By: Robert Orril and Linn Shapiro
Read messages from the online discussion of this article, held Sept. 26 – October 9, 2005, in which the authors responded to postings.
| What importance should historians assign to school history? Should attention to K-12 history education be among the concerns at the forefront of the discipline’s professional commitments? This has been a recurring question ever since school reform gained prominence in the nation’s public policy agenda some two decades ago. As a call to action, it first emerged explicitly when Arthur Link made educational activism central to his 1984 presidential address to the American Historical Association (AHA). On this centenary occasion, Link admonished the AHA for having “unthinkingly abandoned” the “determinative role” it had once played in history education and called for new initiatives designed to bring the association “back into the mainstream of the teaching of history in our secondary schools.” No task, he said, was of “greater moment and urgency” for the historical profession than “the recovery of a crucial role for the AHA in the determination of the curricula of our secondary schools.”1 | 1 |
| Many historians have joined Link in urging a revival of educational activism. Nonetheless, twenty years later, the discipline has neither decisively rejected nor energetically taken up this call. Prolonged indecision, of course, will settle the issue. While the profession has been irresolute, other, more determined claimants to influence over school history have come forward. Both government and the business community now take an interventionist stance toward policies that affect many aspects of history education. Once largely unassertive, they increasingly point to the need for reform as warrant for across-the-board involvement in framing policies that bear directly on curriculum and resource allocation, textbooks and tests, teacher certification and classroom methods. In these conditions, the profession’s hesitance can amount to a concession that its own voice counts for little in shaping the future course of history education. | 2 |
| How much, though, is actually at stake if the profession fails to act on Link’s challenge? What difference does it make if, in the end, the AHA takes little or no part in addressing issues of history education? Is the discipline itself diminished in some important sense if it has nothing to contribute to pressing matters of public policy that fall within its own domain of professional expertise? These are the questions that we hope will be engaged in this forum. To help give them full weight, our aim is to provide an account of the early AHA’s involvement in the making of school history. Sustained for almost half a century, associational activism began in the last decade of the nineteenth century and ended just prior to World War II. During this time, the AHA deemed a unified K-university approach to history education essential to the future of the discipline; and it is no exaggeration to say that its efforts led to the invention of modern school history in the United States. It was also a time, however, when the profession first equivocated and then walked away from problems inherent in the actions that it had initiated. The story we tell, then, is one both of significant achievement and of tensions never resolved. In this light, educational activism in the profession today points as much to a return to a task left unfinished as it does to the making of a new beginning. | 3 |
| From a historiographical perspective, our account differs from others in placing emphasis on the AHA’s decisive role in the making of school history. Historians sometimes have taken note of the early AHA’s educational activism, but most such accounts treat it as marginal to the organization’s primary interest in scholarship.2 Our approach locates school history at the very center of the association’s professional concerns. The few works that address school history more directly view its development anachronistically, as if, from the very beginning, it evolved as part of the “social studies movement.”3 This gives the impression that history has always been joined with social studies in curricular considerations when, importantly, the relationship between the two was problematic from the start and later was held together more by an unstable truce than by a union of common interests. Even more to the point, social studies did not yet exist as an idea, let alone a “movement,” when the AHA first acted to establish history in the school curriculum. Social studies first appeared almost two decades later, in the form of a concerted effort to reconfigure and diminish the role of history in the American educational enterprise. The AHA stepped forward much earlier, and it is there that our narrative begins. | 4 |
| Historians first acted to establish the academic legitimacy of their subject during a period of extreme instability in American education. This occurred during the last decade of the nineteenth century, when the long-standing dominance of the uniform classical curriculum had begun to give way decisively in both schools and colleges. The classical dispensation had lost its hold, however, without being replaced by any new educational order. In a scan of the entire K-university environment, John Dewey described this situation as one in which the “old education” everywhere was quite dead, but nowhere was “a new education in definite and supreme existence.” All that could be seen, Dewey said, was “a portentous multiplication of subjects” that was turning American education into “an experiment in natural selection,” a case of the “survival of the fit” in its most Hobbesian sense.4 | 5 |
| How could the discipline effectively demonstrate the educational importance of history in this contentious and unsettled environment? If the curriculum was now open to new subjects, how could it be argued that history should be counted among those that would make up a new educational core? How, in short, could its educational value relative to other subjects be established?5 In an increasingly competitive educational enterprise, these were questions that historians knew they could not expect others to answer for them. Their most effective response came in 1896, when the AHA appointed what would long be remembered in the profession as the Committee of Seven. Although the Seven are treated here as a group, each member came to be counted among the most respected scholars of the early twentieth century.6 Indeed, as a committee, they set out to demonstrate that diligence in scholarship went hand in hand with a concern for educational policy. | 6 |
| Formally, the AHA constituted the committee in December 1896 in response to a request from the National Education Association (NEA) for a report on college entrance requirements in history. From the start, however, the AHA was determined to expand this mandate, mindful that in the long run the NEA-sponsored recommendations were intended “not for the schools of one section or of one kind, but for the schools of the nation.” Given the competition among subjects, this was an opportunity for influence not to be missed. The Seven accordingly set about over the next two years to transform the NEA request into a comprehensive and systematic “investigation of the subject of history, as it is studied and taught in the schools.” When their report was issued in 1898, the Seven were quite straightforward about their aims, stating that, up to this time, there had not been “any prolonged effort to present the claims of history, or to set before the schoolmen a statement of what might be considered the value of historical study and the place which it should occupy in the school programme.”7 | 7 |
| This assertiveness was new for historians. Previously, advocates for the sciences and modern languages had been at the forefront of the attack on the classical curriculum, while history and historians remained largely uninvolved in the debate. In consequence, history was at best in an insecure position among the new subjects then competing for attention. Indeed, Harvard president and leading reformer Charles Eliot found history in a “humiliated condition” with “no proper place in American education” when he first launched his campaign in the 1870s to open the curriculum to all subjects.8 In 1880, only four years before the founding of the AHA, there still were only eleven professors of history in the United States; and most college history courses were taught in the third or fourth year as supplements to the classical program.9 Courses in the history of the United States had become increasingly common in high schools, but the textbooks used were designed more to comport with the values of evangelical Protestantism than to further historical understanding.10 In 1893, the outlook for history improved somewhat when the Eliot-led Committee of Ten recommended that the subject be included among the “studies” appropriate for student admission to college.11 However, the Ten advised that while “it is now-a-days admitted that language, natural science, and mathematics should each make a substantial part of education, … the function of history in education is still very imperfectly apprehended.”12 | 8 |
| It was the AHA’s intent, then, to move history from its marginal status to a more prominent and secure position in the changing educational enterprise. With this aim in mind, it was evident that the potential for the growth of the discipline would be limited if it remained entirely dependent on the small number of students entering the then-emerging research universities to pursue graduate work and a career in research. These few could not support and justify significant increases in the size and scope of history departments and programs at any college or university. Only large numbers of students enrolled in undergraduate history courses could generate such growth; and these enrollments, in turn, were dependent upon the preparation in history that students received in secondary schools. Moreover, if historians hoped that the results of their scholarship would reach a large public—and they most certainly did—the locus of this public was first and foremost to be found in the ever-growing numbers of students entering the nation’s high schools. Thus, the Seven and most of their colleagues were well aware that the foundation of their discipline had to be established and maintained in the schools—that is, in their service to a general student population—no matter how much the profession prized specialized research and the production of advanced scholarship. | 9 |
| Working from this K-university perspective, the AHA and the Seven effectively gave birth to modern history education in the United States. Before they acted, standards for school history were nonexistent, and no curriculum framework had gained wide acceptance. Nor was there any reliable information about practice in school history or any means of sharing data from one locale to another. History, in short, was not yet a self-conscious educational undertaking. The Seven took as their starting point this absence of an established template for history education. Their point of departure, they said, was the full awareness that there “was no recognized consensus of opinion in the country at large, not one generally accepted judgment, not even one well-known point of agreement, which would serve as a beginning for a consideration of the place of history in the high-school curriculum.”13 | 10 |
