17 Rethinking History Education in High Schools

by Tommy Burke

I love history. It was always my favorite class in school, it was my passion reading outside of class, and it is my major in college. I even plan to go to graduate school for history next year and my current plan is to work as a history teacher. So yes I love history and I loved the way I learned history in school. I loved reading a textbook and listening to lectures. I even loved the long multiple choice scantron tests that tested your memory of specific figures and dates. I loved all of that, but so many people don’t. Very often when I discuss history classes people had in high school with my classmates at Pomona it is in a negative way. They tell me that history class was boring or painful for them. They wonder for what possible reason I would read so many pages for my college history courses. In many movies and books the stereotypical boring teacher is the history teacher. Just look at Harry Potter, the history teacher is literally a monotonous ghost that is frequently described as putting his students to sleep and all the other students are mystified by Hermione’s love of the subject. So clearly the negative experience of history is much more common an experience than my overwhelmingly positive one. This is something I felt like I had to grapple with in this course as I envision for myself a future in history education. How could I reconcile my love for the traditional history classroom with a desire to make more people interested in history who feel left behind by that model. That involved thinking deeply about both what history is and what it is that a history class is actually supposed to be teaching its students.

To even think about what I might imagine a history classroom should be like it is crucially important to have a solid idea in your mind of what history is. Education always needs an aim. If I didn’t know what I was aiming for I had no chance to seriously think about making a different kind of history class. The answer I came to after thinking about this is that history is change. Without change there can be no history. If things simply stayed the same there would be no use for history to explain the past because we would know what happened and how because it would be the same as it always was. History is change, but more than that history is the narratives we tell about that change. Indeed, it is the narratives we construct to explain that change. History really is a question of emphasis. What facts and dates we choose to relate changes what kind of change we are emphasizing.

There are many ways to tell a historical story but two of the most basic are narratives that emphasize either how much or how little things have changed over a given period of time. Neither are particularly wrong in relation of dates and events, but what changes is what the narrative you are writing emphasizes. For example, merely look at the history of race in the United States in the twentieth century. One version of that story goes something like this: the United States made great strides toward equality for people of all races across the twentieth century. It began the century with apartheid the law of the land across the Jim Crow South and redlining and other racists practices rampant in Northern cities. Lynching of Black Americans was common and almost never punished. However, over the course of the century through the courageous action of activists the United States eventually passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and ended Jim Crow in the South. The Country had gone from discrimination being the official law of the land to it being expressly illegal by the end of the century. That is one version of the story of race in the twentieth century United States and it is true. But also true is the story that emphasizes the ways in which even as formal segregation ended, racist oppressive systems continued under the veneer of language of equality. Formally colorblind institutions like the prison and police still disproportionately targeted minority communities. Systemic and meaningful oppression continued despite the changing outward facing rhetoric of political leaders and institutions. That is also a true story. The difference between them is the question of emphasis. One is a story of how much things have changed, another a story of how little they have. Neither story is “lying” they are merely constructing different narratives based on the facts and historical moments they choose to focus on. That is not to say you can’t think one is more or less correct. In fact having an opinion on which narrative you think is more correct is what history is.

It will be perhaps instructive to think about this concept in terms of what history is not. History is not just one “true” story built on a background of facts and dates. It is not really even an objective practice. It is certainly not independent from the present. It is not any of those things because history is the narrative that someone in the now writes to explain the then. Any writer who purports that they write history unbiased and uninfluenced from the present is lying. The now always colors how we write about the past. That it does so is not a failure on the part of history as an objective field, but in fact a feature and an integral element of the subject. We write history to explain how we got to now in big and small ways. As such, pretending that the present is not an important part of that is a fool’s errand. The mere action of putting two sources together in writing is a choice made by the writer and explicitly or implicitly advocating an argument about the change they are describing in their narrative. The aim for history education must then be not the memorizing of those facts, but the practice of assembling them into a narrative that advances an argument about the past implicitly or explicitly. It is an education that acknowledges and encourages connections to the present because it is from that vantage point that we must necessarily always work in writing history.

So what does all this mean for history education in a high school classroom? Keeping this focus on narrative in my mind helped me to reassess the traditional elements of a history class that I loved so much. The thing I tried to keep in focus was that what we should be working toward is teaching students how to construct and critique historical narratives. To that end, I think I must say goodbye to my beloved multiple choice test in history classes. Another way to think about what history classes should try to do is center context. Context about when an event happened, context about who a writer was, and context about why they are writing the historical narrative they are reading. If history is about organizing that context into a narrative the multiple choice test actually does almost nothing to teach those skills. In fact, it really does the exact opposite to practicing assembling a narrative. The test purposefully takes individual moments, dates, people, events, and writers out of their context to present them as a series of memory challenges. They randomize and mix up historical events without asking students to ever place them in a narrative. Now figuring out the right answer to questions like this can be rewarding and even fun on an intellectual level. Jeopardy, the most popular game show in the United States, essentially follows this format because it is fun to be able to know the right answer. These tests are really just intellectual puzzles which can be rewarding to complete, but do not actually teach students how to actually do history.

A common argument for tests like this is that students first need to learn all these details before they can do history. This is a false separation which only actively harms student learning and engagement. The idea that school is a place where students learn things so that they can then, at a later point, do something in their life is harmful. People often think this way about the things they are learning. Asking teachers questions such as “when am I ever going to need to do things like this in real life.” Somehow along the way students are taught that they are incapable of doing while they are in school when the exact opposite is true. The very act of learning is doing something. These ideas have their roots in the banking method of education that John Dewey attacked way back at the beginning of the twentieth century. He argued for the need for progressive education that valued students intrinsic motivation and centered the learning of the student. Students are too often imagined to empty buckets just waiting to be “filled” by the knowledge presented by the teacher. This description will no doubt be familiar to those who have encountered the stereotypical idea of a history lecture or reading. Students know nothing about history and so must be filled up with details about names and dates by the teacher before they could ever think about doing history. This style of teaching actively discourages students from practicing presenting their own narratives based on the facts they learn because it explicitly and implicitly incentivizes the memorization of the one “true” story presented by the teacher in lecture or in the textbook reading.

