History Lessons

The continuing debate between Jon Wiener and Diane Ravitch at Slate regarding how to teach history is quite interesting.

One specific thing that struck me the other day, however, was this point from Ravitch, rebutting Wiener's claim that it is most important to teach "the conflicts":

If you don't know the central events and players—the central narrative—it is
difficult to understand the views and behaviors that diverge from the central
narrative. How can you teach "multiple perspectives" when students don't know
what happened in the first instance?

I found this interesting most of all because I made almost the exact point in an intro-level history class at UC Santa Cruz. The professor had structured the class as a series of debates about American history, and made sure to focus on the perspectives of minorities, women, dissidents, etc. But I found that what happened was that the students who already knew the history participated in the discussions, while the students who didn't already know the history were lost, because the professor spent almost zero time on the basic narrative.

Now, in fairness to Professor Yang-Murray, these were students who had, like all California students, already taken American history in 5th, 8th, and 11th grades. They should have known the basic narrative well enough to move deeper into the material. So the failure was really at the elementary and secondary level, which I think is the point Ravitch was trying to get across. You can't expect sophisticated historical analysis from students who had the basketball coach as their history teacher in high school.