something they can always look it up in an encyclopedia. Why force them to memorize lists of boring facts?
This is nonsense. E.D. Hirsch reminded us several years ago that people who do not share certain facts--he called them "core knowledge"--have a hard time communicating with one another. If you go to England and pick up a British newspaper, you'll be able to read the words, but it will be practically impossible to follow what is being said. Why? Because you won't have the basic facts you need to understand the stories: the names of the politicians and football or rock stars and information about the events and issues. Knowing the language without the facts simply is not enough. And the same is true when it comes to making sense out of history--or any other subject for that matter.
On the other hand, if you stop with teaching kids facts, you won't have taken them very far. History is not just facts and chronology. It is a story that answers questions about why the events happened as they did. It helps us to understand great events like the Civil War or Civil Rights Movement. And we teach students history by asking them to think about and use the facts they are learning. That is where the Virginia standards are weak. They ask students to "describe," "identify," "trace," "summarize" and "outline", but they seldom ask students to "compare" or "analyze" or "evaluate" or "hypothesize."
The either/or quality of the debate about the proposed Virginia social studies standards reminds me of an old mistake that some "progressive" educators made about John Dewey's educational theories. Dewey criticized the rigidity of the educational practices of his day. He was especially critical about having kids memorize tons of material without any attempt to get them to understand and use the material they memorized. Progressive educators picked this up and said, "Hey! John Dewey is against memorizing anything." So memorizing was banished from some schools altogether. Students there were taught to read without learning their ABCs. Could they read? Sure, but they couldn't look up anything in a telephone book or a dictionary. Those who insisted that getting kids to memorize facts was the point of schooling were wrong. But so were those who said that memorizing facts had no legitimate place in a good curriculum.
The people who are now working to produce a final version of the Virginia social studies standards ought to take this story to heart. That way Virginia's children will have curriculums that achieve the important balance between learning facts and learning how to use them.