History tells many stories, but the one we must teach is the story of the struggle for democracy.
The decision to send U.S. troops to Bosnia provides what school people call "a teachable moment" -- an opportunity to connect classroom lessons with a compelling real-life situation. People differ about whether we should be there. But you can't have an intelligent discussion on the question without talking about history-- the two great wars of this century in Europe, the pivotal role of the Balkan states, the rise of American commitments to counter aggression and assure European stability, the end of the Cold War, and what it means to be the remaining superpower.
How can we decide what our role should be (in Bosnia or any other crisis) unless we understand who and what we are as a nation? And how can our students prepare to become active citizens who participate in the vital public questions of their time? Much of the understanding comes from a study of history. History tells many stories, though, and they're not all equally good starting points. The story we must teach is the story of the struggle for democracy. Why? That might just be the answer to the question -- Why have people from different ethnic groups, religions, national backgrounds and, more recently, races been able to live together in the United States for over 200 years, but people in the Balkans have been killing each other for over 1,000 years?
The proposed world and U.S. history standards for schools should help explain why, but they don't. That's one reason the standards, which came out last winter, have received such intense criticism -- including a 99-1 vote of no confidence in the U.S. Senate. Unfortunately, they've also been unfairly used by opponents of Goals 2000 to attack the whole standards-setting program. Scrapping Goals 2000 because we're not satisfied with the history drafts would be a mistake, especially since they're not binding on anybody and initiatives to revise and improve them are under way. In the absence of standards publicly discussed and adopted, textbook writers -- sometimes the same people who wrote the standards -- will make the determinations for us.
What is wrong with the proposed standards? A fundamental problem, as I've suggested, is that they are not organized or written as chronological stories about events, people, cultures, and ideas that are important for American students to learn about. That's pretty basic, because teaching history to children and young adults requires skilled storytelling, as anyone who's done it knows. But there's an even bigger flaw: The authors maintain a tone of olympian detachment from the great ideas of Western civilization. The result is two very odd 300-page documents. They hold tons of facts and erudition (most doctoral candidates don't know what these standards say high schoolers should know), and the authors clearly worked hard to specify what students should learn on every topic.
But as Arch Puddington, senior scholar at Freedom House, notes in "Better Ways To Tell Our Story," a commentary prepared for AFT, "the work they have produced strips history of its passion and dynamism." It substitutes social science exercises ("analyze gender roles in different regions of colonial North America and how these roles changed from 1600 to 1760") and cultural comparisons ("summarize the evidence for and against the proposition that Mesolithic peoples, such as lake-dwelling Maglemosians, were pioneer innovators taking advantage of opportunities offered by changing climate, rather than its victims") for a focused exploration of history's most powerful themes -- war and peace, oppression and freedom, tyranny and self-determination -- and in particular the cultural roots of our own free society.
The world history standards, more than the U.S. ones, take the de-emphasis of Western political traditions over the brink of absurdity. According to these packed pages, students will learn details about civilizations and sub-populations all over the planet in every era, and explain what it all means. The standards for 1450-1670, for example, ask them to "analyze the relationship between Muslims and Hindus in the [Mughal] empire and [compare] Akhbar' s governing methods and religious ideas with those of other Mughal emperors, such as Aurangzeb." In this humming global beehive of cultures, we only catch glimpses of our own and no society has more or less importance or claim on moral value than any other. (Modern Eastern Europe, by the way, does not appear.)
It may be appropriate at the graduate level to put all of history into a pot and say, "Pull out anything you want to study; it's all tasty; you decide what it's worth and what it means." You can't teach schoolchildren that way. They have to be told what you think matters; they're learning important concepts for the first time, not critiquing them! So downplaying our own political and cultural traditions, as these standards do, makes them almost useless for elementary and secondary educators. Teachers are on democracy's front lines. At this turn of the new year, let's hope they get what they need to help students understand the ideas that Americans hold in common, how those ideas grew, and why what Americans hold in common is precious.