Congratulations! You’re a Late Nite Show host and you have been given the awesome ability to resurrect the dead! As a 30 year old woman filling out college applications for the first time, my initial reaction to this essay question was along the lines of, “You gotta be kidding me.”
Well, maybe that’s not entirely fair. The actual question on the application read:
“If you were a Late Nite Show host and could interview any 3 people, living or dead, who would they be, and why?”
"The Dalai Lama," my boyfriend suggested.
Okay. That's a possibility, I thought.
"Well, maybe that wouldn't be such a good idea in practice," he said changing his mind.
The smile on his face told me he was about to say something he thought was very clever.
"Buddhist philosophy is all about acquiring wisdom through self discernment. So if you ask the Dalai Lama a question, he'd probably just throw it right back at you."
Thanks, that was helpful.
"What about Jesus Christ," my girlfriend suggested. "He's always got a good yarn to tell. And let's face it, after you've interviewed him, you kinda got it covered."
When it came around to my turn, I suggested Lincoln, a choice that was summarily shot down by everyone around me because it was a subject that had presumable been well mined. A real ho-hum of a topic. Looking back on that now, I realize it wasn’t about the topic at all. It was about how Abraham Lincoln was taught in school.
I bring this up because of a debate I had recently with someone who was an advocate for cutting funding to AP American History in our High Schools. Why? Because he felt that the History framework emphasizes "what is bad about America" and doesn't teach "American exceptionalism." When I suggested we could do both by framing it as a question and having the students do their own “investigation” like real historians, the conversation turned to another educational hot button: Teaching to the test. As a former History Major and Elementary School teacher, I had a lot to say about this. But I’ll boil it down to its essence. Why is teaching history important and why aren't we getting it right?
I’m reminded of a scene from “Ferris Bueller” where Ben Stein plays a high school teacher who drones on about the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act while his student’s eyes glaze over in a collective stupor. For many, that’s history; an endless list of dates, events and names, to be memorized like a catechism lesson and then quickly forgotten.
When I was in college, I had this fabulously eccentric history professor who arrived to class one day dressed in his full academic regalia and who stood in front of the class, arms stretched akimbo, and asked us if we could guess why.
“You’re an ego maniac,” shouted one student from the back.
We all laughed.
“No,” my Professor said with a smile. “I wanted to get you guys talking about the Protestant Reformation.”
And you know what? He did. Not only was his attire relevant to the question of why Pastors began to wear academic robes after the Reformation, it was a way of engaging us and asking us to think in a different way. Too often history is looked at as something in the remote past: this happened, then this happened, and then that happened. Professor McKendry used a different approach and asked us to think about it as if it hadn't happened yet. To go back in time and imagine we didn't know who won the American Revolution; that we had just declared war on the world greatest navy and army and what would that look like from the American colonist’s side of things?
This was a teacher who made me love history. He welcomed questions and lively discussions. He gave us assignments where we could access primary source documents and investigate them as historians would in order to answer open ended questions: Does war cause national prosperity? Did Andrew Jackson advance or retard the cause of democracy? Were abolitionists responsible reformers or irresponsible agitators? Should the states have the right to ignore the laws of the national government? Was the Civil War inevitable?
The skills I learned evaluating evidence, of posing questions, answering them, writing and organizing information to make an argument, made me a better writer and a better thinker. And while I know that education these days leans towards the more pragmatic, education is not just a vocational enterprise. That’s part of it. But we are also teaching citizens. We are trying to teach people the skills that come along with studying history. I think that’s important in a democratic society if we want people to actually become active citizens.
Now, it may seem obvious that we need good history teachers in our high schools who know history to do this, however, frequently history teachers in this country are actually athletic coaches. Eric Foner, Pulitzer Prize author whose books on American history are required reading at Universities and colleges across the country, said in an interview he did with the Atlantic that when he mentions this to students in class they always say, “Oh yeah, Coach Smith, he taught my history course.” The assumption that anyone can teach history is part of the problem. You wouldn't put Coach Smith in the French Lit class, would you? Why is history any different?
Another Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Walter McDougall, in an article for the American Scholar, sums up the importance of studying history by writing, “History is the grandest vehicle for vicarious experience: it truly educates young minds and obliges them to reason, wonder, and brood about the vastness, richness, and tragedy of the human condition, provides a context in which to fit all other knowledge – like math, science, or literature – that a student may learn”
But the shift we’ve seen in the last 20 years in the way history has been taught brings us back to the tendency of teaching facts instead of teaching concepts.
So, I asked myself the other day, if I was a Late Nite Show host and could interview any 3 people, living or dead, who would they be, and why?
I think today, I could possibly write a killer essay about why I’d want to interview Abraham Lincoln, and I have Professor McKendry to thank for that. I also think that’s why I’m interested in the world around me, why I am a responsibly civic minded citizen, and why I think teaching history is so much more than learning facts from a history book.