History teacher Polski3 lets loose with a long rant about why history education is suffering today, beginning with the following:
...highly regarded historian, David McCullough cited the negative impact of President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" initiative on teaching of history, because of NCLB's emphasis on language arts and math. McCullough also noted that too many "history teachers" in US public schools were NOT history majors, they majored in "education" and did not necessarily communicate a "love of history" to their students. He complained that textbooks were boring the kids to death and turning them off to history due to most history textbooks being written in a dry, data heavy format instead of a "narrative format.I find much of what Mr. McCullough says to be true. However, I believe there are other factors in students lack of interest in the subject of history. I find that for most of the students entering my classroom in seventh grade, they have had very little exposure to history in their elementary school years...Trying to get the kids to score higher on their math and language arts tests is more important than including history...This is also largely due to mandates from our district office. YOU TEACHERS better bring up those damn test scores, or else!
Could these things be related? Yes, NCLB has so far put the focus on reading and mathematics. But if, as David McCullough claims, many history teachers have in fact no training in history, isn't it possible that other teachers have no training in reading and mathematics, either? Because it's very difficult for me to understand why schools now have to work SO HARD to teach basic skills. Could it be that students are failing to learn history because there's little time available for it, and that's because not only the history teachers are poorly-trained in their subject matter?
There's a reason NCLB focused on math and reading first. And if schools and teachers are having to literally give up everything else just to teach the 3R's, then something's wrong, and it's not necessarily with NCLB.
Posted by kswygert at August 10, 2005 07:40 PM