"Education truly begins at home"

A couple of months ago my father told me about the advance copy he had recently received of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough's new illustrated edition of 1776, which he's saving for us and described as "an enormous book stuffed with removable facsimiles of various documents".

So I was interested to read The Wall Street Journal's Author Q&A interview this past weekend with Mr. McCullough. Especially when interviewer Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg asked the noted historian [emphases mine],

What do you think is the best way to get young people interested in history?

Mr. McCullough: Barbara Tuchman was once asked about this problem. She said there's no trick to interesting young people in history. All you have to do is tell stories. History shouldn't be taught as a memorization of dates or quotations, or as a huge survey. It is most appealing to anyone, but particularly the young, when you take a defined subject and bring it to life by telling the story. It's what happened to whom and why, and the fact that these were human beings just like you.

It's a wonder to me how many volumes of history -- and even some biographies -- don't tell you what people looked like, or what they sounded like. That's what everybody wants. It's in our human nature. All the great old fabled stores began…once upon a time, long, long ago, and immediately we're interested. The two most popular movies are about history: "Gone with the Wind," and "Titanic."

WSJ.com: What's the major issue with teaching history?

Mr. McCullough: The problem with education today, whether it's in history or literature or science, is us. Education truly begins at home. We've got to bring back talk about the story, about our country, who we are, why we have the blessings we enjoy and what struggles were part of that story. We also need to discuss what mistakes were made, and what noble achievements were accomplished.

We're raising generations who are historically illiterate. It's appalling. And it's our fault. We've got to do a better job of educating our teachers and not just raise their salaries. We have to raise the appreciation level of their work throughout our entire society.

There was a marvelous specialist in education in England at the turn of the century, Charlotte Mason, who wrote about how we learn. She said that history ought to be taught in a way that the student begins to understand that history is an inexhaustible storehouse of ideas. How different that is from a lot of boring dates and names and battles. Remove the music, poetry and humor from history and you squeeze out everything that touches the soul.

WSJ.com: How does that relate to your new book?

Mr. McCullough: There is nothing like the experience of holding originals in your own hands. It's a tactile connection to a vanished time and people. I think the closest thing to it is if you are in the real room where something of consequence happened, you feel it. And I think that this collection comes as close to giving one that sense as anything could.

I remember as a kid going to Williamsburg, Va., and in a shop I got a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence. That was one of the best things I had, and I hope a lot of young people will have that feeling with this book. ...

WSJ.com: What's next?

Mr. McCullough: I'm working on a book about Americans in Paris. It will cover the 19th and 20th centuries. It will be about writers and painters, but also about physicians, sculptors and composers, from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. to Mary Cassatt to George Gershwin to Edith Wharton. It's about creative ambition and the American desire to venture forth where others haven't gone. It's also about American masterpieces that we take to be so representative of us but only happened because of the experiences of those who went to Paris. I'm learning so much. It's the kick of learning that spurs you on.

Read the entire interview here.

Rewriting history? Or at least museum exhibits

at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa (via The Globe & Mail; emphasis in bold mine):

The battle's not over yet. But under pressure from Bomber Command veterans' groups and sympathetic politicians, the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa will adjust the wording on a panel dealing with the 1945 firebombing of Dresden.

"The final wording has not come out," Fredrik Eaton, chair of the museum board, told The Globe and Mail yesterday. "But we expect to have it installed by October."

Many observers warn of the precedent of a public museum adapting its texts in response to political pressure. "I am very disturbed," said Margaret MacMillan, warden of St. Antony's College at Oxford, author of Paris 1919, and a consultant to the museum on the controversy. "This exhibit was a fair one."

The fight over the 67-word panel, titled An Enduring Controversy, erupted shortly after the Canadian War Museum opened in May, 2005. A group of veterans objected to its saying that "the value and morality of the strategic bomber offensive against Germany remains bitterly contested," and to its contrasting 600,000 dead with the statement that "the raids resulted in only small reductions of German war production until late in the war."

For two years, the museum defended its independence. So did two of a panel of four independent historians, one of them Ms. MacMillan, hired earlier this year to investigate. (All historians found the panel factually accurate, but two questioned the tone.)

The veterans weren't satisfied. One in four Canadians who served in Bomber Command during the Second World War were killed, and the survivors insist on honouring those comrades' memory. Art Smith, a former Bomber Command captain and former Conservative MP, explained: "The words said that we were responsible for 600,000 dead. I took offence that we were just helter-skelter bombers. We always had justified targets."

