Do you teach about heroes? Is history and historical events driven by great figures? A good historian will say no, that in fact that’s the wrong question.

But we do quite a bit about heroes in my class, whom I define as someone who had to struggle, who had to bleed for what we enjoy today. Elizabeth Bentley the millgirl, Alice Paul, Medgar Evars and Martin Luther King, what else can we call these people? Most people go through life without having to pay a personal price for their beliefs or morality. But at some point we all have exchange comfort for doing the right thing, that’s the price of progress. If my students could get that from history class, I’d die a happy man.

Wrapped up with considering history in a professional way, is the fact I love the United States. I try to get the students to think of being American as something they have to live up to, something positive, a responsibility, not an entitlement. My crackerjack moralizing doesn’t have much impact either.

Mike, Who are these “Too many [who] want to run our country down from their places of authority in the public school class room and the college lecture hall” ? Would they be the ones who avow that Lincoln wanted to be King? Or that Grant was just an average General?

Nice to hear from you as it has been much too long. I tend to agree with much of what you have to say. For me it comes down to trusting my students to arrive at their own conclusions. My job is to give them the analytical tools and a sufficient amount of documentation to allow them “be their own historian. Thanks for the link and best of luck in the classroom this year.

I’ts been awhile, but a change in teaching assignment and building curriculum for two electives has taken much more of my time than I thought it would. :/ It’s left little time for blogging, commenting or hitting the social networking sites, but I decided to “veg out” tonight, if intellectual discourse can be considered vegging out.

As a teacher in Texas, I am deeply concerned about how new standards (we call them TEKS [pronounced, most often, like "teaks], Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) will affect history education in this state. I also see your concern in that what goes on here will affect the rest of the country because Texas is such as huge textbook market. What bothers me most is this has become more of a political arguement than an educational one. Conservatives control this state, liberals are kicking against that wall and moderates are lost in the shuffle. I’m aware of only one person on the State Board of Education with any teaching experience, though I do not recall that person’s name, but, unfortunately, that person does not represent my region of the state. Neither does the member in the video.

Personally, I tend to agree with Crystal’s commentary regarding American “exceptionalism.” Sure, we’ve got warts and we’re still working to remove many of them, but the fact that, as a nation, most of us are willing to admit our shortcomings and attempt to work on those has been our best trait. Yes, there are folks who would derail this process based solely on political leaning, attitudes regarding race or some other brainless application of confused logic without checking the facts. Too often people rely on limited and/or biased sources of information and believe them to be the only ones available, both historically and recently. This, perhaps, is one amazingly unexceptional thing about Americans as a whole.

My belief is we have to encourage students to look for questions, not answers, about history. It’s the how and why of what happened in history, not the who and when, that are most important. If students understand how and why things happen in history they will easily recall the who did or said something and when it was done. This is what I see as being the biggest problem with history education standards. Explaining how and why are relegated to something we do “if we have time” after we teach kids what they are supposed to know in order to take some mind-numbing state exam.

BTW, if you want to look at the actual drafts of the new standards, you can find them at this link: http://www.tea.state.tx.us/index2.aspx?id=3643. They are at the bottom of the webpage.

As I stated in the post, I don’t push the moral claim that the United States is exceptional, though I do discuss the history of American Exceptionalism in its various forms.