| Filling the void meant more than making pronouncements. With religious considerations fading and a scientific ethos taking hold in schools and colleges, educational policy was becoming increasingly fact-based and data-driven. Therefore, the committee’s approach was empirical and based on extensive study of existing conditions in both the United States and Europe. Moreover, the Seven urged that their report should serve as a starting point for AHA attention to issues of history education at all levels of the K-university continuum. This, in fact, is exactly what happened. Although we discuss only high school education, the AHA followed the Seven’s efforts with a report on history in elementary schools (1908), another on secondary education (1911), and a sequence of committees and conferences on everything from preparation of history teachers to the organization of the college-level introductory course. In addition, the AHA launched The History Teacher’s Magazine (1909) to provide a forum for discussion of educational issues of concern to school and college teachers. Taken together, these acts confirmed the AHA’s leadership in promoting evidence-based reflection about the condition and future course of history education in the United States.14 | 11 |
| From a policy perspective, the Seven scored a remarkable success. Within a very short time, their proposals gained acceptance in many schools; and this, along with the swift adoption of their curricular recommendations by influential policymakers, effectively established history as a core subject in K-12 education. Less than a decade after the report’s appearance, an AHA committee asserted that the Seven’s work had brought about “the establishment of substantially similar curricula in a large portion of the schools the country over.” Although backed by no data, this claim reflected a belief widely shared among educators. So rapidly, in fact, did the Seven’s report acquire normative status that its critics—and there were many—soon complained that it had become the bulwark of a stubbornly entrenched orthodoxy. | 12 |
| In undertaking their work, the Seven’s chief task had been to demonstrate that history had an “educational value” comparable to or greater than that of other subjects. The outcome hung on the committee’s success in answering two interrelated questions. One concerned how the study of history led to mental development or “intellectual power” in student learning, and the other asked whether the subject was based on an organized body of knowledge substantial enough to produce the desired habits of mind. For much of the nineteenth century, defenders of the classical curriculum had asserted that the new subjects lacked answers to both of these questions, in that, from an educational standpoint, they were formless, without curricular order and sequence, and devoid of the rigor needed for sustained mental development. Advocates of the newer disciplines, for their part, often relegated history to the inferior status of an “information” subject—casting it as a study emphasizing rote memorization of facts rather than work of an intellectually demanding nature. | 13 |
| Addressing the question about intellectual power, the Seven answered that the study of history engendered a distinctive competence that they called “historical-mindedness.” As the committee was careful to explain, historical-mindedness did not mean technical skill in using the research methods of professional historians. In calling for only limited use of the so-called “source method” in classroom settings, the report argued that it was entirely inappropriate to model education for the many on the specialized investigative practices of a few. Citizenship, not scholarship, was the main concern of history education in both school and college. What the Seven meant by historical-mindedness, then, was more in the nature of a sensibility than a method of inquiry. It was an attentiveness to the evolutionary workings of cause and effect in human affairs, an understanding that “nothing is, but everything is becoming.” This historicist frame of mind was presented in the report as both humanizing in its outlook and essential to the intelligent exercise of civic responsibility. Only through the possession of a historical sense could a student comprehend “the political and social problems that will confront him in everyday life.”15 | 14 |
| When the Seven addressed the issue of how to constitute an organized body of knowledge, they boldly argued for a school curriculum consisting of four years of continuous study—soon known as the “four-block program”—starting from ancient history and ascending in subsequent years through medieval/modern European, English, and United States history. Not intended to be four separate or loosely related courses, the sequence was designed to lead students to an understanding of how the idea of liberty had progressively unfolded—specifically how the “seeds” of free institutions and practices first appeared in Western Europe, then reached a new stage of growth in early modern England, from where they were later transplanted into the United States and other parts of the world. | 15 |
| The Seven had no trouble combining the evolutionary idealism implicit in this story with their view of themselves as empirical historicists. What is difficult to judge, though, is the extent to which their presuppositions (obviously Eurocentric and Anglophile) contributed to the widespread acceptance of the committee’s curricular recommendations. It may be that the narrative coherence of this story—with its reassuring message of progressive evolution toward an ever-better political condition—served to fill the vacancy left by a retreating religious world view. For school leaders wanting to maintain a positive outlook on social development, emphasis on the “unity” of Western historical experience almost certainly enhanced the educational rationale for moving history into the center of a curriculum in which religion no longer functioned as the presiding presence. | 16 |
| How else might we account for the acceptance and influence of the Seven’s report? After all, the AHA had no direct authority over school matters. If the report was to have an effect, the AHA had to consider how its recommendations fit with the educational facts on the ground. And so it did. Consider the Seven’s four-block curricular sequence. The committee emphasized that it had no interest in presenting a program that was “merely the expression of the theoretical aspirations of college professors.”16 With this in mind, the Seven brought forward a history curriculum that could be adapted to the emerging organizational infrastructure of secondary education: the graded 9–12 public high school. Now taken for granted, this organizational framework was new and just becoming typical in the late nineteenth century. The Seven, then, were making a bid to conjoin their still-untested program with the structure of an institution that was itself in a formative stage of development. | 17 |
| Nothing approaching a full account of the functional significance of the graded school can be given here. Suffice it to say that, based on an industrial model, the graded school provided an efficient means through which school leaders could sort the mounting numbers of high school students into large classes and move them year by year toward a summative degree.17 To be accepted as educationally sound, however, this program of study had to be more than an accumulation of course credits. On the contrary, it had to be sequential as well as reflect increasing academic difficulty and overall unity of purpose. Accordingly, the Seven’s curricular recommendations filled out four years of graded content and provided a rationale for how each year of study advanced beyond the previous one. Had the high school not been taking on this graded design, it is unlikely that the Seven would have organized secondary history education into a four-block program of study; in turn, the graded design could have remained purposeless if the four-block program had not come forth to provide content and educational meaning. Each, then, reciprocally helped to secure the place of the other in an educational enterprise still uncertain of its direction. | 18 |
| Other developments, not all of which were entirely welcome to the AHA, also gave impetus to the Seven’s recommendations. As noted, the Seven’s work was set in motion by a request from an NEA-appointed Committee on College Entrance Requirements. This committee was part of a top-down effort led in the main by university presidents seeking to exert control over what they viewed as the largely ungoverned and sprawling growth of K-12 education. If college entrance requirements could be standardized, they thought, high schools everywhere would find it necessary to organize their curricular programs in conformity with a framework established by higher education. In this way, secondary education would be brought into line with reforms desired by the universities, and order would be established in the educational environment. Although not in full agreement with this course of action, the AHA forwarded the Seven’s recommendations to the NEA committee, which then made them part of its 1899 report. This might have ended the matter had the university presidents not created the College Board (CB) in 1900. Functionally, the CB was designed to standardize college entrance requirements through high-stakes examinations that tested the learning expected of students graduating from high school. In one of its first acts, the CB adopted the 1899 NEA report as its ground plan for constructing examinations; through this chain of events, the Seven’s four-block program was incorporated into the normative infrastructure supported (and largely invented) by the university leadership. These actions unquestionably extended the reach of the Seven’s report, and the CB’s sustained adherence to the four-block program doubtless also helped to keep this framework effectively in place well into the twentieth century. | 19 |
| Over time, however, this turn of events proved a problem for AHA policymaking. In fact, there is no more equivocal part of the Seven’s report than those sections that address college entrance requirements. Here the committee found itself in a dilemma. Because the great majority of students enrolled in high schools had no intention of seeking admission to college, it was “certainly wrong to shape secondary courses primarily with a view to college needs.” But the committee also knew that the university leadership of the NEA wanted to employ entrance requirements for exactly this purpose of aligning school studies with the college curriculum. The Seven did not want to lend their support to any such controlling policy, but neither could they ignore the NEA request. Obviously, history would suffer greatly in the competition among subjects if it was not included as part of the NEA-sponsored scheme of college entrance requirements. In the end, the members of the Seven professed muted support for the NEA’s efforts but concluded, “we do not feel that we should seek to lay down hard-and-fast entrance requirements in history.”18 | 20 |
