Will Fitzhugh on the elimination of history requirements in NC

Posted on February 13, 2010 by Mary Grabar

Relevant to Them
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
6 February 2010
North Carolina has proposed dropping the teaching of United States History before 1877
for its public high school students. Quite a number of U.S. History teachers have argued
for years that they should have two years for the subject, but North Carolina has just
dropped Year One.
One argument they advance for doing this is that it will make our history “more relevant”
to their students because it will be “closer” to their own lives.
The logical end of this approach will be, I suppose, to constrict the teaching of U.S.
History to the latest results for American Idol.
This is just one more egregious consequence of the flight from academic knowledge in
our schools.
One of the authors published in The Concord Review wrote more than 13,000 words on
Anne Hutchinson, who not only lived before the student did, but even lived and died
more than two centuries before 1877. How was this possible? That public high school
student (who later graduated summa cum laude from Yale and won a Rhodes Scholarship)
read enough about Anne Hutchinson so that her life became relevant enough to the
student to let her write a long serious term paper about her.
For students who don’t read history, and don’t know any history from any other source,
of course anything that happened “back then” seems not too relevant to their own lives,
whether it is or not.
It is the job of the history teacher to encourage and require students to learn enough
history so that what happened in the past is understood to be relevant, whether it is
Roman Law, or Greek Philosophy, or the Han Dynasty, or the Glorious Revolution or our
own.
If the student (and the teacher) has never read The Federalist Papers, then the whole
process by which we formed a strong constitutional government will remain something
of a mystery to them, and may indeed seem to be irrelevant to their own lives.
Kieran Egan quotes Bertrand Russell as saying: “the first task of education is to
destroy the tyranny of the local and immediate over the child’s imagination.”
Now, the folks in North Carolina have not completely abandoned their high school
history students to American Idol or to only those things that are local and immediate in
North Carolina. After all, President Rutherford B. Hayes rarely appears on either local tv
or MTV, so it will be a job for teachers to make Rutherfraud seem relevant to their lives.
Students will indeed have to learn something about the 1870s and even the 1860s,
perhaps, before that time will come to seem at all connected to their own.
But the task of academic work is not to appeal to a student’s comfortable confinement to
his or her own town, friends, school, and historical time.
Academic work, most especially history, opens the student to the wonderful and terrible
events and the notable human beings of the ages. To confine them to what is relevant to
them before they do academic work is to attempt to shrink their awareness of the world
to an unforgivable degree.
North Carolina has not done that, of course. If they had made an effort to teach United
States history in two years, or perhaps, if they decided to allow only one year, many will
feel that they should have chosen Year One, instead of starting with Rutherford B. Hayes.
These are curricular arguments worth having.
But in no case should educators be justified in supporting academic work that requires
less effort on the part of students to understand what is different from them, whether it is
Cepheid variable stars, or Chinese characters, or the basics of molecular biology, or
calculus, or the proceedings of an American meeting in Philadelphia in 1787.
Our job as educators is to open the whole world of learning to them, to see that they
make serious efforts in it, and not to allow them to confine themselves to the ignorance
with which they arrive into our care.