|
|
|
A Lesson from the Past and Some Hope for the Future:
The History Academy and the Schools, 1880–2007
David Wrobel
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
| THERE IS A LONG HISTORY in the United States of collaboration between the academy and K-12 educators.1 Indeed, history, as an academic discipline in America, began in an atmosphere of professorial concern about history's place in the schools. Frederick Jackson Turner, the originator of the famous frontier thesis of 1893, began an address to an audience of K-12 teachers in 1891 with the words "we teachers," expressing a sentiment that all of us in the academy more than a century later would do well to remember. Turner and Charles Homer Haskins "co-taught courses for elementary and secondary teachers at the University of Wisconsin," Robert Orrill and Linn Shapiro point out in their excellent recent American Historical Review essay, "From Bold Beginnings to an Uncertain Future: The Discipline of History and History Education." Lucy Salmon, of Vassar College, too, was a tireless advocate of "collaborative efforts between the schools and the academy" in this early period, Orrill and Shapiro note.2 As early as 1892, at a conference on history teaching, in Madison, Wisconsin, Woodrow Wilson expressed fears about introducing the kind of history into the schools that would raise doubts about the positive nature of the American experience. This "scientific history," Wilson explained, "is a 'history of doubt,' criticism, examination of evidence. It tends to confuse young pupils.... What we need to study in schools is the united effort, the common thought, of bodies of men; of the men who make public opinion, that is of the uncritical and conservative rather than of the educated classes."3 Not one of the future president's finer moments, but a revealing one in light of his efforts to inculcate 100% Americanism in the national citizenry a generation later and silence the objections to war of educated men and women, and a clear reminder of the essential connectedness of the schools and the academy in the estimation of that earlier generation of scholars. |
1
|
|
Further evidence of the infant history academy's commitment to K-12 history education is easily found. That venerable professional organization, the American Historical Association (AHA), founded in 1884, had, by 1896, formed the famous Committee of Seven—comprised of Andrew C. McLaughlin (chair), Herbert Baxter Adams, George L. Fox, Albert Bushnell Hart, Charles Homer Haskins, Salmon, and H. Morse Stephens. This committee was initially constituted in response to the National Education Association's (NEA) request for a report from the AHA on college entrance requirements in history. For the next two years, the Committee of Seven worked on a report that was designed to enhance the place of history in the school curriculum.4 |
2
|
|
In 1880, there were only eleven professors of history in the country. In 1884, when the AHA formed, there were fifteen full-time professors of history, five full-time assistant professors, and about thirty graduate students (numbers not dissimilar from those of a single, medium-sized history department today). As for the schools, Peter Novick notes in his remarkable overview of the American history profession, That Noble Dream, that in 1890, only three of every 1,000 Americans were high school students; a figure that increased ten times by 1924.5 So, a new organization with a miniscule membership was motivated by a clear understanding that if this new discipline of history were to take off at the university level, it would have to build on a foundation of history education in the nation's secondary schools. "Working from this K-university perspective," Orrill and Shapiro write, "the AHA and the Seven effectively gave birth to modern history education in the United States."6 The collaborative ethos was sustained into the early twentieth century. As early as 1909, the AHA began publishing The History Teacher's Magazine. |
3
|
|
History was a new discipline, and much of the work of the Committee of Seven was devoted to demonstrating that it was founded on both a substantive body of knowledge and that in learning about the past, students would develop critical thinking skills. In short, the Committee had to overcome the perception of the defenders of the classical curriculum that the new disciplines were not substantive enough to be taught at schools or universities (a perception that is very much in evidence in the academy today, a century later, and directed at any field whose title ends with "Studies"). The Committee stressed the importance of "historical-mindedness" to good citizenship. Its members offered the "four-block program" for the emerging 9–12 grade public school system, four years of history study, from Ancient history, to medieval/modern European, then English history, and finally, the culmination of this great progressive story of the unfolding of human liberty: American history. They were offering a framework for historical study tailored to the new graded system in the schools. |
4
|
|