The veterans threatened a boycott, attempted to have a private member's bill introduced, and finally got a senate subcommittee to look into their complaints. In June, the subcommittee urged the museum to compromise.

Then, Mr. Eaton volunteered to chair the board. "I thought the museum was taking the wrong slant," he said. "It wasn't right that the museum should fight with the vets. I determined to effect a solution."

Two weeks after Mr. Eaton became chair, museum CEO Joe Geurts - a dogged defender of his institution's curatorial independence - departed.

Ever since, board members, former board member and retired General Paul Manson, and the vets have been negotiating a new text. They'll continue into September.

"The museum staff and professional historians will write the text but will be guided by feelings of respect," said Victor Rabinovitch, president of the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the Canadian War Museum. "We'll find a way to incorporate the respect while remaining faithful to the historical record."

In fact, the veterans have given the museum a version they want substituted for the existing panel. But at nearly 300 words, it is far too long. Besides, one point the vets object to is true: The strategic value and morality of the Dresden bombing are contested.

No one questions the veterans' bravery, Ms. MacMillan insists. "But a museum is not a war memorial. It should allow the public to make up their own minds." She warned that the decision to alter an exhibition to satisfy the veterans could mean "whoever screams loudest can have their view made known."

Indeed, several groups are in the midst of doing just that. One, the National Association of Japanese Canadians, says that the war museum's version of the internment of Japanese Canadians underplays the racist and economic forces behind the internment; the NAJC also wants the museum to recognize that despite the treatment of Japanese Canadians, 150 volunteered to don uniforms and fight for Canada. NAJC president Grace Eiko Thomson met with Mr. Guerts four weeks before his departure.

Yesterday, Mr. Eaton said that the museum had been in touch with the Japanese Canadians. (Not recently, according to Ms. Thomson). "Everyone's knocking on the door," Mr. Eaton said.

Or in the words of Paul McCartney, "Open the door, and let 'em in, oh yeah..."

History and story: When "folklore and fact collide"

At the end of my hep cat post the other week, I mentioned all too briefly Chris Barton's post at Bartography about fictionalized versions of history in children's picture books. If you didn't notice the mention or read it then, go read it now (and not too quickly either), and come on back.

Since we started homeschooling three years ago, I've noticed that one question that comes up often in various home education online groups is "How do I teach history when I don't know much myself?" or "Which books are accurate?" or "How do I know which books are accurate?" Usually parents ask about solid books with unimpeachable research that they, often lacking the knowledge themselves, can trust. There's no easy answer beyond doing your own homework and a lot of reading before you teach your kids.

I was reminded last week of this dilemma and Chris's post while reading The New York Times article, "In [Frederick] Douglass Tribute, Slave Folklore and Fact Collide" (as usual, try Bug Me Not if you don't want to bother with free registration at The Times):

At the northwest corner of Central Park, construction is under way on Frederick Douglass Circle, a $15.5 million project honoring the escaped slave who became a world-renowned orator and abolitionist.

Beneath an eight-foot-tall sculpture of Douglass, the plans call for a huge quilt in granite, an array of squares, a symbol in each, supposedly part of a secret code sewn into family quilts and used along the Underground Railroad to aid slaves. Two plaques would explain this.

The only problem: According to many prominent historians, the secret code — the subject of a popular book that has been featured on no less a cultural touchstone than “The Oprah Winfrey Show” — never existed. And now the city is reconsidering the inclusion of the plaques, so as not to “publicize spurious history,” Kate D. Levin, the city’s commissioner of cultural affairs, said yesterday. ...

It’s “a myth, bordering on a hoax,” said David Blight, a Yale University historian who has written a book about Douglass and edited his autobiography. “To permanently associate Douglass’s life with this story instead of great, real stories is unfortunate at best.”

The quilt theory was first published in the 1999 book Hidden in Plain View, by Jacqueline Tobin, a journalist and college English instructor from Denver, and Raymond Dobard, a quilting and African textiles expert. It was based on the recollections of Ozella McDaniel Williams, a teacher in Los Angeles who became a quiltmaker in Charleston, S.C. “Ozella’s code,” the book says, was handed down from slave times from mother to daughter. Ms. Williams died in 1998.

In fact, one of the first books to suggest the idea of the quilt as a form of secret code is the 1993 children's fiction picture book, Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt by Deborah Hopkinson, who never tried to cloak her story as history (its follow-up, Under the Quilt of Night, is slightly less decisive). However, according to the Amazon page for the book, one reader's review of Sweet Clara states, "This is one of many books I purchased as a learning tool for the Education Committee of our local quilt guild. It's instrumental in showing our young people some of the history of quilting." Oh dear.

