History, American Democracy, and the AP Test Controversy
July/August 2015 | Volume 44, Number 7/8
"Reprinted by permission from Imprimis,
a publication of Hillsdale college"
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/history-american-democracy-and-the-ap-test-controversy/
Wilfred M. McClay
University of Oklahoma
University of Oklahoma
Wilfred M. McClay is the G.T. and Libby Blankenship
Professor in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma. He has also
taught at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Tulane University,
Georgetown University, and Pepperdine University, and he served for eleven
years as a member of the National Council on the Humanities. His books
include The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, The
Student’s Guide to U.S. History, and Figures in the Carpet: Finding
the Human Person in the American Past. He received his Ph.D. in history
from Johns Hopkins University.
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on July 10, 2015,
at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies
and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation
Lecture Series.
Historical study and history education in the United States
today are in a bad way, and the causes are linked. In both cases, we have lost
our way by forgetting that the study of the past makes the most sense when it
is connected to a larger, public purpose, and is thereby woven into the warp
and woof of our common life. The chief purpose of a high school education in
American history is not the development of critical thinking and analytic
skills, although the acquisition of such skills is vitally important; nor is it
the mastery of facts, although a solid grasp of the factual basis of American
history is surely essential; nor is it the acquisition of a genuine historical
consciousness, although that certainly would be nice to have too, particularly
under the present circumstances, in which historical memory seems to run at
about 15 minutes, especially with the young.
No, the chief purpose of a high school education in American
history is as a rite of civic membership, an act of inculcation and formation,
a way in which the young are introduced to the fullness of their political and
cultural inheritance as Americans, enabling them to become literate and
conversant in its many features, and to appropriate fully all that it has to
offer them, both its privileges and its burdens. To make its stories theirs,
and thereby let them come into possession of the common treasure of its
cultural life. In that sense, the study of history is different from any other
academic subject. It is not merely a body of knowledge. It also ushers the
individual person into membership in a common world, and situates them in space
and time.
This is especially true in a democracy. The American Founders,
and perhaps most notably Thomas Jefferson, well understood that no popular
government could flourish for long without an educated citizenry—one that
understood the special virtues of republican self-government, and the civic and
moral duty of citizens to uphold and guard it. As the historian Donald Kagan
has put it, “Democracy requires a patriotic education.” It does so for two
reasons: first, because its success depends upon the active participation of
its citizens in their own governance; and second, because without such an
education, there would be no way to persuade free individuals of the need to
make sacrifices for the sake of the greater good. We now seem to think we can
dispense with such an education, and in fact are likely to disparage it
reflexively, labelling it a form of propaganda or jingoism. But Kagan begs to
differ with that assessment. “The encouragement of patriotism,” he laments, “is
no longer a part of our public educational system, and the cost of that
omission has made itself felt” in a way that “would have alarmed and dismayed
the founders of our country.”
Why has this happened? Some part of the responsibility lies
within the field of history itself. A century ago, professional historians
still imagined that their discipline could be a science, able to explain the
doings of nations and peoples with the dispassionate precision of a natural
science. But that confidence is long gone. Like so many of the disciplines making
up the humanities, history has for some time now been experiencing a slow
dissolution, a decline that now may be approaching a critical juncture.
Students of academic life express this decline quantitatively, citing shrinking
enrollments in history courses, the disappearance of required history courses
in university curricula, and the loss of full-time faculty positions in
history-related areas. But it goes much deeper than that. One senses a loss of
self-confidence, a fear that the study of the past may no longer be something
valuable or important, a suspicion that history lacks the capacity to be a
coherent and truth-seeking enterprise. Instead, it is likely to be seen as a
relativistic funhouse, in which all narratives are arbitrary and all interpretations
are equally valid. Or perhaps history is useless because the road we have
traveled to date offers us only a parade of negative examples of oppression,
error, and obsolescence—an endless tableau of Confederate flags, so to
speak—proof positive that the past has no heroes worthy of our admiration, and
no lessons applicable to our unprecedented age.
This loss of faith in the central importance of history pervades
all of American society. Gone are the days when widely shared understandings of
the past provided a sense of civilizational unity and forward propulsion.
Instead, argues historian Daniel T. Rodgers, we live in a querulous “age of
fracture,” in which all narratives are contested, in which the various
disciplines no longer take a broad view of the human condition, rarely speak to
one another, and have abandoned the search for common ground in favor of
focusing on the concerns and perspectives of ever more minute subdisciplines,
ever smaller groups, ever more finely tuned and exclusive categories of experience.
This is not just a feature of academic life, but seems to be an emerging
feature of American life more broadly. The broad and embracing commonalities of
old are no more, undermined and fragmented into a thousand subcultural pieces.
