Revolution Documentary vs. Classroom U.S. History

In a posted review of Ken Burns’ Revolution documentary, the author expressed how disappointed he was in his high school history class.  His reasoning was if Ken Burns could make this so interesting and enlightening, why couldn't school? 

I could write my next book just answering that question. 

Some of the reasons are ones where school is culpable, as the reviewer is implying.  The extent and nuance of these would make several chapters of my book (some of which I’ve already written about).  These are failures arising from the structure of public schooling (i.e., it has abandoned its responsibility to promote civic culture) and the low average quality of high school social studies teachers. 

Connected to those reasons, I still encourage people to read Lies My Teacher Told Me, by Jim Loewen, even though it's gotten a bit dated.  Its central criticisms about history textbooks and how we teach history in school remain true.

However, there are aspects of the difference between a Burns documentary and a history class in school that are unavoidable. 

One issue is time.  Even though it’s way more complicated than a years per hour count, doing one can give you a basic sense of the difference between what Mr. Burns can do and what a teacher can do. 

A first unit on geography of our country to give setting and context for our history takes a week. The next unit on pre-contact Native Americans, covering around 60,000 years (fortunately more archeological than historical) takes another week.  Then we can start a years-per-class-hour clock.  It ends up as a rate of about 4 years per hour.  That may not seem unreasonable, but to compare, Ken Burns covering around 20 years in around 10 hours gets a rate of 2 years per hour, twice as much time for detail, alternative perspectives, and exploration of meaning.

That's assuming we try to cover everything. Loewen decried what he called “the tyranny of coverage.”  Why not focus on selected events or eras and leave the rest out?  Easy to say, but in a survey U.S. history course, what should we leave out?  We already don’t teach a lot of what would be valuable to know.  Choosing what to leave out invites indoctrination.  For instance, standard high school history in suburban America in the 80’s, when I was a student, gave almost no attention to the labor movement or to African American history (except for Martin Luther King Jr.).  My teacher never mentioned the Trail of Tears and the textbook had maybe four sentences about it.  We sure covered the heck out of every war, and apparently, we had won all of them, which I later discovered was, shall we say, an optimistic account.  History teachers have to be careful to give reasonable time and attention to various kinds of history and all of the perspectives we have through which each has been seen. 

Another limiting factor is that fifteen-year-olds are developmentally primitive.  It’s not their fault.  It’s natural for teenagers to be focused upon matters of their own identities in their time and place. That focus structures their thinking.  Their capacities for understanding and integrating history are limited.  Of course there are a few high school students who love history.  I was one myself and I’ve taught many.  But enjoying it is different from the profound appreciation of its meaning that a person has access to later in life.  The older we get, the more we essentially understand the smallness of our own place, the links of intricate chains that comprise the human story, and how every moment potentially speaks to every other, while at the same time being unique. The author of the review I saw perhaps should ask himself how much his own changed perception is making the difference.  It was typical in my parent-teacher conferences for parents to say that they disliked history when they were in high school, but they loved it as adults.  That's perfectly normal.

However, we can show teenagers how interesting history is in a way that captures the interest of some who would not otherwise be interested, or at least lets them see the value well enough to respect it.  The identity stage that teenagers are in provides a big plus for the history teacher: They long to hear the truth.  They want to know what really happened, to hear the perspectives of everyone involved, and move away from the mythological versions of our history that they got in elementary school.  We can give them that, we’re obligated to, and it works well. 

They welcome the positives to the extent that we are honest about them: Our stated commitment to equality and liberty and our impressive material and ethical progress since our founding, how we have sometimes acted with great energy and sacrifice to fulfill our ideals. We address these things when we teach World War II, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and the women's movement. Students are inspired by the narrative in which our people have acted and sacrificed for good.

They are also eager to learn the darker formative realities of our national character. They engage eagerly when we get to the controversies surrounding who Columbus was, how there was no “first Thanksgiving,” how our founders were deeply divided in their views of how to structure and run the republic. Their attention is held in learning how we treated women and immigrants terribly and about the abomination of slavery and the genocidal program aimed against Native Americans. The students want and need to see how those horrors and other decisions we made when we acted as bigoted imperialists rather than as champions of liberty have left lasting, deep flaws running through our national character.  We tend to want to ignore and deny these things. Even worse, recently there has been an effort to bring back the savage ideologies which encouraged us to hurt people rather than to help them. We have a duty stemming from our national ideals to stop these attempts in their tracks (and it astonishes me that institutions like the National Council for the Social Studies remain silent in the face of them).

Even if we avoid going backwards (a very open question right now), the flaws that our national sins left in our character have held us back from achieving our truly great ideals.  Students need and want to know how this happened.  Disguising, burying, and propagandizing for a jingoistic, cheery narrative of what we are is dishonest.  It lacks integrity, and most high school students have very lively bullshit detectors.  The boring history teacher is almost always the one who sticks to the narratives which paint our history as a foregone conclusion of progress. They are aided by the textbooks which carefully construct the narrative that way.

What Ken Burns is trying to emphasize in his new documentary is exactly the complexity and nuance to which great history teachers give their students access.  We have indeed been great, but greatness is not always attached to virtue.  We have been great in terrible ways and in virtuous ways.  The question that engages teenagers, for whom the future is their land, their possession, is how we can go forward to increase our virtuous greatness. 

As citizens, the best thing we can do to help with this is to support public schooling and to be involved in changing it.  We need history and civics get equal priority to reading and math.  We need for the assumption of K-12 schooling to change from measurement of facts and skills to facilitation of meaning and understanding.  We need to improve teacher education and raise the salaries for teaching. We need to put teaching on an equal footing with the other knowledge professions so that even the average teacher has the intelligence, talent, and knowledge to inspire rather than discourage lifelong education in their students.