Have Professional Historians Neglected Their Duty to Help High School Students Learn History?

ARE COLLEGE HISTORY professors too busy writing books, chasing the tenure bus, and expanding the minds of elite 18-year-olds to care about the problem of high-school graduates who don't know what century the Civil War was fought in? That's the charge leveled by a damning article in the latest issue of the American Historical Review, the flagship journal of the American Historical Association (AHA), the nation's most prominent organization of history professors.

The professors' disengagement is a departure from a once-proud tradition, argue coauthors Robert Orrill (a longtime official at the College Board who is now a senior adviser to the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation) and Linn Shapiro (a historian and director of development for the Latin American Youth Center in Washington, D.C.).

In the last years of the 19th century and into the 20th, they say, the greatest historians in the land played a hands-on role in shaping the modern high-school curriculum, making a study of the past central to it.

But faced with difficult questions about what specific knowledge students should acquire, the historical profession ''equivocated, then walked away...." Today the abdication is complete. ''There is a lot of talk" in the history field about fostering links between college- and high-school teachers, says Orrill in an interview. ''But I haven't a whole lot of evidence of it."

Others wonder where Orrill has been the past few years. ''It's astounding to me that he feels that there hasn't been any significant change," says Gary B. Nash, an emeritus professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles and director of the National Center for History in the Schools. Nash was also co-director of the controversial National Standards for History Project in the early to mid-'90s, a project he contends was part of a renaissance in professorial commitment to the schools. Today, he says, ''You can't go to a history department anywhere in this country without finding history professors who are involved with K-12 teachers."

It's true that great fresh streams of money have been aimed at remedying historical illiteracy recently. The five-year-old Teaching American History program, a pet project of Democratic senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, will alone spend $119 million this year--roughly the budget of the entire National Endowment for the Arts--on seminars that bring together professors and teachers. And Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, with Ted Kennedy and other co-sponsors, has won approval to create summer academies for high school history teachers. Yet Orrill notes that these were politician-driven, not historian-driven ventures.

NOTE (posted 8-30-05)

The American Historical Review will host an on-line discussion of the June 2005 Forum Essay,"From Bold Beginnings to an Uncertain Future: The Discipline of History and History Education" by Robert Orrill and Linn Shapiro. This article, which charts the changing involvement of academic historians in elementary and secondary schools over the last 100 years, asserts that the history profession today has largely failed to live up to its historic role as shapers of public education.

Please note that this discussion has been rescheduled. It was originally scheduled for September 1 to 15, but the dates have been changed so that both authors can be available throughout. It will now take place from September 26 to October 9. Please join us then. For more information, please CLICK HERE.)