America’s elementary and secondary schools are failing to teach students about their shared past and culture, says Lynne V. Cheney, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Dr. Cheney’s comments appear in American Memory: A Report on the Humanities in the Nation’s Public Schools, part of a Congressionally mandated study written by Dr. Cheney and released on August 30. In it she says that history and literature are not being adequately taught in public schools. In support of this report, Lynne Cheney and Professor Steven Donadio of Middlebury College appeared on NBC’s Today Show on September 3. On September 1, Dr. Cheney was the guest speaker at the National Press Club luncheon and answered questions concerning the report. She’s also made other appearances.
The fundamental problem, Dr. Cheney says, is that our system of elementary and secondary education stresses skills rather than knowledge. By emphasizing the process of learning over content, schools are producing students with startling gaps in knowledge of history and literature, the report says. Lynne Cheney cites data from an NEH-funded survey showing more than two-thirds of American seventeen-year-olds are unable to place the Civil War within the correct half-century or unable to identify the Reformation or Magna Carta. The same survey showed that vast majorities of students are unfamiliar with many authors whose works are considered classics.
American Memory identifies several reasons for the problems in humanities education: a curriculum that focuses on skills at the expense of knowledge; textbooks that contain little meaningful content; and a system of training and sustaining teachers that emphasizes how to teach rather than what shall be taught. The report recommends specific improvements in each of these areas.
Dr. Cheney wrote American Memory after consulting with two advisory groups of outstanding scholars, teachers, and school administrators drawn from a variety of educational institutions, twenty-nine of which were on the Advisory Group on History and Literature. AHA members Daniel J. Boorstin, Librarian of Congress Emeritus; Diane Ravitch, Columbia University; and Gordon Wood, Brown University were members of the advisory group. Dr. Cheney also visited schools and talked with teachers around the country.
The chairman of NEH urges that a proper balance between skills and knowledge be restored. She writes, “A system of education that fails to nurture memory of the past denies its students a great deal: the satisfactions of mature thought, and attachment to abiding concerns, a perspective on human existence.”
Knowledge of the past is also important to our nation’s strength, the report says. “The ideas that have molded us and the ideals that have mattered to us function … as a kind of civic glue,” Dr. Cheney writes. “Our history and our literature give us symbols to share; they help us all, no matter how diverse our backgrounds, feel part of a common undertaking.”
The educational reform movement of the 1980s has largely focused on improving math and science, arguing that these areas are critical to the nation’s ability to compete in world markets. But such a view is limited, Dr. Cheney writes, because “world competition is not just about dollars but about ideas. Our students need to know what those ideas are, need to understand our democratic institutions, to know their origins in Western thought, to be familiar with how and why other cultures evolved differently from our own.”
American Memory explains that problems in humanities education began early in this century with a gradual shift away from traditional, intellectual concerns and towards practical, skill training in US public schools. In the process, history was submerged into “social studies,” a term that emphasizes the present rather than the past, while English courses, transformed into “language arts,” began to emphasize communications rather than literature.
Students in general education and vocational education programs—more than 60 percent of the young people enrolled in our schools—have particularly suffered from these changes. Students often fulfill graduation requirements in “social studies” and “English/ language arts” with courses like “Introduction to Careers” and “Business Communications” and thus have even fewer opportunities to know about history and literature than their peers in college preparatory programs.
“If history gives us perspective on our lives, then shouldn’t every young person be encouraged to study it?” Lynne Cheney writes. “If literature connects us to humankind’s permanent concerns, then shouldn’t every young person read it?” Reading textbooks used in most class rooms, the report says, were found to contain few selections from classic children’s literature—or even much good prose. Likewise social studies textbooks used in early grades contain almost no history; instead they stress “human-relations skills” and “life skills.” American history texts used in high schools are heavy with facts but often deficient in compelling narrative, the report says.
Dr. Cheney writes: “For the most part, textbooks used in US schools are poor in content, and what content they do contain is not presented in a way to make anyone care to remember it. … Textbooks are tangible evidence of how little we are doing to make our children share holders in our cultural heritage.”
Turning to teachers, Dr. Cheney writes, “Among good teachers the idea persists that teaching is about transmit ting culture. What I heard from them again and again, however, is how many obstacles stand in the way of doing the kind of teaching they think is important.”
College and university humanities faculties have not played their proper role in training and sustaining good teachers, Dr. Cheney notes. “Future teachers must be of concern to them in a way they have not always been in the past,” she writes.
Restoring the humanities to their proper place in America’s elementary and secondary schools, Cheney argues, will help students acquire familiarity with the past that they will find useful in their lives. “The story of past lives and triumphs and failures, the great texts with their enduring themes—these do not provide the answers, but they are a rich context out of which our children’s answers can come.”
American Memory
The report lists a number of recommendations for strengthening humanities education in the public schools:
- More time should be devoted to the study of history, literature, and foreign languages.
- Much that is in school curricula now under the guise of “social studies” should be discarded and replaced with systematic study of history.
- What goes under the name of “social studies” in the early grades should be replaced with activities that involve imaginative thought and introduce children to great figures of the past.
- Foreign language study should start in grade school and continue through high school. From the beginning, it should teach students the history, literature, and thought of other nations.
- Textbooks should be made more substantive:
- Reading textbooks should contain more recognizably good literature and less formulaic writing.
- History textbooks should present the events of the past so that their significance is clear; inform students about ideas and their consequences; inform about the effect of human personality; inform about what it is possible for men and women to accomplish.
- Original works and original documents should be central to classroom instruction.
- Teachers should be given opportunities to become more knowledgeable about the subjects that they teach:
- Higher education liberal arts faculties must recognize their responsibility for the humanities education of future teachers. Further, these faculties must play a greater role in the continuing education of teachers.
- School districts should invest less in mid-level administrators and more in paraprofessionals and aides who can relieve teachers of time-consuming custodial and secretarial duties to give teachers time to study and think.