While there's certainly a place for folklore in history, it should always be identified as myth and not passed off as fact. Unfortunately, since the publication of both Sweet Clara and, six years later, Tobin's Hidden in Plain View, the idea of the quilt code has taken off as history and spawned, or has been included in, a number of children's books:

The Patchwork Path: A Quilt Map to Freedom by Bettye Stroud

The Secret to Freedom by Marcia Vaughan

The Mystery on the Underground Railroad by Carole Marsh

The Underground Railroad for Kids: From Slavery to Freedom with 21 Activities by Mary Kay Carson

Even National Geographic, which should know better, perpetuates the myth in a lesson plan, telling teachers to "Have students look at pictures and (for advanced readers) read about African-American quilting traditions. Ask them to look for quilting practices that might have helped slaves teach each other about the routes to freedom. Have the students describe the quilts they see and discuss how these long-established African quilting traditions may have helped slaves in the United States understand how to use quilts to communicate. Ask students if they think they would be able to effectively communicate important ideas with quilts."

In these books, the line between fact and fiction is pretty blurred, not just for younger children who aren't yet able to conduct their own research or know yet to question the source but for their unknowing parents and teachers as well.

Home educating parents and classroom teachers alike often prefer a "living books" approach, since real stories, especially when they're beautifully illustrated, are a wonderfully engaging way to attract and hold children's interest in a subject, not to mention an easy way to liven up what is often dismissed as "dry and dusty" history. And both home educating parents and teachers can have trouble teasing the myth from history; according to The Times article, "The codes are frequently taught in elementary schools (teachers have been eager to take up the quilting-codes theory because of its useful pedagogic elements — a secret code, artwork and a story of triumph), and the patterns represent a small industry within quiltmaking."

As Shelley Pearsall, who writes children's historical fiction, notes at the very worthwhile and comprehensive Underground Railroad Quilt website (for more on this site keep reading, below):

[The "Quilt Code"] enables schools to keep from tackling the realities of the runaway slave experience. I think it also diminishes the incredible courage, guts, and individual determination the journey required. There were no quilts -- there was hunger, there was fear, there was illness, there was bad weather, there was frequent misinformation and losing your way -- it was not a lovely journey of hopping from one quilt pattern to the next.

Mentioned just above, a solid source of information on the myth of the quilt code is Leigh Fellner's Underground Railroad/Quilt website, a "greatly expanded" version of Fellner's March 2003 article for Traditional Quiltworks magazine, and one of the few websites I've ever come across with a bibliography. Be sure to scroll all the way down on the website's main page. I've had this site bookmarked for a while, and was glad to see it included in J.L. Bell's Boston 1775 post on The Times article -- where Bell also notes that "there are many elementary school lesson plans about the 'quilt code,' despite all the serious historical questions" (and don't miss his paper on “grandmothers’ stories” of the Revolution). I'm pleased to see that Fellner updated the website as recently as last month. It includes a wealth of information, with a variety of links and the aforementioned bibliography/list of resources, including links to the article, Young Readers at Risk: Quilt Patterns and the Underground Railroad by Deborah Foley of Culver Academies; primary sources from the University of North Carolina, Library of Congress, and elsewhere; and, also from Culver Academies, a lesson plan of "Search Strategies for Researching the Lives of African Americans".

Beyond the quilt code myth, an excellent choice for adults is Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory edited by the aforementioned Dr. Blight of Yale, who specializes in historical memory; some of his other books include Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory and Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War.

In a similar vein as Passages to Freedom but meant for children is Freedom Roads: Searching for the Underground Railroad by Joyce Hansen, Gary McGowan (published in 2003 by Cricket Books), mentioned by JoVE the other day; she writes,

"While the topic is the underground railroad (and it appears to have lots of good historical information on that), the approach is very focused on how historians know what they know. Each chapter looks at a different type of evidence and assesses its value and how it would be used by historians. I only skimmed the book but it looks like it is well presented with lots of pictures of actual artifacts, record books, etc. It also deals with how historians use a variety of sources to build up a picture of what happened."

I haven't seen the book but I'm intrigued and would be interested to hear from JoVE, Mother Crone, and others who've read and used it with children. According to the Booklist review at Amazon, "the authors examine the origins and development of the Underground Railroad, with a special focus on the varieties and limitations of historical evidence. ... Valuable as much for its approach as for its specific topic." A good lesson to learn regardless of the historical event or era.