Historians a century ago understood the importance of promoting history in the schools. They also knew that their work was part of a wave of professionalizing initiatives that affected the fields of law, medicine, and all the academic disciplines. Novick reminds us that professional historians were hoping "to establish their hegemony over the production and consumption of history at every level—in the schools, in the colleges, in the literary marketplace."7 Their reputation as professionals depended upon success in this endeavor. Just as the American Medical Association worked to discredit the practice of midwifery and have all new American births occur in hospitals under doctor supervision, so the members of the American Historical Association wanted to ensure that the historical knowledge those new Americans acquired would be determined by themselves, the experts. |
5
|
|
For more than two decades, these proactive efforts of the American Historical Association cemented the place of history in the public schools. But even in these halcyon days, there were a few troubling aspects of the relationship. While the Committee of Seven was confident in its recommendation of a four-year plan—of Ancient, European, English, and American history—for a four-year high school experience, it was less specific about what should actually be taught in each of the four-blocks. This in turn led to a degree of confusion among teachers and a rather high failure rate of high school students in the history college entrance exams compared with that in other subjects. Despite repeated pleas from the College Board over the course of decades, the AHA never took the time to offer a more precise curriculum for history in the high schools.8 Had the AHA done a better job of providing a detailed curriculum, one suspects that the rest of our story might be rather different. Still, this part of the story is a sobering reminder of how large a stumbling block the matter of assessment can be. |
6
|
|
In the wake of World War I, and the reservations its carnage raised concerning the progress of humanity, and because of the rise of the Social Sciences early in the century, history's dominance in the schools was challenged by the American Political Science Association, the American Economic Association, and the American Sociological Society. Some historians, too—such as Charles Beard, James Harvey Robinson, and Carl Becker—were enthusiastic about the application of social science techniques to human society. Furthermore, a new group of "educationists," as many historians disparagingly labeled them, were pushing a "Social Studies" approach to history education, emphasizing "social behavior" over intellectual development. The formation of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) in 1921 was evidence of the consolidation of the Social Studies position. |
7
|
|
By 1934, The History Teacher's Magazine (1909), which had, in 1918, become The Historical Outlook, was turned over to the NCSS and was re-titled The Social Studies, and then, in 1937, it became Social Education. The changing titles of the magazine, (whose beginnings serve as a testament to the AHA's commitment to K-12 education in the early twentieth century) mark the organization's retreat from the arena of school curriculum building. Novick notes that "there was a pessimistic, beleaguered tone to historians' discussions of history's place in the schools throughout the interwar years."9 "By the onset of World War II," Orrill and Shapiro write, "the [AHA] had gone from a major formative influence on K-12 history education to having scarcely any educational agenda at all.... In effect, historians had left school history to fend for itself."10 Shortly after the war, the AHA gave up "the editorial and financial responsibility for the National Council for the Social Studies' magazines for high school teachers" and professional historians largely stopped writing for them. In 1947, the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, forerunner of the JAH, dropped its "Teachers' Section."11 |
8
|
There were a few last gasp efforts by some historians to reestablish their hold on the school curriculum. Allan Nevins, in 1942, convinced the New York Times to publish a series of articles relating to a survey that demonstrated "students' ignorance of American history." He used the survey results as a rationale for wresting the school curriculum away from the "educationists." But most American historians did not join his crusade and were not convinced (and rightly so) that the restoration of a prescribed body of knowledge, much of it centered on the nation's presidents, was a worthy alternative to the social studies curriculum.12 A decade later, University of Illinois historian Arthur E. Bestor, Jr. employed outrageous Cold War rhetoric in his personal crusade to save school history from the "educators":
Across the world today stretches the iron curtain that the professional educators have fashioned. Behind it, in slave labor camps, are the classroom teachers, whose only hope of rescue is from without. On the hither side lives the free world of science and learning, menaced but not yet conquered.... The subversion of American intellectual life is possible because the first twelve years of formal schooling... have fallen under the policy-making control of educators who have no real place in—who do not respect, and who are not respected by—the world of science, of scholarship, and of the learned professions.The fifth column that engineered this betrayal was composed of professors of education.
