Don't Know Much about History? 

When 80 percent of college seniors receive a "D" or "F" on a short high school level American history test (unable to identify when the Civil War was fought or Germany's allies during World War II), it's time to shake up the nation's history lessons.

One place to start is with our textbooks.

Because 81 percent of social studies teachers did not major or minor in history, these teachers are heavily dependent on their textbooks. And as publishers place a higher worth on "design values" such as graphs, photos, and cartoons, content in these textbooks has fallen, creating gaps in what students might learn.

For example, the sixth grade text The World contains 28 lines on the North American Free Trade Agreement but nothing on Albert Einstein.

As the written word has decreased, publishers have made choices to create space, reducing references to explorers and founders who created our nation, and emphasizing pop culture figures in a wrong-headed effort to make such texts more attractive (but thus, less challenging) to students.

In the 11th grade text The Americans, sections on the 1920s feature flagpole sitting, Al Capone, Aimee Semple McPherson, George Gershwin, Paul Robeson and Duke Ellington. As researcher Gilbert Sewell points out in his analysis for the American Textbook Council, "Andrew Mellon and Herbert Hoover, isolationism and geopolitics, revolutions in communications and electricity, medicine and transportation, speculation in real estate and securities, the Crash of 1929 - all are shortchanged in the textbook."

The same philosophy has led to classroom projects that seem inconsequential. Writing in American Educator, Sewall notes "The most ambitious of the nation's new secondary-level history textbooks, McGraw-Hill/Glencoe's American Journey - whose authors include a former president of the American Historical Association … - features a Taffy Pull, complete with a recipe and an invitation for students to relive the social event of the 1800s and early 1900s."

If this is the way high school students spend a valuable class period, is it any wonder they cannot identify Theodore Roosevelt?

Perhaps worse, history textbooks have swung toward "political correctness" to overcompensate for past mistakes. Where 30 years ago, many texts barely mentioned the importance of slavery in the United States' development, today they throw in disconnected "factoids," making heroes of little known individuals as Mansa Masu, Rigoverta Menchu and Anne Hutchinson, at the expense of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Edison and Henry Clay.

How do these books get adopted?

California, Texas, Florida, and North Carolina dictate the texts used in schools. Nineteen other states publish lists from which local school districts may choose. The others all permit local choice adoption.

Areas with local textbook adoptions often permit at least a semblance of participation by parents, although such recommendation committees are typically top-heavy with school staff members.

Sewall offers clear goals: "History textbooks should be accurate and interesting. They should record what actually happened, and do so with some drama, conveying rich details, making an effort at objectivity, and making clear to children why a person, event, or geographical detail was of significance and importance. They should explain, not indoctrinate."

Parents and teachers should seek history textbooks that impose order on the past, with an emphasis on written text. Graphs, photographs, and maps should illuminate the text - not substitute for it in a disjointed manner. Other important steps -

Review the information for accuracy, and look for texts that are narrative stories, placing our history in context.

Consider purchasing slightly dated textbooks, supplementing them with current materials. Such books are often less expensive, but have more detail and clarity than the new breed of history texts.

Finally, contact the American Textbook Council at (212) 870-2760 or www.historytextbooks.org and ask for their analyses of history texts as a guide in your school's next purchase. Their latest report, and other offerings, will help ensure that - even if history was not your favorite subject in school - your children will understand how our nation and world got where it is today.

Adapted from Parent Power! September, 2000