| The Seven were even more doubtful about examinations as a means for implementing college entrance requirements. In part, this skepticism was due to worry about the persistence of the manner in which history had been tested under the old classical regime—wherein students had been required to do no more than recall a handful of names, dates, and events drawn from ancient history. In the Seven’s view, none of the known methods of examination assessed the learning outcomes most valued by historians. History, they said, was as sequentially developmental as any of the more established subjects, but “growth in power of historical thinking is much harder to measure than progress in mathematical knowledge or in linguistic facility.” Given the absence of any “just and adequate system of examinations in history,” the committee urged that the NEA and colleges adopt the most flexible policies possible with regard to evidence of student preparation in history. This included acceptance of portfolios (as we now call them) through which students could supplement examination results with examples of “written work done in connection with the study of history in the schools.”19 | 21 |
| Hesitance about college entrance issues provides a starting point for understanding what turned out to be the often difficult relationship between the AHA and the College Board. The elite university presidents who joined in creating the CB anticipated a much closer working connection between the two organizations than ever came to pass. In the design that Harvard’s Eliot had in mind, the disciplinary associations would set educational standards, and the CB would both administer examinations that reflected these standards and secure the agreement of schools and colleges to accept the test results.20 The outcome of this cooperative effort would be much more than a means of determining student readiness for college. Strategically, it meant that the universities and disciplines would act together to set achievement levels for the upper threshold of secondary education and thus, in effect, control the still-contested boundary between school and college.21 | 22 |
| Pursuant to this design, the College Board early on asked the AHA to provide more “definiteness” regarding the content to be emphasized within each of the four blocks. In what became a pattern, the AHA allowed this request to languish from inattention. For almost two decades, the CB would press for a more detailed specification of standards, and the AHA would reply with a long silence. Typical of this evasiveness is a message that Charles H. Haskins sent in 1910 to co-member of the Seven Andrew McLaughlin, regarding a CB request for AHA direction that had been sent three years earlier. Haskins pointed out that, after this long lapse of time, the AHA “in common decency” should finally reply. “I do not see how we can avoid making some answer,” he said, “as we have put them off every year.” Nonetheless, Haskins added, the substance of the response need be only “very brief.”22 | 23 |
| Even though a usable response was never forthcoming, the CB continued to appeal to the AHA for help with test specifications until 1916, when it finally gave up and formed its own commission on history standards. Why had the relationship failed? To understand, it is important to bear in mind that all through this period the student failure rate was significantly higher on CB examinations in history than for any other subject. This not only raised questions about the validity of the examinations but also was a drawback in gaining institutional acceptance for the CB system as a whole.23 By and large, colleges wanted reasons to accept students rather than turn them away. Therefore, it was of crucial importance to the CB that the success rate on examinations be sufficient to support the wishes of the colleges. Success, the CB believed, depended on teachers’ and students’ being able to prepare for examinations by knowing in advance what content was likely to appear on them. What the CB wanted, then, was for the AHA to impose limits on content within each of the four blocks by specifying exactly what material students should regard as important and, by inference, what could be safely ignored. For the AHA historians, however, this imposition of inflexible test specifications was tantamount to imposing a curriculum every bit as prescriptive and fixed as that enforced by the old classical regime. Indeed, the Seven had said at the outset of their report that schools should disregard “any rigid list of requirements or any body of peremptory demands” coming from external agencies.24 The AHA’s indifference to requests for more definite examination specifications for history is perhaps the best evidence that the report meant exactly what it said. | 24 |
| From the beginning, then, the CB and the AHA had different educational ends in view. Contrary to a long-surviving myth, the AHA historians did not join with the CB in any university-led effort to “dominate” the schools.25 To be sure, individual historians participated in CB-sponsored committees, and many took an active part in preparing history examinations. Indeed, a member of the Seven, Lucy M. Salmon, served as the chief examiner for the first CB history examinations, which were administered in 1901. Later, however, Salmon became one of the sharpest critics of CB examination methods, and she assailed the board from a policy standpoint for “standing on the necks of the secondary schools.”26 Fundamentally, the difference was that the CB acted on behalf of the strategic interests of the university administrative leadership, and the historians sought what they thought was the best educational environment for student learning and the development of their subject. This led to divergent educational policies. One emphasized the need for order and control in secondary education, and the other insisted that teachers needed independence if, as the Seven advocated, they were to make the experience of studying history “a continually developing and enlarging one” for students.27 | 25 |
| For historians, CB policies reflected a regulatory intent that inevitably would undermine the AHA’s aim of forming an inclusive professional community of K-university history educators. In effect, these policies left college historians free to shape classroom instruction as they thought best while making high school teachers subject to the prescriptive actions of an external agency. Over time, this inevitably would lead to two very different and divided cultural environments—one relatively autonomous and the other highly controlled. To their credit, the early professional historians worked hard to prevent any such outcome in ways that went well beyond criticism of the CB examination system. This was perhaps most evident in the leading role they played in forming a cluster of regional history teachers’ associations. A direct outgrowth of the work of the Seven, whose members helped to launch and sustain them, these associations provided a forum in which school and college history educators joined as professional colleagues in discussing a full spectrum of educational issues, ranging from teaching methods to college entrance examinations. By the early twentieth century, three major regional associations had been founded: the New England History Teachers Association (1897), the North Central History Teachers Association (1899), and the Association of History Teachers of the Middle States and Maryland (1904). | 26 |
| Linking school and college history educators, these associations were meant to provide high school teachers with a full opportunity to participate in debate about educational policy and practice. Discussion within them led the AHA in 1907 to appoint a new committee to review and adjust the recommendations of the Seven. This attentive response demonstrated how the AHA sought to function in the policy environment of the day. Understanding the highly decentralized conditions of American education, AHA members had no illusions about top-down rule. Instead, they worked through appointed committees charged with seeking data, taking advice, assessing the situation—grappling with “the whole question,” as the Seven called it—and then issuing reports that gave voice to the educational convictions and concerns of the full community of history educators. In short, the AHA sought to conduct itself so that it could legitimately say it expressed the aspirations and values not of an organization but of history educators collectively. Moreover, while seeking to reflect and shape the views of a broad spectrum of history educators, associational policies also underscored the AHA’s efforts to promote the autonomy of the profession and to help practitioners withstand often unwelcome pressure from external sources such as the College Board, local school boards, and state regulatory agencies. | 27 |
| The Seven, then, delivered more than a report; they also gave the AHA a model for undertaking future policy initiatives. This model supported professional self-governance, encouraged educational activism, and positioned the association at the center of an effort to unite history educators wherever they might be located. Open about many matters, it held as a given that the practice of history teachers should be shaped by attention to the subject, not determined by obedience to externally imposed roles. As the Seven had said, every educational issue—in school and college alike—should be framed by “the subject as a growing, developing, enlarging field of human knowledge.” | 28 |
| Although the report of the Seven had primarily an educational rationale, it also presented a fully developed conception of the discipline of history. This did not reflect a strong scientific bias, contrary to what Peter Novick writes about the epistemological views of the early professional historians.28 Not the scientific method under another name, historical-mindedness was itself “one of the marked characteristics of modern learning”—distinctive in its outlook on human affairs and yet integral to the practice of all other disciplines. In a time of divisive specialization, history held together much that otherwise threatened to come apart: Like literature, it deals with man, and appeals to the sympathy, the imagination, and the emotional nature of the pupils. Like natural science, it employs methods of careful and unprejudiced investigation. It belongs to the humanities, for its essential purpose is to disclose human life; but it also searches for data, groups them, and builds generalizations from them. Though it may not be a science itself, its methods are similar to scientific methods, and are valuable in inculcating in the pupil a regard for accuracy and a reverence for truth. It corrects the formalistic bias of language by bringing the pupil into sympathetic contact with actualities and with the mind of man as it has reacted on his environment. It gives breadth, outlook, and human interest, which are not easily developed by the study of natural phenomena.29In this conception, history not only shares in the best qualities of other disciplines but also corrects defects in their outlooks. By balancing the literary and scientific points of view, history provides a unifying center in an intellectual world at risk of being pulled apart by divergent tendencies. | 29 |