|
9
|
|
When Bestor sought to circulate a resolution at the next AHA meeting, declaring "total war" on the "educationists," saner minds prevailed and a Committee on Teaching History in the Schools was established, and this development led, in turn, to the establishment of the AHA's "Service Center for Teachers." The Service Center, by the way, published a series of pamphlets in the mid-1950s for school teachers summarizing recent trends in scholarship, and history graduate students preparing for comprehensive exams seem to have ended up being the primary beneficiaries of them.13 |
10
|
|
Professional historians fell relatively quiet in the next few decades about the place of history in the schools and the developments there were not promising. By around 1960, high school students generally took a year of world history and a year of American history, down from the four years of history studied in the public schools in the early twentieth century. By 1985, the world history component had been largely dropped and eighth-grade American history was being dropped, too, in many school systems because, it was argued, it already received coverage in high school.14 The academy's heightened emphasis in the 1960s and 1970s on research as the primary basis for faculty evaluation pushed the schools to the periphery of historians' consciousness.15 Though it is worth noting that the AHA did establish its Teaching Division, charged in part with the responsibility for nurturing links between the academy and the schools, in 1974. Then, in 1984, AHA President Arthur S. Link (Woodrow Wilson's biographer) re-ignited the issue in his Presidential Address, calling for closer ties between the history academy and the schools, greater interest in helping shape the school history curriculum, and greater assistance to school teachers in their efforts to come to grips with new scholarship. In 1986, Link appointed and chaired a special commission on historians and the schools, which he described as akin to the earlier Committee of Seven.16 |
11
|
|
Link's significant efforts and the earnest concerns of other professional historians have combined in the contemporary period with another set of factors to stimulate K-12-college/university cooperation. The culture wars of the last few decades have been a catalyst for widespread public attention to the school curricula. Politicians, using educational issues as rhetorical props, have made school history front page news. The Teaching American History institutes were themselves born in a moment of perceived crisis at the turn of the last century as Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia and others decried the seeming lack of knowledge of core American values and institutions among the nation's schoolchildren. Byrd was echoing Allen Nevins's concerns expressed a half century earlier, and to some degree, Lynn Cheney's of the early 1990s. The consequence of those concerns was the earmarking of tens of millions of dollars each year for the Teaching American History initiative, with its emphasis on "Traditional American History," though my sense is that the majority of the institutes going on around the country, thankfully, interpret "traditional" imaginatively. University-based historians and K-12 historians have been handed a financial lifeline to together pull themselves out of the mire of their separate spheres. The lifeline has come as a result of politicians' concern over a loss of national character and national heritage and the need to save our children from the great handicaps sure to accompany their futures if they cannot distinguish President Harding from Hoover, or any of the rather similar looking late nineteenth-century Presidents from one another. But that lifeline comes, it is worth remembering, with significant responsibilities for the academy and the schools. As discussed later in this essay, it is incumbent upon grant participants to build the foundations for future K-12-college/university collaborations in times when the financial lifeline may no longer be so strong. |
12
|
|
Some healthy professional organizational competition has probably done its part, too, in facilitating these partnerships between the history academy and the schools. The Organization of American Historians (OAH), the main organizational rival of the AHA, is an active partner in the Teaching American History (TAH) initiatives, as is AHA. Certainly, federal funding has proven quite important to the leadership of both organizations. Still, to see AHA and OAH jockeying for recognition as partners with the U.S. Department of Education to promote TAH institutes is a pleasant change from the post-World War II years when AHA and the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (OAH's forerunner) seemed to be in a race to disassociate themselves from history in the schools. |
13
|
|
Now, the lesson of this brief and general overview of the history of collaborative efforts between professors and K-12 teachers is not that we should return to the recommendations of the Committee of Seven, emphasizing the evolution of human society through four Western-Civilization-centered stages, from the Ancient world to its apex, the United States—though that might actually be the wish of some of the politicians who advocated the targeting of federal funds to enhance the teaching of "traditional" American history in the nation's schools. The motivation of those early American historians, though, to make history a vital part of K-12 education, to foster intellectual development and the mastery of a wide and deep body of knowledge for the purpose of nurturing active, enlightened citizenship, through the study of history are surely worth emulating. |
14
|
|
