Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone)

by Sam Wineburg

A sober look at a century of history testing provides no evidence for the “gradual disintegration of cultural memory” or a “growing historical ignorance.” The only thing growing is our amnesia of past ignorance.

today’s students do just about as well as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.

Complex questions often require complex answers. Not here. Kids look dumb on history tests because the system conspires to make them look dumb.

students listen to the teacher explain the day’s lesson, use the textbook, and take tests. Occasionally they watch a movie. Sometimes they memorize information or read stories about events and people. They seldom work with other students, use original documents, write term papers, or discuss the significance of what they are studying.

The topics of the history curriculum are of “great human interest,” wrote Goodlad, but “something strange seems to have happened to them on their way to the classroom.” History becomes removed from its “intrinsically human character, reduced to the dates and places readers will recall memorizing for tests.”40

“persistent instruction”—a single teacher standing in front of 25–40 students, talking.

Despite today’s hype over flipped classrooms and blended instruction, history class, it seems, hasn’t changed all that much. Over three thousand high school students in a 2015 survey reported that it was their history teachers who lectured more than any other during the school day.42

Multiple-choice tests cost us in other ways. They convey the dismal message that history is about collecting disconnected bits of knowledge scattered hither and yon, where one test item has nothing to do with the next, and where if you can’t answer a question in a few seconds, it’s wise to move on to the next.

in a knowledge economy, bubble tests mock the very essence of problem solving.

The design of our courses and curricula must be an exercise in triage, in making hard choices about what gets thrown out of the story, so that the essentials can survive. . . .

In many ways, A People’s History and traditional textbooks are mirror images that relegate students to roles as absorbers, not analysts of information—only at different points on the political spectrum.

Zinn’s undeniable charisma turns dangerous, especially when we become attached to his passionate concern for the underdog.

Bloomian pyramids imply that knowledge functions as a set of building blocks to be assembled for the purposes of forming judgments. Yet, while mastering new facts may help students see the world in a more intelligible way, it doesn’t necessarily teach them to think.

True historical inquiry must end where it begins: with a question mark.

Because many students lack basic information, plugging holes in background knowledge is how many teachers begin a new unit. But does that kind of knowledge, the sort typically purveyed in textbooks, necessarily pave the way to critical thinking?

For historians, critical thinking meant determining what they needed to know to better understand the document and its time:

Such questions, what I think of as the specification of ignorance, distinguish historians from bright high school students.

It teaches us that at the heart of historical inquiry are two inescapable Kantian coordinates: time and space. When did something happen? Where?

effort, gets locked in the basement. Of course, knowledge is a prerequisite to critical thinking. At the same time, knowledge represents its highest aim. And there can be no new knowledge without new questions. While the pyramid narrows to a point, turning it on its head opens up new worlds.

Historians’ sensitivity to eighteenth-century linguistic codes allowed them to see the document’s narrative arc,

Historians were not deaf to Washington’s religious references.

It was precisely because he knew that Americans did not believe the same thing (contrary to what one of the scientists claimed) that Washington was scrupulous in choosing language that would be palatable to a broad spectrum of religious groups.

A world without background knowledge turns George Washington into—to quote one of the scientists—“a country preacher” who “assumed that everybody believed the same thing.” In the absence of knowledge, Washington’s proclamation, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, or Ronald Reagan’s “Tear Down This Wall” speech may be classified (to use a term made popular by the Common Core) as “informational texts.” But historical texts they are not. History humbles us when it acquaints us with our ignorance.

Words, too, are steeped in history. Shorn of knowledge, we become caged by the present and turn the past into a faded and inferior copy of the world we already know. Our ignorance gladly issues invitations to stereotypes to fill in the gaps.

Kids had no clue how historians made knowledge. We wanted to change that.

We challenged schoolchildren with the imperative of the British Royal Society, nullius in verba: “take no one’s word for it.”

Our goal was to have students meet each other as intellectual partners rather than turning to the teacher as the judge of right and wrong.

50 percent of the exchanges in our classrooms occurred between students, rather than from teacher to student.

Traditionalists fear that lacking a fixed story, children will be left with a hodgepodge of shards that form no useful purpose. Our classrooms proved the opposite.

“Well . . . last year it was so boring that it was really hard to pay attention. But this year it was interesting. That’s way easier!”