| The Seven argued that this unifying function clinched the case for the centrality of history in the school curriculum. Others, however, viewed the claim as imperialistic, and challenges soon came from many directions—notably from advocates of an ill-defined approach to curriculum-making given the name “social studies.” Opposition came first, though, from the emerging social sciences, especially sociology, economics, and political science. Before World War I, these late-arriving disciplines had little presence and even less definition within the high school curriculum, where they existed almost entirely as subjects “allied” to history in courses focusing on civil government or political economy. These were studies that—if offered at all—were historically oriented and typically were linked to, or accommodated within, the course on United States history. In educational planning, the Seven asserted that these allied subjects should be thought of “as part of history,” thus helping to integrate rather than further fragment the curriculum.30 | 30 |
| As the social sciences organized, however, they increasingly rejected this view of a close kinship with history. By the 1920s, as Dorothy Ross points out, a disengagement from historicism was fully under way across all of the social science disciplines.31 In fact, social scientists now often defined themselves by drawing attention to what they argued were the shortcomings of historical thinking. Historians, they said, were given to literary narrative and romance, while social scientists were devoted to factual analysis and reality. The latter was empirical science, the former a kind of sentimental humanism. No longer justified after the horrific experience of World War I, this indulgent historicism—as the social scientists saw it—reflected a flawed evolutionary faith that counted on social ills’ giving way to the slow drift of historical progress. Thus, the study of history, if overdone, tended to cover over social problems rather than work toward their solution. | 31 |
| Ever more a social science dogma, this critique amounted to a direct denial of the Seven’s claim that history was the subject best suited to provide the student with “practical preparation … for forceful participation in civic activities.” It also was the point of departure from which the social science organizations began to demand that the “monopoly” of history in the school curriculum be broken and that their own subjects be given either equal or a significant share of time.32 This campaign culminated in reports criticizing the dominant place given history in high school education that were issued almost in concert during 1922–1923 by the American Political Science Association, the American Economic Association, and the American Sociological Society. This insistence of the social sciences that they deserved their own place in the school program contributed to what a 1924 AHA report referred to as “a rising tide of discontent” with the Seven’s framework for history education. In addition, the entry of the social sciences into debate about the school curriculum helped to destabilize the ecology of policymaking in history education. In contrast to their stance in 1898, the AHA now understood that the social sciences would speak for themselves, and that their views—whether hostile to history or not—must necessarily be taken into account in the design of any school curriculum intended as preparation for citizenship. | 32 |
| In claiming a place in the school curriculum, the social scientists pointed out that support for their position was not lacking among historians. Indeed, they said that those they considered “the most progressive historians” were solidly in the social science camp. According to the social scientists, these historians favored loosening “the grip of history” on the school curriculum so that much more student work could focus on social science approaches to contemporary issues. Furthermore, any history retained in the curriculum should itself be oriented toward attention to present social problems. As a matter of policy, the American Economics Association report said, “these historians believe that the monopoly of history is to be broken and that the history which remains in the curriculum is to be more definitely pointed toward understanding the society of today.”33 | 33 |
| Who exactly were the “progressive” historians that the social scientists had in mind, and how sizable a constituency within the AHA did they represent? It is impossible to answer these questions with complete certainty, but without doubt the group included Charles Beard, James Harvey Robinson, and Carl Becker. These are the names that figure most prominently when the claim is made that historians helped form what came to be known as “the social studies movement.” Of the three, Beard unquestionably was an early critic of the Seven, and he eventually became a leading spokesperson for organizing history education within a social studies framework. Robinson was a member of a 1916 NEA committee that gave national currency to the name “social studies,” and Becker—though the least active of the three—questioned the Seven’s presuppositions whenever he spoke about history education. Given such prominent critics, there can be no doubt that an influential movement had emerged within the AHA aimed at rethinking and revising the policies established by the Seven. | 34 |
| How had the Seven gone wrong, and what should be the new direction for history education? Significantly, the progressive historians had more to say about the first of these questions than the second. At least as early as 1908, Beard was arguing before an audience of teachers that the Seven’s “partition of all history into four rectangular domains” was alien and deadening to historical work. Historical thinking, he said, does not move from early to more recent times along the lines of this slow chronological crawl. Instead, it originates in problems that emerge from “the living present” and then draws upon history as an instrumental means to address them. This meant that school history should be organized topically rather than chronologically, and that there should be “a readjustment of our program in such a way as to place more emphasis on the recent period.” But he could go no further. He himself had no “practical program” to offer through which teachers might implement these changes; nor, at this point, did he believe that the historical community at large was “ready … for this radical readjustment of our historical perspective so far as actual instruction is concerned.” In the spirit of the pragmatic evangelicalism, all Beard hoped to do was “awaken the spirit” to the need for change.34 | 35 |
| In a more plainspoken way, Becker arrived at almost the same end point. Speaking to Kansas teachers in 1916, he questioned whether it was advisable to continue the ambitious program for history education that the Seven had set forth. He referred to AHA data suggesting that history was losing favor with school administrators, adding, “I have no doubt that … one of many reasons for the fact is that the actual educational value of history in high schools is far less than it was supposed, twenty years ago, would prove to be the case.” The problem, he suggested, was that historians had not been able in practice to distinguish between elementary and more advanced courses; therefore, the Seven’s four-block framework led to the piling on of more and more (quickly forgotten) information rather than the fostering of intellectual growth. Given these circumstances, Becker concluded that “some radical reorganization of the curriculum is necessary,” and, moreover, that it would serve the interests of education best if the outcome were “a carefully coordinated course in which history, economics, civics, and sociology … all find their properly related place.” But Becker acknowledged forthrightly that he had no idea how this could be done, and he ended more or less where Beard had, saying, “I am perfectly willing that someone else would attempt to organize the ideal course.”35 | 36 |
| Although the progressive historians wanted change in the Seven’s program, it does not seem that they sought anything like root-and-branch reform. After all, Becker was the admiring student of Haskins, and he, more than any other historian, continued the effort to elucidate the meaning and value of “historical-mindedness” in both academic and everyday life. Also, without expressing any serious reservations, Robinson had served as a member of both the Committee of Ten and the Committee of Five, which reappraised the work of the Seven, and only gradually, never stridently, pressed for modification in the work of these bodies. Beard was more outspoken, but even though he protested the exclusion of the social sciences, he always insisted that history should be the centerpiece of the school curriculum. Like the Seven, the progressive historians wanted—as do many historians today—disciplinary leadership in the design of a curriculum that was at once intellectually rigorous and ethically responsive to societal conditions. They differed with the Seven primarily in how they regarded the pace and volatility of social change. Both believed that progress was inherent in change, but for the Seven this was a slow, almost inevitable drift upward. In contrast, the progressives felt an intense urgency about the seriousness of social problems and thought that historical study should contribute directly to purposeful efforts to achieve a better future. As Henry May said, they “agreed with their opponents that progress was natural—even inevitable—but they wanted to speed it up.”36 Applied to curriculum, however, this meant that history started later—taking off from the political and technological revolutions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—with all that implied, of course, for the staffing of history departments in schools and colleges. | 37 |
