Why Are US History Students Taught Two Versions Of US History?
Asked by RedditorWhy are elementary-aged students in the US knowingly taught a version of US History that middle and high schools have to completely contradict and re-explain?
I’ve always wondered why so many of the lessons about history (especially US history) taught during the early years of my education (late ‘90s and early ‘00s) were based on myths or tall tales that all my later teachers would have to completely negate. Stuff along the lines of “Columbus proved the Earth was round” or “Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity” or portraying the Founding Fathers as saintly heroes with no room for complexity/flaws.
An excerpt from Redditor u/newlyfast‘s answer:
Education in the US is a highly localized affair, and as a result making broad statements about what is happening in any area of classroom education is difficult. Still, we can look to the research on elementary education to help answer this question. The first issue is that elementary teachers spend on average one hour of instruction just dedicated to history (that is, not integrated with other subjects like English Language Arts). As a result, at best elementary students are treated to an incoherent vision of history; the lessons tend to be isolated to individual events taught without a broader context.
Complicating this further is that most elementary teachers will have taken only one college-level history course, usually a survey of US history. They will not have learned about historiography or the historical method nor studied any one topic in great depth. Thus, when they get to their own classrooms, they lack a vision for the purpose of teaching history and often report lacking the confidence to teach historical topics.
As a result, what they teach comes out of what they remember learning from their own elementary educations (Darling-Hammond calls this the “apprenticeship of observation”). And what they likely remember learning are the myths of national histories (Washington and the cherry tree, Columbus discovered America, etc.).
Finally, these trends have been accelerated since 2001. With the passing of NCLB [No Child Left Behind Act], a greater emphasis was put on success in standardized exams. In the NCLB framework, meeting proficiency in math and English language arts was what counted as “success….”
In summary: history in the elementary years is not prioritized by the educational bureaucracy, likely resulting in minimal history instruction (if at all). In addition, elementary teachers lack the requisite content knowledge and/or the confidence to spend a great deal of time on historical subjects. Thus when students get to the high school years they have likely learned a great deal of history at home, in movies, in video games, etc., much may not be reliably told.
