Creating History Standards in United States and World History

Gary B. Nash

Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History
9 (Spring 1995). ISSN 0882-228X
Copyright (c) 1995, Organization of American Historians

There was nothing remarkable in the 1930s about the AHA's involvement in how young Americans learned history in the public schools. Since the founding generation of professional historians in the 1880s, it was taken for granted that college and university historians would be deeply involved in history education because, as Hazel Hershberg has pointed out, they "had a deep commitment to history as the conscience of the state and a concern with its role in public affairs." By the early 1890s, the NEA's Committee of Ten became the "first national committee to recommend curricula for all the high schools subjects, both classic and modern" for students, who in those days, were mostly not college-bound. Historians on the Committee of Ten included Charles K. Adams, president of Wisconsin, Albert Bushnell Hart, Woodrow Wilson, and James Harvey Robinson. From this point on, the country’s most eminent historians were involved in close collaboration with teachers of history and the social sciences in the public schools.

What is remarkable is that this long involvement of professional historians in history education in the schools came to an abrupt end with the advent of World War II. Preoccupied with building departments of higher education after World War II, professional historians turned their backs on how young Americans were trained in precollegiate history courses. Looking back from the late-twentieth century, we can see a profound irony: while the G.I. bill sharply increased the percentage of Americans who could go to college, this democratization of higher education absorbed the energies of the new professorate so thoroughly that it disengaged itself from precollegiate education that had been taken for granted from the 1880s through the 1930s.

Since the late 1970s, OAH members gradually have been dipping their toes in the roiled waters of public education. The creation of National History Day, History Teaching Alliances, National Endowment for Humanities summer seminars for precollegiate history teachers, and other opportunities for school-college partnerships have begun to nurture an important and healthy re-engagement of professional historians with the education of America's youth.

One of the main fruits of this change is a very broad and complex collaboration that has produced the National Standards for History. Hundreds of history teachers in precollegiate schools have joined college and university historians and curriculum specialists in creating them. The labor involved was enormously time-consuming and paid for only symbolically, that is with stipends that would not begin to meet minimum-wage standards. Some of this collaborative involvement came from those who made up the U.S., World, and K-4 curriculum task forces which did the actual crafting of the standards. Many more were involved in focus group critiques of various drafts--five of each--that were circulated over the thirty-two months that it took to bring the project to completion.

I like to think that decades from now teachers and historians will take special notice of the collaboration from 1992 to 1994 that produced the history standards that are printed in the following pages. Perhaps the controversy over the standards will also be noticed for a long time; but with greater perspective, historians may examine the controversy as a poignant example of the culture wars of the last decade of the twentieth century. "The rages of the ages will inform," Thomas Hardy wrote many decades ago. And so the attacks on the history standards may stand alongside burning controversies over how to celebrate the 1992 quincentenary of the Columbian voyages, how to redesign college core courses, how the Smithsonian should present an exhibit on the fiftieth anniversary of the A-bomb dropped on Japan, who is entitled to be on postage stamps in the Legends of the West series, and even what descriptives black Americans or Native Americans prefer. All of this reminds us that history matters, and that how it is organized, presented, and interpreted cuts to the quick of national identity and national self-presentation.

Teachers should understand that those involved in crafting these standards regard them as no final, cut-in-marble dictum. Rather, as page one of the preface of National Standards for United States History: Exploring the American Experience emphasizes, these standards are "a critical advance but not the final destination in what must be an ongoing, dynamic process of improvement and revision over the years to come. History is an extraordinarily dynamic field today, and standards drafted for the schools must be open to continuing development to keep pace with new refinements and revisions in this field."