History Is A Great Story, If Told Right

I am a history buff despite what I learned in school.

Whatever you do, don’t tell Ms. Sobo I said that.

Judy Sobo was an enthusiastic young woman who spent much of the 1972 school year trying to convey to 11th graders an understanding of history. In my case, she failed; history class was a procession of dusty names and dates that creaked by, imparting nothing of discernible relevance.

As far as I can tell, things have not changed.

That’s why I’m not exactly stunned by the recent study indicating that American children know little about history. I once read that some kids thought Martin Luther King freed the slaves, so I’d be surprised only if research showed our students were competent in history.

In this study, the Education Department polled 22,000 public and private school students nationwide. Among the findings: Only 47 percent of high school seniors knew containing communism was the primary goal of U.S. foreign policy between 1945 and 1990. Just 34 percent had any knowledge of Nat Turner’s Rebellion, the most famous of the slave revolts. Seven percent of fourth graders were able to identify the “important event” that happened in Philadelphia in 1776.

Curious about how my own kids would stack up, I posed an easy question over dinner: Why did the Pilgrims come to America?

Marlon, who is 13, didn’t know. Monique, who is 18, thought they came with Columbus.

Only 10-year-old Bryan volunteered the right answer: The Pilgrims came in search of religious freedom. But Bry didn’t stop there. Breathless with excitement, he launched into a narrative about the obstacles they faced on their long voyage: storms, disease, hunger and vermin. He told it as he would the plot of a favorite movie, and I silently blessed his teacher. She and I obviously agree on what’s wrong with history class:

There are no PICTURES in it.

I don’t mean TV pictures. I mean mind pictures. One of the first things they teach you in Writing 101 is, show, don’t tell. But in teaching history, we too often tell - and dully at that.

For example, what do you know about the Great Depression? The date the market crashed? The general outlines of the tragedy that followed? If that’s where your knowledge peters out, blame history class.

But if you read contemporaneous accounts and the work of the very best historians (one is “Hard Times,” Studs Terkel’s oral history of the Depression), different textures emerge. History becomes as psychologically complex as Shakespearean tragedy, as mysterious and divine as biblical parable, as titillating and bawdy as “Melrose Place,” as immediate as CNN.

History is the intricate and involving story of who we are and how we got this way. If kids don’t find it riveting, maybe the fault isn’t theirs alone. Maybe we could do a better job of telling the story.

Consider: If I tell you, as my teachers told me, that America was in a vengeful frame of mind following the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, well so what? You’ve heard it all before.

But what if I tell you that it took the House of Representatives 40 minutes to vote for war, 388 to 1, and the one, Republican Jeanette Rankin, had to cower in a phone booth until the corridors were clear and she could escape to safety? I would argue that I’ve given you a truer, more vivid understanding of how the nation felt that day.

And I would argue that that understanding is vital.

The links uniting the states are deceptively tenuous, after all. We do not share blood, we do not share ancestry. What we share, at one end of the spectrum, is pop culture - we all eat at McDonald’s and watch Disney movies. And at the other end we also share certain core values: individual freedom, social equality and the right to pursue our highest goals.

Those values, as articulated by Jefferson, frame us. Everything that has happened in this country has been in affirmation of, reaction to, or violation of those values. So if you don’t know American history, you can’t truly know American values. And what else makes you an American?

Think about it over your next Big Mac.

(And by the way, for those who are wondering, Jefferson’s first name was Thomas. He was president.)

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