Memory is a funny thing. Modern impressions of some events -- such as the quilt code or, say, Pickett's charge at the Battle of Gettysburg -- are based on myths and legends rather than on historical evidence. The interesting part, of course, is learning how and why those myths and legends arose in the first place, and then changed over time. Speaking of Pickett's charge, Pickett's Charge in History and Memory by Carol Reardon is terrific book (and just out in paperback). Yes, Reardon is a military historian, so you might be thinking of edging your way toward the nearest exit or at least a more popular David McCullough title. But give her book a chance if you're interested in how to teach and learn history. It's hard to find a better lesson about primary sources, how memory even indavertently manipulates public opinion, and the dangers of accepting even primary accounts of historical events as truth, colored as they can be by personal biases.

Other good books and articles:

The classic mystery novel The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, published in 1952. Tey's protagonist, Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, spends the entire book in a hospital bed. Where, bored by his confinement, he becomes fascinated with a portrait of Richard III and decides to delve into the mystery of the murder of the little princes in the Tower and the accuracy of Shakespeare's portrayal of the murderous hunchback. As Grant discovers, it's the victors who tend to write history.

Would JFK Have Pulled Us Out of Vietnam?: A tantalizing archival discovery suggests the perils of historical evidence, an article by Sheldon M. Stern, director of the American History Project for High School Students at the John F. Kennedy Library

Also by Sheldon Stern, the article Evidence! Evidence! All You People Talk about is Evidence!, at the Organization of American Historians website; the article was originally published in the March 1998 issue of History Matters!, the newsletter of the National Council for History Education.

Lesson plans from the Library of Congress, including The Historian's Sources and Using Primary Sources in the Classroom

Hardhat History, a website established by Professor Tom Isern originally for his undergraduate and graduate students at North Dakota State University "in their development as historical scholars".

James (Lies My Teacher Teacher Told Me) Loewen's Tips for Teachers, including Ideas for Dealing with Textbooks, Books and Periodicals Suggesting Alternate Approaches in History Teaching, Teaching American History Through Imaginative Literature ("American literature usefully ties in with American history, so long as that literature is historically accurate," writes Loewen), and more.

The American Historical Association's Guidelines for the preparation, evaluation and selection of history textbooks

And finally, even if you haven't discovered the writings of Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died recently, this appreciation today by Verlyn Klinkenborg of The New York Times:

Where does the truth of history lie? In coups and revolutions, in wars and treaties and the chronicles of our textbook heroes and antiheroes? Or does it lie in the pulse of ordinary life, in a dailiness that looks almost hallucinatory if you venture outside it? I think of Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died at 74 on Jan. 23, as an emissary between those two versions of history. His writing life divides between the conventional reporting he did for the Polish press agency PAP — a voluntary slavery, as he described it, that made the whole world available to him — and the literary journalism that has found its way into books like Imperium, The Soccer War and The Emperor.

He was both witness and reporter, and an enduring reminder of the fact that the two are not the same.

Read the last bit here, and read some Ryszard, too.

Updated, as I'm still going through The Times (in between bouts of wrestling the basement into shape before our departure and beginning to pack), to add today's op-ed piece, "History's Tangled Threads," by journalist and historian Fergus Bordewich in reply to last week's article. Mr. Bordewich is the author of Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America (2005). Also worth reading is his original blog post the other year on the myth and reality of the Underground Railroad.

Tossing textbooks

I made a comment the other day about textbooks, in connection with the library nonsense in California where the school trustees aren't keen on library books contradicting textbooks.

I believe my exact words were, "textbooks, which with a few exceptions tend to be committee-written, dumbed down, boring, uneducational, politically correct drivel."

And then I linked to Diane Ravitch's The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, all about the deficiencies of textbooks -- she addresses those on the subject of English literature, and world and American history for the most part -- and the textbook publishing industry; with which, in the interest of full disclosure I used to work in a previous life, and which probably paid for at least the bathroom in my old co-op apartment. But I didn't have to like them much then, and I still don't.

My own experiences with textbooks, academically and professionally, have colored my decision to limit their use in our home schooling, both by not using too many and by relegating them to a supporting position as reference books, rather than relying on them as main texts. I remember sitting in a classroom over 30 years ago, well before political correctness reared its ugly head and the educational publishers started eating each other, staring at the dry dusty writing in my history textbook and thinking that I would never be able to remember, or be interested in, the day's reading. And I remember the freedom of high school, where we were finally given some good quality historical nonfiction and then entrusted with primary sources. English textbooks were even worse; you'd get a teasing, tantalizing snippet, and no more, of something good, and then something else interesting would go flying by.

