As an academic historian in an age of falling enrollments, when I should be madly grabbing at any thought that might stanch the bleeding, I am very nearly committing treason when I say that I am in no way convinced that falling scores for historical knowledge among American 8th graders has a direct tie to their capacity for democratic participation or to their sense of civic duty.
We see a relationship between national cohesion and historical knowledge as commonsensical because 19th Century and early 20th Century nationalists reached out to history as a way to remake political identities. In the early 21st Century, many people forget how most of Europe’s map was remade multiple times between the rise of Napoleon and the Treaty of Versailles, by negotiation, by manipulation, by acquiescence to annexation, and by violence. Probably contemporary Italians have some ability to recall the at least debatable vote that led to Nice being part of France rather than Italy, or that a mostly unified Italy waged a war against the Pope and his mercenaries in order to add the Papal States to the new nation. But I wager that most everybody else would be surprised to hear it. The leadership of the new nations wanted desperately to overcome or even eradicate older regional identities (in contrast to the few remaining empires like Austro-Hungary, which tried to go a different route in pursuing territorial and political cohesion) and history was one of their major tools.
That went for the United States as well, as its conquest of North America concluded and its imperial acquisitions beyond its contiguous territory accumulated in Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and elsewhere. History was also the tool that actors within nations seized upon to advance particular civic projects that favored their communities or groups, as in the case of the “Lost Cause” advocates of white supremacy in the United States who built public monuments to the Confederate dead and argued that the Civil War had little to do with slavery.
So it seems that history is important to certain kinds of ideological and social projects, and so it has been. So it still is: it’s no accident that the all-out assault on public education in general from the American right is most strongly focused on destroying existing history instruction and replacing it with not-even-close-to-true mythologies custom-built to shore up the overall political project of the right. Just as one example, Tucker Carlson’s belief that mobbing helpless people chosen for their political ideology is “not how white people fight” is just plain factually wrong in historical context, including quite recent history. It’s precisely how white people fought against the civil rights movement, for example; it’s precisely how people got lynched throughout the 20th Century. The Hard Hat Riot wasn’t a group of individual white men challenging individual protesters to a fistfight out in the parking lot.
The problem is that it’s not clear to me what the kind of truthful, well-researched, relatively neutral history that 8th graders were tested on actually does in civic life or in relationship to democratic participation.
I think social science, including history, is abstractly “good to think” in terms of understanding the world, and that quality seems important for evaluating government, community, self-interest, policy and so on. So in that sense it does matter and in that sense it’s very important to teach history. Social science that is purely presentist and ahistorical is intellectually crippled, to the point of being actually false in ways that might be just as dangerous as the highly ideological mythologies preferred by ethnonationalist conservatives, dangerous because that’s the kind of social science that is used to craft policy interventions that fail precisely because they didn’t consider relevant historical information, which then leads to public disillusionment with policy and government altogether.
But if you look at the five sample questions that were on the 8th grade exam as reproduced in the New York Times, it gets a little harder to jump from “you ought to know this” to “you will be a better democratic citizen”. Henry Hudson was looking for a water trade route to Asia, not land for sugar plantations or religious freedom. But there were other Europeans of his rough vintage looking for those goals. The Bill of Rights doesn’t guarantee the right to vote, peculiarly, nor a right to health care or public education, just right to trial by jury. But an 8th grader might feel a bit tricked by the right to vote answer (it matters! but it’s complicated!) and might want to talk a bit about why the Constitution doesn’t promise those other things, but also why it matters that it doesn’t. Washington recommended neutrality, but nobody really paid attention to him in that respect even in the 19th Century, and his recommendation has only mattered in the way that “city on a hill” matters, as something to reference in a political speech, usually insincerely. Black Americans got more access to education in Reconstruction, but maybe the more pertinent things to know about Reconstruction are less recollected now—and less to the credit of the America that followed Reconstruction. The question on Prohibition adroitly mixes the aftermath of Prohibition with its causal beginnings in a way that almost feels designed to fool an 8th grader (or maybe your average adult), but why? What comes of an 8th grader knowing one of the causal roots of Prohibition, and how does that track to their participation in democracy? I suppose you could say: Ah, that is a lesson from history, watch out when you set out to use laws to enforce moral principles, it doesn’t turn out well. Only that’s arguably too simple by far as an understanding of Prohibition, and it’s a lesson that the United States in any era, with any level of knowledge of history, has failed repeatedly.
That’s part of the problem here: it’s hard to say that the points where American 8th graders scored higher on those tests were points where democracy functioned notably better in terms of that level of retail politics or decision-making. You could argue that the country was further away from civil war or partisan division, but how does that derive exactly from knowing more American history, where brutal partisan division has been recurrent?
I think more to the point that if there is a kind of knowledge that 8th graders might gain which would track towards participation, dialogue and democratic practice, I suspect it starts with something other than those kinds of context-less factual questions that seem like a better fit for winning Jeopardy! than working within community. The broad themes of American history matter a lot to the arts of community life and democratic participation, mind you. I want 8th graders to know those, but I do not think those themes rise from a foundation of knowing what Henry Hudson’s voyagers were for or recognizing a specific 19th Century point of greater Black inclusion into education (particularly when that point is separated from a wider history of public education in American history in general).
If knowledge about those themes help (and is grounded by some sense of specificity of facts and chronology) it is because that leads to the real heart of democratic life: lifting up people and their concerns where those are excluded from the general life of the body politic, defending the public sphere and public goods as a necessary precondition of a democracy, spending the effort to understand people as they are and as they might wish to be. It involves figuring out who is here for the democracy and who is here to evade or destroy it. History is only one of the arts that can lead to that ethic of participation and negotiation within community; I know there are many other roads there. When history helps most, it is not because of names and dates, but because of the way it makes certain kinds of empathy and imagination possible.
You can’t test that on multiple choice, so I am uncertain about whether 8th graders are losing it—or whether we’ve had it in fulsome measure before.
Image credit: By General Services Administration. National Archives and Records Service. Office of Presidential Libraries. Office of Presidential Papers. (01/20/1969 - ca. 12/1974) - National Archives - Online Public Access, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31921154
thoughtful and well-written, thank you