There is another possible factor worth considering—a potentially powerful rationale for professors to want to participate in collaborative projects with K-12 teachers: professional development and professional standing. If the academy comes to realize that partnering with teachers makes professors better teachers themselves, and better historians, too, then I can imagine a history teachers' panacea in which selection as a faculty member for a teachers' institute means as much as winning a research grant. For this to happen, university administrators (department chairs, deans, and provosts) need to recognize the enormous impact of these partnerships between the academy and the schools. I think they are starting to do so. There is a renewed interest in teaching in the profession. Teaching portfolios, teaching workshops sponsored by university and college Divisions of Teaching and Centers of Teaching Excellence, the actual consideration of teaching as a factor in whether a faculty member should be hired, or retained, or promoted—all of these initiatives have gained momentum in recent years. The AHA is using the phrase "K-16 education" on its website, which suggests a renewed professional recognition of the interconnectedness of the schools and the academy. This is an opportune time for professors and teachers to take their collaborative efforts to new levels. It would be a great shame indeed if the current momentum were allowed to dissipate, as happened in the post-World War I era. |
15
|
|
To maintain the momentum, it is worthwhile for university faculty to consider a few quite obvious benefits for college and university faculty stemming from these collaborative endeavors, benefits that a deeply ingrained cynicism in the academy concerning teaching at the "lower" levels often obscures. First, working in teacher institutes reminds us professors that we are teachers and makes us more critical about our craft. Participation in teacher institutes forces us to think carefully about how we teach, the themes we are trying to convey, the kinds of evidence we use to support the arguments we make, the kinds of readings we draw on to illustrate key issues and themes. In short, working with school teachers makes university teachers better teachers. Our own college and university students benefit from our collaborations with teachers. K-12 teachers, it hardly seems necessary to note (yet the deep-rooted disdain of many professional historians for educational theory can obscure the obvious), prove to be very perceptive observers of our own classroom style and substance. |
16
|
|
We stand to learn an enormous amount about good teaching from K-12 teachers since they devote a great deal of time and energy to the examination of how teaching affects learning. Collaborative projects with teachers prompt us to think more about learning outcomes for our own students. Assessment starts to become less a dirty word than a necessary gauge of the impact and significance of our work in the classroom. Furthermore, through our work in teacher institutes, we get to enjoy the company of this incredibly motivated, smart, enthusiastic group, and learn things about our own subject matter from their very deep reservoirs of historical knowledge. K-12 teachers constitute a perceptive and critical audience that can help us work through the theoretical complexities of our own scholarship. At times, we even find ourselves writing and publishing on topics that we have always been interested in as teachers, but never imagined could fall within the parameters of our own fields of scholarly expertise. |
17
|
|
Moreover, through teacher-professor partnerships, we get to play a role in improving the quality of the very same students who we will teach in the near future. The remarkable proclivity of university faculty for bemoaning the quality of the students they teach is lamentable and particularly tiresome, when such sentiments are voiced by those who make no effort to work with their colleagues in the schools. During my twenty years of teaching college students, first as a graduate student at a state university, and then as a faculty member at two private liberal arts colleges, one private regional university, and one large metropolitan state university, I seem to have missed the much-discussed downward spiral of ability in each new incoming college class. My sense is that college undergraduates remain talented and motivated, while the memories of many college faculty are in a state of deterioration. Whatever the case, to complain about the quality of incoming students and not devote time to addressing the problem is both nihilistic and irresponsible. To get involved in these cooperative enterprises raises faculty spirits concerning the potentially positive impact of our work as teachers of history. |
18
|
|
Another inestimable benefit is that professors, if they are very lucky, get to develop their thespian sides through involvement in teacher institutes. Each summer, the professors in the Jefferson County, Colorado TAH institute put on a play, spoofing ourselves and our presumed lack of knowledge of the world outside of academia. In the play, we profess to know absolutely nothing about teachers and to have very little experience with teaching, as a consequence of our burdensome and enormously important research agendas. We are, in the play, the quintessential professors—both absent-minded and self-possessed and absolutely obsessed with academic hierarchy. Patty Limerick (of the University of Colorado, Boulder) plays an aging hippie, "tenured radical" type, full of equal doses of good karma and deep determination to maintain the university pecking order. Jim Horton (of George Washington University) and Lois Horton (of George Mason University) engage Limerick and Mick Nicholls (of Utah State University) in a vigorous debate over which of the esteemed faculty should occupy which of the chairs available on the stage—the most ornate chairs always going to the faculty with the largest egos and weightiest resumes. We always find a young assistant professor (Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke, both of Cal State Northridge, have had this dubious honor in recent years) to play the role of the over-worked graduate student research/teaching assistant, and we always end up assigning most of the faculty teaching load for the upcoming teacher institute to that student. The Jefferson County Colorado History/Social Studies administrators, Brian Loney and Cynthia Stout play themselves, deeply committed K-12 administrators trying to bring a group of wacky university faculty on board as institute collaborators and finding, to their exasperation, that a career in herding cats now seems like a highly undemanding one. |