I do think textbooks, the few well-written ones by a minimum of authors, have their place, especially in upper level math and science studies. One of my long-time favorite history textbooks is the two-volume Growth of the American Republic by Henry Steele Commager, Samuel Eliot Morison, and William E. Leuchtenberg (volume I, volume II), which the kids will make full use of when the time comes. And this year we are using Joy Hakim's History of US, which I use as a narrative overview for the time period, and then supplement with armfuls of good historical nonfiction and fiction, from Johnny Tremain and Ben and Me to Paul Revere's Ride by Longfellow and Sam Fink's illustrated version of the Declaration of Independence.

As Ravitch writes in The Language Police [all emphases mine],

The flight from knowledge and content in the past generation has harmed our children and diminished our culture. As they advance in school, children recognize that what they see on television is far more realistic and thought-provoking than the sanitized world of their textbooks. The numbing nihilism of the contentless curriculum produced by the puritans of left and right merely feeds the appetite for the exciting nihilism of an uncensored and sensationalized popular culture, skillfully produced by amoral entrepreneurs who are expert at targeting the tastes of bored teenagers. ...

Intelligence and reason cannot be achieved merely by skill-building and immersion in new technologies; elites have always know this and have always insisted on more for their children. Intelligence and reason cannot be developed absent the judgment that is formed by prolonged and thoughtful study of history, literature, and culture, not only that of our own nation, but of other civilizations as well.

That is not what our children get today. Instead, they get faux literature, and they get history that lightly skims across the surface of events, with no time to become engaged in ideas or to delve beneath the surface. Not only does censorship diminish the intellectual vitality of the curriculum, it also erodes our commitment to a common culture.

Ravitch's argument is bolstered by an old Edutopia online article, "The Muddle Machine: Confessions of a Textbook Editor" by Tamim Ansary, currently highlighted at a couple of my favorite education blogs, Chris O'Donnell, and Tall, Dark, and Mysterious. I was intrigued by a few of Ansary's suggested steps for reform, which many homeschooling families already follow:

"Revamp our funding mechanisms to let teachers assemble their own curricula from numerous individual sources instead of forcing them to rely on single comprehensive packages from national textbook factories. We can't have a different curriculum in every classroom, of course, but surely there's a way to achieve coherence without stultification.

"Reduce basals to reference books -- slim core texts that set forth as clearly as a dictionary the essential skills and information to be learned at each grade level in each subject. In content areas like history and science, the core texts would be like mini-encyclopedias, fact-checked by experts in the field and then reviewed by master teachers for scope and sequence. ...

"Just as software developers create applications for particular operating systems, textbook developers should develop materials that plug into the core texts. Small companies and even individuals who see a niche could produce a module to fill it. None would need $60 million to break even. Imagine, for example, a world-history core. One publisher might produce a series of historical novellas by a writer and a historian working together to go with various places and periods in history."

The Edutopia website (brought to you by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, yes, that George Lucas) has some interesting related articles, including "How To: Toss the Text", although the most useful hint for those trying to wean themselves from textbooks was tucked away at the very bottom of the page: "Explore books addressed to many audiences: college level, general high school, and general interest. These will show you a variety of approaches and provide a ready supply of entry points for your students."

Another article, "No Books, No Problem" is by chemistry teacher Geoff Ruth, who admits, "The students in my general chemistry class almost never open their textbook. My reason: The less I use the book, the more they learn. While some textbooks are excellent, most bore my students and frustrate me." At the end of the article are a series of "How To" links, for science and history.

Some more extras:

Ravitch's book has a nifty appendix at the end, a sampler of children's classic literature for grades 3 to 10; and her end notes and bibliography are a goldmine of information for parents and teachers. I haven't found her list of book recommendations online anywhere so you'll have to try your library or bookstore for The Language Police. BookCloseouts has a couple in stock now (at this writing) for $6.99.

The American Textbook Council, an independent research organization based in New York, "dedicated to improving the social studies curriculum and civic education in the nation's elementary and high schools." The ATC reviews history textbooks and other educational materials, and issues a yearly report, available for purchase.

The Textbook League, based in California and headed by William J. Bennetta (not to be confused with William J. Bennett, the former secretary of education and "drug czar"), reviews middle school and high school textbooks in a variety of disciplines, including math and science.
UPDATED to add: While I find TTL's science and math book reviews useful, the more I consider the history text reviews, the more I find they require great grains of salt.