I have spent a lot of time in this essay attacking what a history classroom shouldn’t look like, but now I want to speak positively about the kind of things a history class should do in my opinion. History class should really be structured around dialogue between not just the teacher and students, but between students. The idea, to use the ideas of Paulo Freire, would be to pose problems to the students that they ask questions of and discuss possible answers to. In this case the “problem” being posed is not a riddle or a math problem, but a text of shared reading. History is inherently a textual subject. Most often it deals with interpreting the written works of the past. But no text is by itself full of obvious meaning. Just reading them individually will not give students a chance to really engage with them within their context. A text offered to the class in this way must be analyzed not just for the facts of what it says and what argument it was making, but also for the context of who wrote the text, why did they write it, and when did they write it. This is not just a skill that needs to be used on primary source writing either, in fact it is almost more important to use these kinds of analytical skills on secondary sources. It is often more obvious and direct in primary sources that the author is presenting an argument based on their historical context. In secondary sources often that argument is much more subtle and implicit, but no less important. As mentioned previously, those arguments are what we are trying to teach history students to do and so practicing examining them and deconstructing them in existing works of scholarship can be good practice for students.

In these dialogues it is emphatically not the teacher’s role to state which student is more or less correct in their interpretation of a text, but rather to offer their own individual perspective on a text and model for students what doing history can look like. The important thing to emphasize and make space for is giving students the space to tell their own stories about the past. To do this it is necessary to ask students questions about how they explain the events that you are studying that week and not be looking for a “correct” answer. It replaces lecture with discussion. The important thing to center is not that students got all the chronological details out of a reading, but how they frame what was important about that time period and why that particular historical event mattered in context with other readings previously discussed. Again, these should not be one off questions posed by the teacher and answered by one student before moving on, but rather merely the beginning of a dialogue in which students respond to each other’s ideas about the past. This practice would encourage students to bring in their own life experiences to explain the past. Connections to the present should not be shunned in a history class because without them we would never be able to make any kind of argument about what changed or didn’t change. This means making the classroom a space where students feel comfortable bringing their own unique perspective to the material. They need to feel that their perspective is valued, and not just valued in terms of a grade they will get for memorizing a detail from a story, but truly valued by the teacher and other students.

One way to make this possible is through the use of the conceptual workshop discussed by Donald Finkel in Experiences that Teach. Conceptual workshops seem ideal to what my history class is trying to achieve because they make explicit space for collaborative student discussion entirely separate from teacher intervention. They would present students in small groups with a text and some context and pose questions to them in writing that offer them opportunities to tell their own narrative of what matters about the history represented in the text. They would do this not looking for a response by the teacher but from each other. This lessened power differential, between peers rather than student and teacher, I think would better allow students to feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to discussion of the past. They need to be formal would be lessened and by engaging in dialogue with each other they would do the work of history. Together they would find the details that are important to them and construct them into a narrative that emphasizes the changes they see as important.

To try to introduce this centering of student narratives to new students I have thought of a workshop exercise that could be done in the first week of class. This would serve the dual function of introducing students to workshops and the aims of the course to practice deconstructing and constructing historical narratives. The workshop would present several different historians’ descriptions of the life of Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie is a figure who has been both valorized and vilified in equal measure by different writers so I think he would serve as a good subject for this exercise. In this exercise the students would be presented not only what was written about Andrew Carnegie but who was writing and when they wrote it. This would present students with the opportunities to really see that there is no one “true” history. It is true that Andrew Carnegie was a poor immigrant to the United States who became one of the richest men in the world and a famous philanthropist. However, it is also true that he gained that wealth through his connections to one of the wealthiest men on the East Coast, his brutal business practices, and corruption of government officials. Like the narratives of race in the twentieth both those narratives are based on true facts and events it is merely a question of emphasis. I hope to be able to show students how in boom times like the 1920s Carnegie was celebrated as an “Industrial Statesmen,” but during the Great depression he was a “Robber Baron.” By giving the students the space to examine the differences between the different descriptions of Carnegie and drawing connections to what was happening historically when those texts were written I hope to drive home the message that history is different based on who is telling it and when they are telling it. It will also invite them to offer their own interoperation on who Carnegie was. This lesson I hope will encourage them to be more confident in themselves as no more or less qualified than those writers to take their own life experiences to bear on the texts presented to them throughout the course and to construct their own historical narratives based on those experiences and their own interpretation.

This pedagogy I have outlined briefly here centers real thing that drew me into history in the first place–the stories. I fell in love with history at the same time I fell in love with big fantasy books. Both things, though seemingly so different, offered me similar things. They both presented stories that were grand in scope but small in detail. The told stories of big changes happening on the scale of nations and on the scale of families. Thinking through this better history class allowed me to remember that as much as I enjoyed the memory challenge of the multiple choice history test that wasn’t what triggered my love for the subject–it was the stories those details were a part of. For as much as I think the skills taught in a class like I have described would be useful to anyone at any point in their life, my true goal in teaching history is to try to inspire in my students the same I love I feel for the subject. To inspire something like my excitement I have whenever I open a new history book. The centering of narratives, both historical ones and students own personal narratives, I hope will do just that.