| Of all the critics, the most outspoken and determined opponents of history education emerged from a loose network of new professionals whom historians came to refer to as “educationists.” Historians applied this designation very broadly, often with disapproval, to education officials and faculty in schools of education who, to varying degrees, believed that the disciplinary framework governing the school curriculum should be jettisoned and replaced by one organized around pressing (or mundane) problems in the immediate social environment. In the words of one influential educationist, David Snedden, the purpose of schooling was not primarily to stimulate the intellectual development of individual minds—as history and the other disciplines advocated—but instead should be to make students “fit to carry on the group life.” Schools, that is, were agencies that existed to serve the social order; and this meant that both the goals and the substance of education should be specified through an analysis of immediate “social necessities,” and not by reference to the structure and substantive concerns of disciplinary learning. In practice, Snedden argued, the goal should be to replace courses in disciplines such as mathematics and history with studies focusing on aspects of daily life such as vocational skills and hygienic habits.37 Looking back, the historian Richard Hofstadter described the efforts of the educationists as an attempt to produce a “de-intellectualized” school curriculum; and given the views of Snedden and his allies, this seems a fair appraisal of their intent.38 | 38 |
| Although Snedden and like-minded educationists sought to disestablish disciplines altogether, their top priority was to eliminate history from the curriculum.39 If that could not be fully accomplished, they hoped at least to transform school history into something close to what Snedden called “contemporary social science.” Listening to Snedden speak about history education, the Cornell historian George Burr observed that “this seems much like history with the history left out.” And so it was. Increasingly, educationists such as Snedden—most of whom identified themselves as progressive pragmatists—interpreted John Dewey’s call to “live forward” to mean that the past should be rejected and shed rather than rediscovered and assimilated. From this perspective, as Dorothy Ross has pointed out, historical consciousness in the progressive camp came to be directed more toward “discarding the past” than toward exploring its bearing on the present.40 | 39 |
| In 1918, the cause of the educationists was given powerful impetus by the report of the NEA’s Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (CRSE). The leading question before this commission was what should be the mission of the high school, given that at least some secondary education was fast becoming universal and that educational planners increasingly had to take account of “large numbers of pupils of varying capacities, aptitudes, and social heredity, and destinies in life.” In short, what conception should rule the school curriculum under conditions of mass education? Answering this question in a report that came to be known as the Cardinal Principles, the CRSE pronounced that, henceforth, the governing mission of the high school no longer was to engender “intellectual power” but instead should be to fit the student for democratic life “through activities designed for the well-being of his fellow members and society as a whole.” To this end, disciplinary frameworks should be subordinated to and reoriented toward supporting seven objectives said to be essential to the good order of social life: “health,” “command of fundamental processes,” “worthy home-membership,” “vocation,” “citizenship,” “worthy use of leisure,” and “ethical character.”41 Obviously, these aims reflected a very different and rival educational vision from the disciplined-based one advanced earlier by Eliot’s Committee of Ten and the AHA’s Committee of Seven. To the present day, these two contending points of view—one focusing on intellectual development and the other emphasizing social behavior—continue to oppose one another in a long-unresolved debate about the central purpose of schooling in the United States.42 | 40 |
| The favorable reception accorded the CRSE model by many school administrators would prove a turning point in AHA policy toward the schools. By implication, the CRSE had differentiated between the missions of schools and colleges—making the socialization of all students the primary work of the former and leaving the latter to support the intellectual development of a much smaller minority. This functional separation tended to call into question the stance taken by the Seven that all high school students—not just those preparing for college—deserve an academically serious and demanding education. Furthermore, this differentiation of schools from colleges—which in effect turned them into two different cultures—threatened to undermine the AHA conception that all K-university history educators should belong to one unified professional community. The most direct challenge to the discipline, however, came from the CRSE’s endorsement of a subcommittee recommendation that history in the high school curriculum be subsumed within a social studies framework and allocated at most two years of study rather than the four still recommended by the AHA. | 41 |
| By endorsing the idea of a curricular domain called social studies, the CRSE gave educational standing to a concept that existed concretely as little more than a phantom presence. Much later, in 1938, John Dewey was still trying to answer the question “What Is Social Study?” while warning against attempts to give it too definite a meaning.43 Indeed, its appeal to school administrators may have been the operational latitude that the social studies rubric permitted in labeling courses for academic credit. In the social studies dispensation, they did not have to be governed by standard usage, as was necessary when designating a course as, say, “algebra” or “ancient history.” To label it social studies was sufficient even though this disclosed very little, if anything, about the content of the course or its place in an ordered curriculum. In 1924, this loose practice led an AHA committee to employ twenty-two general course categories when it attempted to survey what was then being taught in the schools under the heading of social studies. Not surprisingly, the committee described the data as reflecting a “confusion of tongues” and as useless for setting AHA policy directions. Nonetheless, this AHA committee included history as a “social study,” pointing to some measure of acquiescence to the CRSE point of view.44 Even if never confirmed in policy, this shift placed the AHA in the dubious and ultimately futile position of joining in a search for the educational meaning of an idea—if social studies can be called an idea—that defied substantive definition or coherent expression through a sequenced curriculum. In the end, this placed school history in an educational and curricular limbo from which—up to now—it still has not been able to extricate itself. | 42 |
| The social studies movement might have faltered, however, if it were not for the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS). The council was formed in 1921 when a small group gathered by faculty from Teachers College announced that the CRSE recommendations required an organizational locus for uniting the efforts “of all the persons interested in training for citizenship.”45 At the outset, those most responsible for launching NCSS were unsure about how it should carry out its mission, and different organizational models were considered and floated during the early years of the council’s existence. In part, inspiration was derived from the earlier establishment of K-12 subject matter associations during the second decade of the twentieth century. Among the most important of these were the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). Like the start given to NCSS, the impetus to form these organizations came largely from faculty in schools of education, who feared that they would have little influence in the overall educational enterprise if K-12 teachers joined and became part of the culture of the existing disciplinary associations. Although these organizations claimed to represent the interests of teachers, they were, in fact, largely led and sustained by educationists throughout the formative years of their existence. Indeed, the early governance structure first established for NCSS effectively disallowed teachers from holding leadership positions in the organization.46 | 43 |
| The formation of NCSS had enormous consequences for history education. In contrast to NCSS, associations such as NCTE and NCTM were organized along subject-matter lines, and this made it possible in theory for teacher members to think of their work as following broad disciplinary contours.47 Such, however, was not the case within a nondisciplinary social studies framework, where history was absorbed into an amorphous meld of many subjects. In consequence, history teachers eventually would find themselves without any organizational voice to represent their interests either in school settings or as a professional community. The arrival of NCSS, then, helped to create a new, ill-defined professional identity—that of the social studies teacher—which in itself indicated no particular substantive expertise or definite educational responsibilities. In turn, this meant that teacher certification requirements under a social studies dispensation would begin to be cast so broadly that a social studies teacher who had never taken a college history course could be assigned to teach history.48 It is not the case, of course, that the early leaders of NCSS—and their supporters within the AHA membership—intended anything like these outcomes. Looking back, however, what must be said is that the organizers of NCSS were fully ready to dissolve the existing history curriculum—and thereby weaken the professional identity of history teachers—on not much more than a bet that something definite would eventually arrive to take the place of history. | 44 |
| In its own response to critics, the AHA at first seemed determined to resist attempts to subsume history within social studies. In 1923, the association formally resolved to undertake “the development of a strong constructive policy in the matter of history education in the schools.” There were considerations within this resolution, however, that made it less than straightforwardly actionable. On the one hand, the resolution called for a “new statement of the value and contribution of history to education, independent of, and apart from the other social studies.” This appeared to reflect a resolve to continue the tradition of the Seven in advocating for the integrity of history as a disciplinary study. On the other hand, the resolution also proposed the development of a “new statement or brief for the social studies as a whole with a view to obtaining for these subjects consideration commensurate with their importance.”49 Here the AHA seemed to hope that advocacy for history and support of social studies were not incompatible. The authors of this resolution perhaps thought of the inclusion of these two alternative paths as a necessary evenhandedness, given differences of opinion among the AHA membership, but in retrospect it appears more to reflect a mood of uncertainty that increasingly undermined the association’s direct support for history education in the schools. | 45 |
