Primary, Secondary, and Higher History Education

One of the chief reasons I decided to pursue an M.A. in History was the gulf I recognized between the Academy and the K-12 educators who prepare students for its rigors. After teaching a couple years, it was evident to me that the opaque group that formulated the standards and their benchmarks at least consulted scholars from higher education in history, but there was a lack of appreciation of the inspiration and empowerment called for in the curricula. Simply put, a lot of my high school history teacher colleagues had no clue what the standards they were supposed to be teaching were getting at. In some cases, they were passionate and highly competent history teachers who recognized little value in the list of items; to them it was little more than a distraction from the coherent and nuanced picture of the past they were trying to help their students to see.

The issues here are manifold. When it comes to primary and secondary education in the United States there are no fewer than six distinct groups: 1) the state government that oversees the codification of standards, at least in consultation with 2) scholars in higher education, 3) the county and school administrations that supervise the standards' implementation and (try to) provide further clarifying guidance to 4) teachers who gaze upon the texting 5) students, whose 6) parents will let them know quickly if something is not working. Just a cursory survey of all the interactions in that network could fill up more than one blog post, so I'm going to ease into this with just one observation between two stake-holder groups, and perhaps make this a running blog series.

One of the most essential disconnects I have recognized between passionate and inspired secondary history teachers and their counterparts in higher education is their approach to narrative. At the collegiate level, the pedagogical rhetoric is almost anti-narrative. The past is always more complex, nuanced, problematic, messy, etc... Every narrative is an oversimplification. I agree with this.

At the primary and secondary level, teachers are attempting to fill what they see as basically a vacuum of knowledge--a lack of narrative. I actually agree with this too. Almost any narrative that gives meaning to generally-accepted facts about the past is welcome unless it is overtly hateful, e.g., few teachers will scruple a student sharing with the class the prophet Mohammad's young brides, the bloodbath upon the overthrow of the Umayyad dynasty, and/or some of the more unsavory elements of early Islamic military expansion as part of a summary judgment on the religion and its adherents. (Sadly, I think most teachers would shut it down by pulling rank rather than with counter-evidence. I'd point out to the student that the New Testament book of Philemon consists of Paul writing a letter to a slave-owner with the runaway slave he's sending back to him; Constantine had his nephew and then sister executed mainly out of paranoia, and the conduct of the Crusaders' conduct toward Jews and Muslims was pretty abominable, and all that might not be a fair representation of the entirety of the faith, but now more than half this paragraph has become a digression.)

The point is that collegiate educators take a narrative for granted--the students get it from movies, parents, or popular culture, but high school history teachers can attest that the narrative tabula rasa we're born with can endure far longer than those who love history are inclined to admit. My prescription is for high school teachers to state explicitly those points they are aware some facts are getting amputated to fit the Procrustean bed of this initial narrative, and collegiate instructors should appreciate the possibility that some students have previously missed the establishment of a narrative.