19
|
|
This hastily arranged and largely unscripted production, I should note, is intended as a comedy. We play the characters that some of the teachers might perhaps have expected us to be before the institutes began. We certainly play the roles that much of American society imagines us in. I would hate for the play to ever be considered a tragedy; a testament to collaborative efforts that failed because professors were so mindful of their place in the small academic marketplace of ideas that they failed to get out into the larger world, where a whole generation of American schoolchildren, millions of them, have the opportunity to grow up with a historically grounded sense of who they are and how they connect with the world around them. |
20
|
|
In a recent New York Times op-ed piece on the controversy surrounding the resignation of Harvard President Lawrence Summers, John Tierney quotes historian Fred Siegel, who proclaims that "status anxiety" is the "Achilles heel" of university faculty.17 Siegel is partly correct. But we should also remember that the term status anxiety was first used by American historian Richard Hofstadter in the 1950s (when professional historians were drifting away from the schools) to explain the reform efforts of the upper middle class (old middle class) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (when historians were very much interested in the schools). Hofstadter claimed that these privileged, yet anxious progressives were motivated by self-interest to try to turn back the clock and recreate through reform the kind of society in which their forbears had been prominent.18 |
21
|
|
Historians have since refined, if not altogether invalidated, Hoftadter's status anxiety theory as it relates to progressive reform. Still, the theory may on some levels be instructive for us nonetheless. Our goal should not be to turn back the clock to the early twentieth century, when the academy dominated the schools; our purpose should be productive collaboration, not conquest. I have used terms such as "K-12-university partnerships" and "collaborative endeavors between K-12 and college/university teachers," because these terms convey the spirit of the current enterprise. When faculty approach teacher institutes with an air of imperiousness—i.e., when they view their role as that of the great expert informing the unenlightened—the K-12 teachers and administrators in the room pick up on the faculty member's attitude immediately, and are greatly disappointed. When faculty, by way of contrast, demonstrate during their time working with K-12 teachers that they are partnering in a project that has the potential to benefit all participants equally—i.e., that they personally and their respective colleges and universities have a great deal to gain from the joint endeavor—the K-12 teachers and administrators recognize that commitment very quickly and breathe a collective sigh of relief. |
22
|
|
Partnering with K-12 teachers helps college faculty play an important role and have a significant impact on society. If there is a kind of status anxiety afflicting the professoriate, then I would suggest involvement in teacher institutes as an effective antidote. Certainly, bemoaning our current status—the general low regard that American society has for academia—expressing our anxiety over it, and doing nothing about it is both fatalistic and irresponsible. To be both anxious and inert is to forfeit our role as public intellectuals. Indeed, in the early twenty-first century, we historians have the chance to be a part of a cycle of collaborative efforts similar to those which catalyzed the history field a century ago. Academic historians entered the last century on a high note with respect to partnerships with teachers. We have entered the present century on a similarly ascending path, but if we are to be more successful than the last time around, the commitment will need to be greater, more broadly shared among us, and better sustained. We need to think, like Turner, in terms of "we teachers"—a phrase that suggests a relationship based on shared respect and mutual involvement in the work of educating the public, and not in terms of "professors and teachers," us and them, or the self-professed experts and their ostensibly uninformed audiences, since such terms evoke the kinds of hierarchical relationships that are anathema to the success of K-12 and college/university partnerships. |
23
|
|
Most importantly, we need to ask ourselves a very simple question and gauge the depth of our commitment to collaborations with K-12 teachers based on our answer. If the financial lifeline (from outside sources such as the Department of Education, NEH, and the Gilder-Lehman Institute) were cut, would we, college faculty, still be firmly committed to these cooperative projects? If the answer is a firm and resolute "yes," then we have a bright future of K-16 partnerships ahead, one that has the potential to revive the study of history for future generations of Americans. If the answer is a mere "perhaps," or "maybe," or worse, a fatalistic "probably not," then we need to question our motivations for involvement and be less enthusiastic about the firmness of the foundations for collaboration that we have built. |
24
|
|
