History Professor: Standards Should Be Strengthened

Nov. 21, 2003 -- The head of the Department of History at the University of Wyoming agrees with parts of a national report critical of history instruction in Wyoming schools. The Thomas Fordham Foundation report, "Effective State Standards for U.S. History: a 2003 Report Card" gave Wyoming an "F" grade, ranking the state 46th among the 50 states in history education.

The Fordham study criticizes Wyoming's lack of content and performance standards for history. It questions the absence of recommended core content in American history, and challenges the emphasis on the broadly-defined "social studies" standards that encompass areas such as citizenship, government and democracy, and cultural diversity. "The inescapable fact is that Wyoming's social studies content standards contain neither historical content nor measurable standards," the report notes. "There is no plan for sequential development in U.S. history because there is no subject matter to be developed."

Kristine Utterback, UW professor of history and department chair, agrees with the Fordham study's call for meaningful history standards.

"We'd like to see more students entering the university with more subject matter knowledge, and the study's author emphasizes this too, especially in U.S. history," says Utterback. While noting that some students enter UW well-prepared in history, she says, "I don't think we see a lot of students who are really very familiar with U.S. history, or are knowledgeable about how we got to where we are, or why we are in conflict with the people with whom we are in conflict."

A medieval historian, Utterback says she welcomes students with European and world knowledge, too, because if they had some historical background, she and her colleagues could easily expand it into other areas.

"Students often come into history classes with no sense of how to separate their opinions and beliefs from facts, without the ability to look at things from various perspectives, including ones they might find unappealing or even repugnant," she says.

The Fordham report discusses problems of "presentism," judging the past by current standards and beliefs. Utterback says this is a very dangerous way of thinking, because it assumes that everything now is better than anything in the past.

"People in the past dealt with difficult problems, some different from today's and some eerily similar. We can learn much by understanding why they did what they did, what worked and what didn't work," she says. "No one will ever come to understand the world we live in without the ability to understand other viewpoints, and history provides an excellent way to learn that skill."

Utterback notes that "social studies is such a broad area, and there's only so much time to teach." She is concerned that not enough is being done to implement specific content in history.

She also agrees with the study's assessment that many U.S. education majors do not receive sufficient content instruction.

"It's very important to know how to teach, but it also is important to have something to teach," she says. "The better educated the students are as historians, or geologists or mathematicians, the better teachers they are going to be."

On the positive side, she says the state has been very supportive of the successful Wyoming History Day program. The UW American Heritage Center coordinates the annual contest, in which students research history topics of their choice and create projects that are entered in competitions at the district, state and national levels. The Wyoming State Historical Society and the State Department of Parks and Cultural Resources sponsor the Wyoming event, supported by teachers and parents throughout the state.

Learning history is important in other ways, too. Utterback says "history traditionally has been used to teach values, so people know what is good and what is bad. History isn't always trying to tell us exactly what happened, often it teaches us how to be good citizens."

Sheldon Stone, former chief historian at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library in Boston, wrote the Fordham report as part of "Back to Basics: Reclaiming Social Studies," a continuing project to revitalize the subject with a new focus on "serious content, high standards, effective teaching and sound instructional materials."

Posted on Friday, November 21, 2003