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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2005 > October > 12 > Entry
The war of the words over what kids need to know
I have a friend who edits social studies textbooks for a living. You know what the hardest part of her job is? Crafting the language so it doesn’t offend anyone.
Wars are really tough. Textbook companies don’t like it when one side “attacks” the other and it’s certainly too charged to say the soldiers on one side or the other were “killed.” In textbooks, “a battle occurred” or an army “was defeated.” At least in textbooks that anyone wants to sell to states or school districts.
Every school subject area has its political squabbles, whether it’s “new math” vs “old math” or the music teacher I had in elementary school who caused a stir by teaching us Beatles songs instead of traditional choir hymns.
But nowhere is the debate more heated, and more political, than in history.
On Monday this week, I spent the morning at an interesting seminar on the quality of history and civics instruction put on by the Fordham Foundation and the University of Dayton School of Education..
As a special treat, I got to meet the famed education blogger JennyD, who was in attendance.
The panels tilted conservative, so there was a lot of bashing of “social studies” for watering down history with a lot of nonsense.
The classic conservative view is that we have dropped too many key historical facts that kids need to know in order to really understand the context of history to make room in the curriculum for softball, feel-good multicultural studies. One of the speakers argued explicitly that we must go back to teaching more about “dead white guys.”
And that’s the major liberal complaint — that the tradition version of history in American classrooms has been preposterously narrow, over emphasizing the story of early American elites while ignoring other fascinating and compelling histories of the common man, minorities and women, not to mention leaving out much detailed discussion of the history of the rest of the world.
We’re not likely to get consensus any time soon. Ask any 10 scholars, or for that matter regular joes, for the top 20 most important history lessons our kids need to know and you’re not likely to get two identical lists. Sadly, that’s not even the core debate going on.
The problem is that the real war being fought in history is not over what kids need to know to be good citizens. The real fight is over political ideology and the front line is every word in every history text our kids read.
Education Week last month wrote about a Texan named Neal Frey who dissects 50 textbook pages a day, combing over every paragraph for evidence of liberal bias and firing off complaint letters to publishers and state officials on behalf of a conservative religious group for which he works.
Frey, for instance, flags the word “fetus” — he prefers a more human term like “developing baby” — and references to homosexuality, same-sex marriage or adoption. He even complains when abstinence is referred to as a “preferred” behavior rather than the stronger term “expected.”
Yes, history is a full-blown political battlefield, complete with vigorous lobbying. And left behind is what our kids really need to know to live and compete in the ever-shrinking world.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Comments
By JennyD
October 12, 2005 12:44 PM | Link to this
I agree. It was very conservative. I think the positions were needlessly either/or, as though you can’t have both student and teacher-directed education in the same classroom. No one talked about the importance of modeling civic behavior by apprehending and expanding on ideas, especially opposing ideas. I thought Jayson was in some ways the best speaker because he spoke about teaching civic knowledge in real ways. Meanwhile, check out the carnival. You’re in it.