An unusually large and deep pool of funds has facilitated the K-16 partnerships of recent years and nurtured what should be a thoroughly natural set of collaborations between the schools and the academy. Those collaborations need to remain natural and essential, in the estimation of the major parties involved, regardless of the level of external funding sources. If, in the absence of such outside funding, these partnerships no longer appear logical and essential to us, then our collaborative house will have been built on sand and is likely to come tumbling down, just as previous periods of K-16 cooperation have disintegrated. My hope is that as more college and university faculty become involved in teacher institutes, they will experience the great benefits of working with K-12 teachers and administrators. As more college and university administrators become fully cognizant of the positive impact that these partnerships have on the community, including the direct impact they can have on the quality of students coming into institutions of higher learning, they too will become promoters of these collaborations. They will better understand how to reward faculty for their efforts to promote the teaching of history outside of the college classroom. As more faculty become committed to these projects, more university history departments are likely to develop Master of Arts in Teaching History (MATH) programs and will thus become more fully invested in the K-16 future of history. The lesson from those earlier cooperative efforts among the schools and the academy are, I hope, clear. And my expectations for a bright future of K-16 history education rest not just on a generally optimistic disposition, but on a hunch that the current wave of cooperative efforts between schools and universities constitute a more democratic set of partnerships than those efforts a century ago to build a fledgling history academy in part through control and ownership of the K-12 history curriculum, that the sentiment "we teachers" is becoming a mainstream outlook, not a decidedly minority position within the history academy. |
25
|
|
Notes
1. My thanks to the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, Boulder, which sponsored my talk, "Partnerships for the Future Built on the Past: How Professors and K-12 Teachers Can Together Revive the Study of History" (March 22, 2006). Thanks, too, to the Jefferson County, Colorado School District, the Co-Sponsor with the Center, of Teaching American History institutes since 2002, in which I have participated. My talk in Boulder provided the basis for my talk at the 2006 Organization of American Historians Meeting in Washington, D.C., on April 21, 2006, "A Lesson from the Past: The Academy and the Schools, 1880–2006," part of the session titled "What is Important About History-Education Department Integration and Why We Should Encourage It," which also included Kathy Steeves, Cynthia Stout, and David Blight. This essay is drawn from the talks in Boulder and Washington.
2. Robert Orrill and Linn Shapiro, "Forum Essay: From Bold Beginnings to an Uncertain Future: The Discipline of History and History Education," American Historical Review, 110 (June 2005): 727–751, 750. My essay draws heavily on the details provided by Orrill and Shapiro.
3. Woodrow Wilson, quoted in "Minutes of the 1892 Madison Conference," in Arthur H. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), vol. 8, p. 65, quoted in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge University Press, 1988), 71, another work I draw heavily from in this essay.
4. See Orrill and Shapiro, "From Bold Beginnings to an Uncertain Future." Orrill and Shapiro note that four of the Committee of Seven became presidents of AHA: Hart (1909), McLaughlin (1914), Stephens (1915), and Haskins (1922). Furthermore, they note, "two had served as public school superintendents, four had been high school teachers, and one had taught at a normal school," 729. Salmon, Hazel Hertzberg notes in her Social Studies Reform, 1880–1980 (Boulder, CO, 1981) was "the first woman to be named to a national curricular committee in the social sciences," 13; cited in Orrill and Shapiro, 729.
5. For the first figure on the number of professors, see Orrill and Shapiro, "From Bold Beginnings to an Uncertain Future, 720. For the 1884 figure, see Arthur S. Link, 1984 AHA Presidential Address, "The American Historical Association, 1884–1984: Retrospect and Prospect," American Historical Review, 90 (February 1985): 1–17, 2. For the figure on the number of high school students see Novick, That Noble Dream, 185–193, especially 186–187.
6. Orrill and Shapiro, "From Bold Beginnings to an Uncertain Future," 731.
7. Novick, That Noble Dream, 185.
8. Orrill and Shapiro do an excellent job of outlining these more troubled aspects of the relationship between the history academy hierarchy and the schools in "From Bold Beginnings to an Uncertain Future," 735–736.
9. Novick, That Noble Dream, 192.
10. Orrill and Shapiro, "From Bold Beginnings to an Uncertain Future," 747, 748.
11. Novick, That Noble Dream, 368.
12. Ibid., 368–369.
13. The quotation is from Bestor, Jr.'s article "Aimlessness in Education," Scientific Monthly, 75 (August 1952), 114, quoted in Novick, That Noble Dream, 371, and the discussion of Bestnor is drawn from the same source, 370–71.
14. Novick, That Noble Dream, 576.
15. David Jenness, Making Sense of Social Studies (New York: Macmillan, 1990), xiv.
16. Arthus S. Link wrote in his address, "The American Historical Association, 1884–1984: Retrospect and Prospect," American Historical Review, 90 (February 1985): 1–17, "Let us return to the field that we so unthinkingly abandoned. Let us speak, both as citizens and as professional historians, in the deep conviction that no person can have a full and rich life without intimate knowledge of his or her past...[and] bring the AHA back into the mainstream of the teaching of history in our secondary schools."
17. John Tierney, "Free Harvard (Or Not)," New York Times OP-ED, March 4, 2006, A13.
18. Richard Hofstdter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to D.D.R. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955).
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|