EDITORIALS : Assault on the past
Posted on Sunday, July 8, 2007
IS THERE nothing going so well in
education that the educantists won’t
try to screw it up ? This time it’s how our kids are taught Arkansas history. Now it is part of the curriculum from the earliest grades, which is where the study of history should begin. So the young ’uns can be introduced to history, which is their own story, in the context of their own state. Later, in junior high and high school, they can expand their knowledge and horizons to world history. Think of it as how a circle expands—from more familiar territory to less so.
That way, a child gradually both a knowledge of history and an historical way of looking at the world, which might be summed up as the ingrained understanding that it didn’t start this morning. It was the Roman orator Cicero who warned that “not to know what took place before you were born is to remain forever a child.”
Only geese and fools, it’s been said, believe the world is created anew every day. Well, we’re not sure geese are that dumb, but, to judge by some of the utopian schemes we keep hearing proposed as if they hadn’t been tried and failed before, humans certainly can be.
Even a little history at a young acquires age might serve as a useful corrective to that kind of gullibility. The study of history should instill both pride and humility, each proper in its place, and an enduring curiosity about the grounds for both. And like most good habits, an historical consciousness should be established early. Which is what Arkansas’ history teachers have been trying to do.
Apparently they’ve been doing it entirely too well to escape the meddlesome attention of the kind of bureaucrats who habitually confuse mere change with progress. Because now the state Department of Education wants to eliminate the separate, specific study of Arkansas history in the early grades and squeeze it in somewhere else. Maybe in junior high together with world history. Maybe in the high school years, though just where isn’t clear. That decision is to be left to local school districts. Hey, it’s just history. Let’s fit it in any old way. Apparently the old approach has been entirely too orderly, logical and effective. It has to go.
The clearest conclusion to be drawn from this kind of pointless tinkering, always billed as Reform, is that the people at the Department of Education need to study a little history. Isn’t their “new” approach the kind of neglect of Arkansas history in the early grades that the current system was designed to remedy ?
Now the remedy is to be replaced with a whole set of ills. Some of these “experts” at the Department of Education seem to have an irresistible impulse to fix what, far from being broken, is working quite well. They seem never to have heard of Hippocrates’ advice to physicians: First do no harm. This coming change has the potential to do all kinds of harm beginning this August. Just look at the first results of this disimprovement:
In order to teach both Arkansas and world history in the seventh or eighth grades, both have to be abbreviated—or maybe an extra school period will have to be added to the school day, which is what the Conway School District is doing. Margaret Grimes, who teaches Arkansas history there, has agreed to conduct an extra class each day. But how many school districts have as dedicated a teacher as Ms. Grimes ?
Odds are that the study of Arkansas and world history will be combined, and therefore both diluted, in the eighth grade. Or maybe Arkansas history will be taught in high school—even though there may not be any history textbooks available that are specifically designed for high school students.
HISTORIANS like Jeannie Whayne
at the University of Arkansas are
understandably dismayed by the change. (“ I’m just astonished and appalled. It’s a devastating blow to Arkansas history. ” ) Tom Dillard, president of the Arkansas History Education Commission, says the change could discourage the publication of Arkansas history books in the future.
Here’s why: The publisher of a series of Arkansas history books geared to students from kindergarten through the fifth grade—at a cost of $ 500, 000 or maybe closer to a million—now has been told that Arkansas history as a separate discipline won’t be taught any more in those grades. Why would any publisher want to gamble on producing still more history textbooks—at considerable expense—if the ones he’s just published have been rendered obsolete ? What other sudden changes might the educrats have in store ?
If historians and history teachers were consulted about this change, and we suspect their reaction would have been much the same as Tom Dillard’s and Jeannie Whayne’s, why wasn’t their counsel taken more seriously ? Were “educators” once again allowed to overrule scholars ?
Sue Madison, a state senator from Fayetteville who helped pass the 1997 law that required the study of Arkansas history in public schools, protested this change last May in a letter to Ken James, the state’s commissioner of education. “Why are they messing with this ?” she now wants to know. “I thought it was working real well.” Good question. No satisfactory answer has yet appeared.
Maybe the curriculum is being changed precisely because it was working so well that the usual educrats just couldn’t keep their officious hands off it. Or maybe this is another example of history’s absorption by the amorphous blob known vaguely as Social Studies, whatever that might be. The integrity of history as a whole continues to be eroded by those who imagine they can break history down into its supposed components—geography, sociology, economics or whatever divisions are currently fashionable, from women’s history (herstory ) to Black Studies to some other favorite take on the subject.
THE PEOPLE of Arkansas should
insist on their history being taught to
the next generation whole and starting early—not sliced and diced, strained and parboiled, served late and cold, till the taste and texture have been largely lost. History can be moral judge, guide to policy, and source of saving insights when not demoted to mere self-glorification or tricky rationalization for our own heedless wants. It offers society both a unifying, common canon and encourages different interpretations of it. No wonder it is one of the liberal arts, that is, a discipline befitting the free, who must reach our own conclusions and make our own decisions. Beware any appeal that uses the phrase, “History shows us that....” The study of history seldom leads to only one conclusion or some purely rhetorical point. Lest we forget, Clio, the muse of history, is indeed one of the muses, an inspiring spirit rather than one of the brutish, one-eyed Cyclopes without perspective or nuance. To appreciate history requires imagination, an ability to transcend the present and its short-sighted limitations, and take the long view. But to do so requires a whole-hearted, even whole-souled, commitment—not just an occasional lick and a vague promise to have the young study it when they can fit it in, maybe in high school, maybe not. Such an approach is to confuse the essential with the optional.
At its best, history is a form of literature with literature’s power to inspire introspection and excite us to action. It cannot perform its function as a living presence within if it is to be vivisected into some disjointed collection of miscellaneous data scattered here and there in the grab-bag called Social Studies.
It would be a crime against the future to dismember our history as a state and people, and call its scattered, incoherent parts “history.” Which is what those taking apart the old curriculum seem intent on doing—in the name of progress, of course. Oh, Progress, what crimes are committed in that name ! Whatever the reasons or excuses for such a decision, it was a bad one, and one of the lessons history should teach is that not even government bureaucrats have to stick with a bad decision. Let us return to past practice; that would be true progress.
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