| With this resolution, the AHA’s approach to school policy began to drift in two divergent directions. One was a retreat into the realm of expressive politics—that is, occasional pronouncements about the importance of history education, with no serious attempt to provide substantive backing for the claim. The other was to participate as one constituency among many in coalitions aimed at developing a “brief for the social studies as a whole.” During the years 1928–1934, the AHA was drawn much more along the latter course when the Carnegie Corporation provided a large grant to support the work of a Commission on the Social Studies. This has often been referred to as an AHA commission, but the AHA actually served only as a facilitating agent for the grant. In fact, the commission was set up at Carnegie’s insistence as an independent attempt to reach consensus about the future direction of social studies education, and therefore its membership intentionally included representation from historians, educationists, and social scientists in more or less equal parts. How committed each of these camps was to the task at hand was open to question from the very beginning, but on the surface, at least, all parties were pledged to cooperation. | 46 |
| Although ambiguous at best, the results of this commission proved to be a turning point in the AHA’s stance toward history education. It is clear from the record that some influential historians wanted to use the commission as a means to carry the AHA fully into the social studies camp, or at minimum to revise the policies of the Seven. This reform impetus increased when the prolonged shock to society brought on by the Depression called into question all preexisting social and educational policy. Among reformers, there was no one more convinced of the need for change than Charles Beard, who almost immediately became the spokesperson for the commission and the foremost public advocate for the social studies point of view. It is not easy, however, to say exactly where Beard stood among the contending parties. Historians now claim Beard as one of their own, but he was equally active professionally as a political scientist and from the 1920s on was a close associate of educationists at Teachers College. Very probably, he saw himself—and was so viewed by the Carnegie Corporation—as being above the fray and performing the role of educational statesman. Still, Beard was quite forthright from the outset that, as he understood it, one important objective of the commission was to make a break with past positions of the AHA and bring an end to what he called the “reign of the historian” over the school curriculum.50 | 47 |
| Unquestionably, many historians other than Beard believed that the school history curriculum needed serious revision. Although modified somewhat by subsequent committees, the Seven’s curriculum scarcely touched on the most pressing issues confronting the nation following World War I; immigration, industrialization, urbanization, and international relations all were largely beyond its ken. It was difficult, therefore, to make the case that the Seven’s curriculum was still an adequate preparation for civic involvement or the stimulus to an effortful social life. This called for a rethinking of AHA policy, but it did not answer the question of why history should be reconfigured within social studies. This was an especially pertinent issue given that no educationally viable definition of social studies had as yet been formulated. So why replace history with social studies? In reply, Beard had remarkably little to offer of a substantive nature. The term “social studies,” he acknowledged, had arisen largely as a label of “convenience” for all those studies that in common supported “the efforts of mankind to become civilized.” Moreover, he admitted that as far as he could tell, “The boundaries of the field are indefinite. The subject-matter is difficult to determine. Methods of teaching and testing are under debate. Intangibles are numerous.” Despite the many unknowns, Beard urged educators to have faith that “there is substance, there is reality, in social studies.”51 Essentially, his was an evangelical call to a belief that social studies surely must be a path to a better way even if nothing about that future condition could be known or specified in advance. | 48 |
| In the end, however, no better way—or clearly marked path of any kind—resulted from the work of the commission. As many critical reviewers pointed out, the definition of social studies was no more settled when the commission adjourned than it had been at the outset. When its report finally appeared in 1934, four of the sixteen members, including the influential social scientist Charles Merriam, refused to sign off on its recommendations. The commission itself neither recommended nor endorsed any substantive program of study.52 In the spirit of pragmatic trial and error, the work of developing a social studies curriculum was left totally up to experimentation within individual schools. But the commission had not provided anything approaching an adequate working hypothesis upon which to base this work. Thus, what had come to be regarded as the center of the school curriculum—the studies that most directly prepared students for life in a democracy—was left vacant and open to any and all claimants. Over time, this decentering of the curriculum may have been the most consequential of the many outcomes that resulted from the social studies movement. | 49 |
| The effect of the commission on the AHA was significant and far-reaching. That such a prestigious national body labored for five years under the auspices of the AHA—if not its direction—seemed to affirm the association’s activist role in making education policy. The result, however, was exactly the opposite. Backing off involvement, the association remained silent, neither endorsing nor rejecting any part of the work of the commission. The one formal action that the AHA did take was to hand over control of its professional journal on history education to the NCSS. This act in itself signified to many that the AHA thereafter would defer to the NCSS in all matters related to K-12 education. Whether intentional or not, the changing titles of this journal tell a story about the diminishing fortunes of history in the school curriculum: The History Teacher’s Magazine (1909), The Historical Outlook (1918), The Social Studies (1934), and then Social Education (1937). | 50 |
| In practice, high schools now encountered two rival curriculum models for history education—one advocated by the NCSS and the other framed by the examinations of the College Board.53 The AHA kept apart from both alternatives, proposed no model of its own, and thereby abandoned standards setting and curriculum development to two organizations, neither of which represented the discipline of history or any community of historians. By the onset of World War II, then, the association had gone from a major formative influence in K-12 history education to having scarcely any educational agenda at all. As a result, the organization that had provided intellectual and policy guidance in the making of school curriculum for almost half a century largely ceased to be an active presence in the further evolution of secondary education. In effect, historians had left school history to fend for itself. | 51 |
| After World War II, the AHA’s activist legacy mostly lay dormant for several decades and increasingly was forgotten by members of the profession. By 1980, the loss of memory was almost complete. In that year, Hazel Hertzberg observed in an AHA-sponsored retrospective that remembrance of the association’s once “decisive role” in school history had become “virtually non-existent” among historians. This indifference, however, was about to be disturbed.54 In 1979, the New York Times had reported a dramatic twenty-year decline in SAT scores; and from this point forward, growing alarm about the state of public education began to propel school reform to the forefront of the nation’s public policy agenda. It primarily was concern about the implications of this changing policy environment that underlay Arthur Link’s 1984 attempt to convince the discipline that attention to school history should be one of its prime responsibilities. If the AHA did not return to the task begun by the early historians, he warned, then “others”—most probably government agencies—would enter the policy void and take control of issues that properly should be decided within the community of history educators.55 | 52 |
| Historians today are not likely to agree about how effectively the profession has responded to Link’s challenge. Perhaps the most that can be said is that history education is much more a live issue in the discipline than was the case twenty years ago. It is certainly true that a number of historians have joined in helping to strengthen school history.56 In a recent policy forum, Tom Bender takes this involvement as a definite sign of revived activism in the profession, but he adds, “the task is large, and these are scattered, even marginal, efforts.” Echoing Link, he calls for a broad-based initiative in which “all academic historians” work in concert to involve the discipline “more fully in the development of curricula, the training of teachers, and the writing of tests, textbooks, and other teaching materials.”57 For Bender, the rationale for such decisive action is self-evident. It should be apparent, he says, that a revitalization of history education cannot be legislated. Indeed, it could be thwarted by government intervention and bureaucratic regulation. Among possible contributors, only the discipline can bring substantive depth and a spirit of critical inquiry to conversations about the direction of school history. Full commitment to these conversations, in turn, can counter the ever-present danger that a disengaged pursuit of specialized research will result in an isolation of the profession from matters of public concern. In short, if the discipline acts, school history stands to gain an intellectual energy that has long been missing, and historians are saved from a depleted sense of public mission. | 53 |
