How Much Content is Enough?

Here’s a fair critique of student-centered education-it takes a long time to get somewhere, if you are driven by chronology.  More to the point, the more exercises I do around thinking and speaking, the more content goes out the window.  Every day I spend on peer critiquing exercises, another historical moment gets cut from my curriculum.  To make room for a project, cut an entire unit. 

What is sacred?  What won’t I cut?  To some degree, the question begins with my own process of inquiry

In an unhealthy way, I’ve become fascinated by this Tea Party business.

There’s such an inherent wrongness to the whole spectacle of comfortably well-off white people misquoting American history in order to provide themselves an opportunity to feel oppressed—and to pretend that African-Americans, Hispanic immigrants, and beret-wearing, goateed coffee-house communists left over from the 1950s have somehow seized power when no one was looking…I mean, what the hell are people thinking?  How did they get things so wrong?  

So I guess what I’m trying to say is… to me, the place the historian starts is in the present, just to understand what the hell is going on.  And this has me thinking about the early goals of progressive educators, one of which was to educate Americans to be functioning members of a democracy (and we can argue about what they thought democracy was in the 1920s...) 

To that end, you should have some basic knowledge of the Constitution, and the origin of our rights, and the historical struggle by those left out of the original document for their inclusion as citizens, otherwise you sound like an ass, at best. 

And to be honest, in my darker moods I understand Alexander Hamilton when he warned about giving the "mob" political representation.

To some degree, I am arguing about the canon, here—what is absolutely necessary for a student to learn to understand what the hell is going on--or in this case, how not to break the country in half.  To me, you strip American history down to just the essentials—enough to get a taste for learning more, but also enough for the kids who just will never read a book about history on their own—you get the Constitution, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Movement.  Three events that are in the backdrop of every conversation going on in politics, and all of which are being horribly distorted to score points.

The beauty of it is, you can see how the three are connected, and are in fact telling the basic framework of our country’s history, or at least, an aspect of it.  And all three of them are essential in defining us as Americans!  And it’s why I hate to see the lies being spread about what actually happened—they are changing our identity!  And I don’t like the direction it’s going…

Saying that, I am sensitive to charges of bias—and smart enough to know that I could be wrong in my interpretation of past events.  So my goal is to give the kids the access to the sources they need to come up with their own understanding of the past. But at least I know they will have thought about it, considered different perspectives, and that their conclusions are based on something more than what they hear on TV.

There’ll be time for imperialism next semester, and to touch on industrial growth and urbanization when we compare NYC to Buenos Aires or Mexico City.   But a whole semester dedicated just to understanding how a marginalized group of people claimed their citizenship despite every legal and physical barrier heaped in their way has got to make you excited that you teach history.  If not, maybe it’s time to go…