The Constitution, Second-Class Citizens, and the Historical Understanding of Young People

Terrie Epstein

A contribution I can make to this discussion includes a short story about my involvement in the founding of the Magazine and another short story about my current involvement in a small but growing area of research in education relevant to the aims the Magazine seeks to fulfill.  The idea for the Magazine grew out of a collaborative venture between historians and teachers sponsored by the American Historical Association in the early 1980s.  At the time, I was working as a history teacher in a high school outside Denver, and I applied to be a participant in an AHA-sponsored seminar on teaching the Constitution.  The Constitution was one of my least favorite topics to learn about or teach, but the idea of finding some compelling teaching materials on the topic, as well as the chance to get a couple of days off from school, was too appealing to pass up.  When my application was accepted, I thought I would enjoy a few quiet days, collect a few materials, and return to teaching relatively unaffected by the experience.

Instead, I heard Linda Kerber give one of the most interesting talks on any subject I had ever encountered.  She gave a historiographical overview of the writings on the Constitution over the past two  hundred years, and though I have long forgotten the exact contents of the talk, I remember seeing my own thinking about the meaning of the Constitution transformed.  I then thought to myself, “What if this kind of information were made available to teachers to use in their teaching?” and “How much more interesting and historically grounded history instruction could be for students if they learned to think about the Constitution as a historical, i.e. human crafted and contested document, which held different meanings for different populations at different times?”  It made sense to me to think about a newsletter for teachers which, in addition to including a historiographical essay to inform teachers of the recent scholarship on a topic, included one or two primary sources illustrating or extending the points in the essay.  I envisioned the newsletter as a four- to eight-page publication for teachers.  By the time my five-page proposal for a “teacher newsletter” reached and moved beyond the desk of Joan Hoff who, at the time, was the Executive Secretary of the OAH, the idea of a newsletter had turned into the reality of the Magazine.

In telling this story, I am reminded of Marjorie Bingham’s point about how far organizations like AHA and OAH have come in providing opportunities for history teachers and professors to work together and grow professionally.  I feel quite fortunate to have been involved in several committees and other professional experiences in which teachers’ and educators’ voices and unofficial votes were counted on an equal footing with those of historians.  At the same time, I agree with Marjorie that teachers and other non-University history professors are treated as second-class citizens, as somehow not as important or intelligent as those in control of the organizations at any given time. 

Having moved professionally from the ranks of precollegiate teaching to university teaching in a School of Education, I still find it odd that when it comes to making judgments on educational issues, historians rarely consider themselves ill trained or ill informed to determine what or how young people in schools should learn.  Yet when I’ve raised the issue of including teachers on the OAH Annual Meeting Program Committee, a prominent historian complained that teachers lacked the technical or sophisticated knowledge to assess the merits of new or specialized sub fields in history.  At the same time, then, that some members of the professional organizations act out of an understanding that to broaden the boundaries to include teachers or educators as equal partners leads to sound and wise policy and practice, others act out an elitism which silences or subordinates those they consider among the unannointed. 

In closing, I’d like to end on a positive note and write about a growing field of research which has the potential to influence in important ways the next decade of collaboration among those interested in improving history teaching and learning in the schools.  A growing number of researchers in North America and Great Britain have investigated aspects of young people’s historical understanding.  These studies are expanding our understanding of how young people think about historical concepts and methods, how different forms of instruction shape young people’s thinking and how particular curricular frameworks inhibit or enhance young people’s understanding of their own and others’ worlds. 

This research has the potential to provide informed judgments on questions about how and how much history can or should be taught to students at different ages and how instructional innovations like inquiry based teaching or cooperative group learning actually affects young people’s learning.  This seems to be a fertile area in which the Magazine can act as a conduit for educators to communicate with teachers and historians about their area of expertise and thereby open another avenue for meeting the Magazine’s original goal of improving the teaching and learning of history.