| Even if this rationale proves persuasive, the way forward is far from certain. It is doubtful whether action will result from prolonging debate about how research has “trumped” education in determining what counts in the work of the discipline. Although relevant, this may not be the heart of the matter. In fact, the AHA backed off, then abandoned, issues of school history long before research became an overriding concern in the discipline during the 1960s and 1970s. What happened in the 1930s was arguably a failure of nerve—or a fear of division in the ranks—brought on by problems that will be encountered again in any revival of educational activism. These problems turn on questions as difficult as any that historians are likely to take up—questions specifically about the distinctive nature of historical thinking, its educational value, the progression and content of coursework, testing of student learning, and the position of history within a social studies framework. An understanding of matters of this kind should guide policymaking in history education, and this cannot be achieved through committee votes, press releases, or ad hoc measures of any sort. With this in mind, should not the AHA consider taking the lead in establishing a locus within the discipline for research and data collection bearing on all developments in the teaching and learning of history? A reliable policy arm could emerge from this source, enabling the discipline to overcome hesitance and speak with confidence about issues of school history. This venture—call it simply a Center for History Education (CHE)—might involve some organizational redesign of the AHA itself or be based on a consortial arrangement among participants that bring relevant expertise to the work. It also might be undertaken as a joint effort with the AHA-supported proposal for establishing a National History Center. No matter what model is adopted, this initiative need not start from scratch. Across many fields, inquiry into the nature of learning has thrown off its behavorist bonds and begun to give us new understandings of how people acquire knowledge.58 A recent AHA-sponsored publication points to how this research bears directly on rethinking history education,59 and from this starting point it is not difficult to see how a forward-looking agenda of work could be organized comparable in scope and significance to that undertaken by the Committee of Seven. | 54 |
| Importantly, the CHE should adopt an inclusive approach and avoid treating school history in isolation from the many other aspects of history education. In particular, the center should foster the sense that all K-university history educators are members of a single unified professional community. This was among the strongest convictions of the early professional historians, and it was one they worked hard to put into practice. It also may be the point where their understanding of the profession most differs from that of the majority of historians today. An AHA-sponsored study, The Education of Historians for the Twenty-first Century, reports that “in most history doctoral programs neither faculty nor students tend to think of themselves as part of a K-16 community of educators, all devoted to history.”60 This, in contrast, is exactly how both the Seven and the progressives did think of themselves. In 1891, when Frederick Jackson Turner spoke to an audience of K-12 history educators, he addressed them as “we teachers” and envisioned their work and that of university historians as part of a common educational enterprise. In that spirit, Turner and Haskins co-taught courses for elementary and secondary history teachers at the University of Wisconsin, and Vassar’s Lucy Salmon worked tirelessly on behalf of teacher professionalism and the establishment of close working ties between school and college educators.61 These were not atypical actions, but rather reflected a belief commonly held in the early profession that all history educators shared the same aims and aspirations. For nearly half a century, the expectation among historians was that this belief should receive its most complete expression through the work of the AHA; and the question here proposed for discussion is whether the AHA can again lead the profession in a quest for a unified educational vision. | 55 |
The authors gratefully acknowledge research support provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Special thanks are due to Thomas Bender, Richard Bennett, Jerry Bentley, Richard Brown, Leon Fink, James Grossman, David Gutierrez, Nadine Hata, Stanley Katz, David Kyvig, Suzanne Lebsock, Lawrence McBride, Carla Pestana, Clement Price, Daniel Rodgers, Emily Rosenberg, Peter Rutkoff, David Trask, William Weber, and the editors and anonymous readers of the AHR. We are especially indebted to Dorothy Downie for her editorial assistance and thoughtful advice. Arthur Link, “The American Historical Association, 1884–1984: Retrospect and Prospect,” AHR 90, no. 1 (February 1985): 1–17; Link’s appeal for renewed educational activism appears on pp. 12–16. Robert Orrill is Executive Director, National Council on Education and the Disciplines, and Senior Advisor at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Among other academic and teaching positions, he previously was Executive Director, Office of Academic Affairs, at the College Board. He has organized and edited numerous publications on American education, including The Future of Education: Perspectives on National Standards in America (1994); The Condition of American Liberal Education: Pragmatism and a Changing Tradition (1995); and Education and Democracy: Re-imagining Liberal Learning in America (1997). Linn Shapiro is an organizer and historian who studies the politics and culture of the American Left. She learned most of what she knows about the relationship between politics and culture from Bernice Johnson Reagon. With Judy Kaplan, Shapiro edited Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left (1998). She is currently writing a history of the community-based Left in Washington, D.C. She works as development director at the Latin American Youth Center in Washington, D.C., and as coordinator of Proyecto VOS (Voices of Survivors), which tours international survivors of human rights violations to college and university campuses. Notes1 Arthur Link, “The American Historical Association, 1884–1984: Retrospect and Prospect,” AHR 90, no. 1 (February 1985): 1–17; Link’s appeal for renewed educational activism appears on pp. 12–16.2 See, for example, John Higham with Leonard Krieger and Felix Gilbert, History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965); Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1988); and Ernest A. Breisach, American Progressive History: An Experiment in Modernization (Chicago, 1993).3 The two most comprehensive studies of the place of history in secondary education are Hazel Hertzberg, Social Studies Reform, 1880–1980 (Boulder, Colo., 1981), and David Jenness, Making Sense of Social Studies (New York, 1990). Useful as they are, both books take it for granted that educational activism among historians must be conjoined with advocacy for social studies reform.4 John Dewey, “The Educational Situation,” in Jo Ann Boydston, ed., John Dewey: The Middle Works, vol. 1: 1899–1901 (Carbondale, Ill., 1976), 265–66, 281.5 Among educators, no issue was debated more extensively in the late nineteenth century than the comparative “educational value” of different subjects vying for a place in the curriculum. Seeking to disestablish the dominant classical curriculum, Herbert Spencer launched this debate in 1859 with a demand that educators recognize “the enormous importance of determining in some rational way what things are really most worth learning.” In one form or another, Spencer’s question has continued to be the one that is asked most often about curriculum. Herbert Spencer, Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (London, 1949), 6.6 The Committee of Seven included Andrew C. McLaughlin (chair), Herbert Baxter Adams, George L. Fox, Albert Bushnell Hart, Charles Homer Haskins, Lucy M. Salmon, and H. Morse Stephens. Four would later become president of the association: Hart (1909), McLaughlin (1914), Stephens (1915), and Haskins (1922). Two had served as public school superintendents, four had been high school teachers, and one had taught at a normal school. As Hertzberg points out, the AHA pioneered with the appointment of Salmon, “the first woman to be named to a national curricular committee in the social sciences.” Hertzberg, Social Studies Reform, 13.7 Committee of Seven, The Study of History in Schools (Washington, D.C., 1899), 429, 430.8 Charles Eliot, “What Is a Liberal Education?” in Educational Reform (New York, 1960), 106.9 Frederick Rudolph, Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study since 1863 (San Francisco, 1977), 177.10 William J. Reese, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven, Conn., 1995). For a discussion of history courses in nineteenth-century high schools, see 117–18, 137–38, 150–51.11 Publication of the report of the Committee of Ten, known officially as the NEA’s Committee on Secondary School Studies, launched a debate about the purpose and makeup of the high school curriculum that continues to this day. The broad issues at the forefront of this debate are discussed in Herbert Kleibard’s aptly titled The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958 (New York, 1995). Other useful studies with a bearing on curricular issues include Jurgen Herbst, The Once and Future School: Three Hundred and Fifty Years of American Secondary Education (New York, 1996); Edward A. Krug, The Shaping of the American High School (New York, 1964); David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1974); and Daniel Tanner and Laurel Tanner, History of the School Curriculum (New York, 1990). The work of the Committee of Ten is addressed in detail by Theodore R. Sizer, Secondary Schools at the Turn of the Century (New Haven, Conn., 1964). Diane Ravitch writes as an engaged participant in this more than century-long curriculum debate in Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (New York, 2000).12 Committee on Secondary School Studies, Report of the Committee on Secondary School Studies (Washington, D.C., 1893), 28.13 Committee of Seven, Study of History, 431.14 The report on elementary schooling mentioned above is Committee of Eight, The Study of History in the Elementary Schools: Report to the American Historical Association (New York, 1909). Useful information about history education in elementary schools can be found in two publications by Diane Ravitch: The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980 (New York, 1983) and “Tot Sociology,” American Scholar 56 (Summer 1987): 343–54.15 Committee of Seven, Study of History, 438–39, 453.16 Ibid., 432.17 The numbers of high schools and high school students grew astonishingly beginning in the late nineteenth century. In 1870, 72,156 students were enrolled in 1,026 high schools; in 1900, 516,251 students were enrolled in 6,005 high schools. In the twentieth century, high school enrollments doubled decade by decade. Rudolph, Curriculum, 212.18 Committee of Seven, Study of History, 490, 491.19 Ibid., 495–96, 496, 497.20 Wilson Farrand, “A Brief History of the College Entrance Examination Board,” in The Work of the College Entrance Examination Board, 1901–1925 (New York, 1926), 21–30.21 A recent publication that includes useful essays on the early College Board is Michael Johanek, ed., A Faithful Mirror: Reflections on the College Board and Education in America (New York, 2001).22 Charles H. Haskins to Andrew McLaughlin, November 3, 1910, Box A-243, Records of American Historical Association, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.23 See Frederick B. Davis, “A Brief History of the College Board Entrance Examination in History,” The Social Studies, March 1934, 127–33.24 Committee of Seven, Study of History, 431.25 This myth was propagated by leaders of the social studies movement in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. For a concise account of how university “domination” of the schools became an ideologically charged issue, see Herbert M. Kliebard, Changing Course: American Curriculum Reform in the 20th Century (New York, 2002), 50–54.26 “Proceedings of the Conference on History in Secondary Schools, with Especial Reference to the Report of the Committee of Seven,” in Annual Report of the American Historical Association (Washington, D.C., 1908), 80.27 Committee of Seven, Study of History, 444.28 Novick, That Noble Dream, 37.29 Committee of Seven, Study of History, 446, 445–46.30 Ibid., 489.31 Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, 1991), 386–89.32 As reported in Edgar Dawson, “The History Inquiry,” The Historical Outlook 15 (June 1924): 250.33 Ibid.34 Charles A. Beard, “A Plea for Greater Stress upon the Modern Period,” Report of the Sixth Annual Convention of the Association of History Teachers of the Middle States and Maryland, March 1908, 12, 13, 15.35 Carl Becker, “History in the High School Curriculum,” Educational Administration and Supervision, June 1916, 377–78. From an educational perspective, this was an especially provocative criticism in that it questioned both how much the study of history contributed to a student’s cognitive development and whether there was any reason why one course necessarily should follow another in the curriculum. Becker’s view was that historians should be puzzled by these questions rather than address them through doctrinal statements.36 Henry May, The End of American Innocence (New York, 1959), 21.37 Snedden wrote often and extensively about a wide range of curricular issues. His arguments against the educational value of history can be found in “Teaching of History in Secondary Schools,” The History Teacher’s Magazine 9 (November 1914): 277–82, quote 280, and “History and Other Social Sciences in the Education of Youths Twelve to Eighteen Years of Age,” School and Society 115 (March 10, 1917): 271–313.38 See Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York, 1962), 299–300, for analysis of anti-intellectualist tendencies within progressivism.39 Importantly, Snedden and other educationists also pressed for an approach to teacher education that stressed pedagogy over command of the content of a disciplinary domain. By aggressively promoting their cause with legislatures, they increasingly influenced the laws and regulations governing teacher certification, so that from the 1920s onward, required courses in education dominated teacher preparation in most states, with only minimal attention given to disciplinary knowledge and expertise. A summation of the misgivings of college faculty about this development can be found in “Report of the Committee on College and University Teaching,” Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors 19 (May 1933): 61–70.40 George L. Burr, “What History Shall We Teach,” The History Teacher’s Magazine 9 (November 1914): 286; Ross, Origins of American Social Science, 316.41 Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education (Washington, D.C., 1918), 8, 9, 10–11.42 In recent scholarship, this debate has been revived by the publication of William G. Wraga’s Democracy’s High School: The Comprehensive High School Educational Reform in the United States (Lanham, Md., 1994). Wraga argues that the Cardinal Principles report reflects a Deweyan humanism and does not advocate Snedden’s socially behaviorist point of view. See also his “A Progressive Legacy Squandered: The Cardinal Principles Report Reconsidered,” History of Education Quarterly, Winter 2001, 494–519. A reply directly critical of Wraga can be found in Herbert Kliebard’s Schooled to Work: Vocationalism and the American Curriculum, 1876–1946 (New York, 1999). Other relevant discussions of this report and its influence on education policy appear in Herbst, The Once and Future School, and David L. Angus and Jeffrey E. Mirel, The Failed Promise of the American High School (New York, 1999). The starting point for this scholarly debate is Edward A. Krug’s commentary on the Cardinal Principles in The Shaping of the American High School, 1880–1920 (New York, 1964).43 John Dewey, “What Is Social Study?” Progressive Education 15 (May 1938): 367–69.44 Dawson, “History Inquiry,” 254.45 Earl U. Rugg, “A National Council for the Social Studies,” The Historical Outlook, June 1921, 190.46 Louis M. Vanaria, “The National Council for the Social Studies” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1958), 100.47 This does not suggest an absence of conflict in these subject areas. In the so-called “math wars,” university mathematicians often are adamant in their opposition to the views of NCTM on school mathematics. Nonetheless, this essentially is a debate about the nature of mathematics itself, in which neither wants to diminish the importance of mathematics in the school curriculum. In contrast, social studies first represented itself as inherently different from history—or any discipline—and as its rival in the educational enterprise.48 The recent AHA study of graduate programs reports that “currently only about one-third of high school students are studying history with teachers with a college major in the discipline, and half of the students in grades 7–12 are in classrooms with teachers lacking even a college minor in history.” Thomas Bender, Philip M. Katz, Colin Palmer, and the Committee on Graduate Education of the American Historical Association, The Education of Historians for the Twenty-first Century (Urbana, Ill., 2004), 3.49 Quoted in Howard Boozer, “The American Historical Association and the Schools, 1884–1956” (Ph.D. diss., Washington University, 1960), 188.50 Charles A. Beard, “The Social Studies Curriculum,” The Social Frontier, December 1935, 78. Unlike Snedden, Beard was neither antidisciplinary nor antihistory. He insisted that social studies must respect “the spirit and letter of scholarship” and take account of “the stubborn and irreducible elements of the special disciplines.” Little different from the Seven, he argued that “history can furnish cement to bind all other social disciplines into a workable unity, giving to them a patterned background and, by virtue of its basic time element, a dynamic which pertains to the future.” See Charles A. Beard, A Charter for the Social Studies in the Schools (New York, 1934), 20.51 Charles A. Beard, “The Trend in Social Studies,” The Historical Outlook 20 (December 29, 1929): 371.52 Although the commission was severely criticized for its failure to provide concrete recommendations, it did sponsor a number of publications by individual authors that remained influential texts in the educational literature of the mid-twentieth century. These included Merle Curti, The Social Ideas of American Educators (New York, 1935); George S. Counts, The Social Foundations of Education (New York, 1934); Henry Johnson, An Introduction to the History of the Social Sciences in the Schools (New York, 1932); Bessie Louise Pierce, Citizens’ Organizations and the Civic Training of Youth (New York, 1933); and Rolla M. Tryon, The Social Sciences as School Subjects (New York, 1935).53 This continues to be the case today. In line with policy first advocated by the CRSE, most schools include two history courses in the social studies curriculum—typically World/European history (tenth grade) and United States history (eleventh grade). Many of these schools also now offer the College Board’s Advanced Placement courses to a rapidly increasing—but still select—number of students. For a description of a long-persisting “modal pattern” in the social studies curriculum, see Jenness, Making Sense of Social Studies, 86–88, 155–56.54 Hazel Hertzberg, “The Teaching of History,” in Michael Kammen, ed., The Past before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980), 474–75. The depth of amnesia in the profession at this time is fully evident in Laurence Veysey’s critical evaluation of the AHA, the OAH, and other humanities organizations during the period 1860–1920. Writing in 1979, Veysey totally ignores the energetic educational activism of the early professional historians and, contrary to all that the record shows, portrays the associational life of the discipline in these formative decades as marked by complacency and intellectually empty sociability. Laurence Veysey, “The Plural, Organized Worlds of the Humanities,” in Alexandra Oleson and John Voss, eds., The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860–1920 (Baltimore, Md., 1979), 77–79.55 Link, “The American Historical Association,” 15.56 Largely on their own initiative, individual historians have undertaken noteworthy reform efforts. Following World War II, the most significant included Arthur Bestor’s assault on the educationists; Richard Brown’s Amherst Project on American History; Edwin Fenton’s project at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, later expanded upon by Peter Stearns; and Gary Nash’s work through the National Center for History in the Schools. Despite nominal support for the National Center’s history standards project, the discipline took up none of these initiatives as priorities. That this activism brought little involvement from the historical profession illustrates the extent to which history education had migrated from the center to the margins of the disciplinary agenda.57 Thomas Bender, “Reforming the Disciplines,” Daedalus 131 (2002): 62.58 The bearing of this research on education is discussed in full in the National Research Council’s How People Learn (Washington, D.C., 1999). Importantly, this report emphasizes that successful learning—what it calls “learning with understanding”—is discipline-specific even at the high school level. As the researcher Sam Wineberg sums up, “There is no such thing as generic critical thinking. We think critically within the bounds of our discipline, and features of thought critical in one field often fail to appear in another.” Of course, it does not necessarily follow that disciplinary experts are good teachers, but this does suggest that the early professional historians were close to the mark when they placed “historical-mindedness” at the center of history education. For Wineberg’s statement, see “Teaching the Mind Good Habits,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 11, 2003, B20.59 Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineberg, Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives (New York, 2000).60 Bender et al., Education of Historians, 64.61 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of History,” in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner (New York, 1994), 28. For Salmon’s efforts, see Nicholas Adams and Bonnie G. Smith, eds., Lucy M. Salmon, Selected Essays: History and the Texture of Modern Life (Philadelphia, 2001). | |
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