* * *
This condition has profound implications for the academy and for
our society. The loss of history, not only as a body of knowledge but as a
distinctive way of thinking about the world, will have—is already having—dire
effects on the quality of our civic life. It would be ironic if the great
advances in professional historical writing over the past century or
so—advances that have, through the exploitation of fresh data and new
techniques of analysis, opened to us a more expansive but also more minute
understanding of countless formerly hidden aspects of the past—were to come at
the expense of a more general audience for history, and for its valuable
effects upon our public life. It would be ironic, but it appears to be true.
As historian Thomas Bender laments in a recent article, gloomily
entitled “How Historians Lost Their Public,” the growth of knowledge in ever
more numerous and tightly focused subspecialties of history has resulted in the
displacement of the old-fashioned survey course in colleges and universities,
with its expansive scale, synthesizing panache, and virtuoso pedagogues. Bender
is loath to give up any of the advances made by the profession’s ever more
intensive form of historical cultivation, but he concedes that something has
gone wrong: historians have lost the ability to speak to, and to command the
attention of, a larger audience, even a well-educated one, that is seeking more
general meanings in the study of the past. They have indeed lost their public.
They have had to cede much of their field to journalists, who know how to write
much more accessibly and are willing to explore themes—journalist Tom Brokaw’s
celebration of “the greatest generation,” for example—that strike a chord with
the public, but which professional historians have been trained to disdain as
ethnocentric, triumphalist, or uncritically celebratory. Professional
historians complain that such material lacks nuance, rigor, and is prone to
re-package the past in terms that readers will find pleasing to their
preconceptions. They may be right. But such works are at least being read by a
public that is still hungry for history. The loss of a public for history may
be due to the loss of a history for the public.
Instead, it seems that professional historiography is produced
mainly for the consumption of other professional historians. Indeed, the very
proposition that professional historiography should concern itself in
fundamental ways with civic needs is one that most of the profession would find
suspect, and a great many would find downright unacceptable—a transgression
against free and untrammeled scholarly inquiry. Such resistance is
understandable, since conscientious historians need to be constantly wary of
the threat to their scholarly integrity posed by intrusive officials and unfriendly
political agendas.
There can be no doubt that the professionalization of the field
has brought a remarkable degree of protection for disciplinary rigor and
intellectual freedom in the framing and pursuit of historical questions. But
must abandonment of a sense of civic responsibility come in tandem with the
professionalization of the field? This presents a problem, not only for the
public, but for the study of history itself, if it can no longer generate a
plausible organizing principle from its own resources.
* * *
Consider in this regard our startling incapacity to design and
construct public monuments and memorials. Such edifices are the classic places
where history and public life intersect, and they are by their very nature
meant to be rallying points for the public consciousness, for affirmation of
the body politic, past, present, and future, in the act of recollection and
commemoration, and recommitment to the future. There is a profundity,
approaching the sacramental, in the atmosphere created by such places, as they
draw together generations of the living, the dead, and those yet unborn in a
bond of mutuality and solidarity. The great structures and statuary that
populate the National Mall in Washington, D.C.—such as the Lincoln Memorial and
the Washington Monument—or the solemnity of Arlington National Cemetery, do
this superbly well. There is a sense, too, that cemeteries honoring fallen
soldiers of the Confederacy somehow deserve our general respect, even if the
cause for which they fell does not. But these structures were a product of an
earlier time, when the national consensus was stronger. Today, as illustrated
by the endless deadlock over the design and erection of a memorial to Dwight D.
Eisenhower in Washington, a drama that has become a fiasco, we seem to find the
construction of monuments almost impossibly difficult. And in a different but
not unrelated way, the sudden passion to cleanse the American landscape of any
and all allusions to the Confederacy or slaveholding—a paroxysm more
reminiscent of Robespierre than of Lincoln—also suggests the emergence of a
public that is losing meaningful contact with its own history.
Why has this happened? In the case of the Eisenhower memorial,
it happened because the work of designing the memorial was turned over to a
fashionable celebrity architect who proved incapable of subordinating his
monumental ego to the task of memorializing a great American hero. But more
generally, it has happened because the whole proposition of revering and memorializing
past events and persons has been called into question by our prevailing
intellectual ethos, which cares little for the authority of the past and frowns
on anything that smacks of hero worship or piety toward our forebears. The past
is always required to plead its case before the bar of the present, where it
generally loses. That ethos is epitomized in the burgeoning academic study of
“memory,” a term that refers in this context to something vaguely suspect.
“Memory” designates the sense of history that we all share,
which is why monuments and other instruments of national commemoration are
especially important in serving as expressions and embodiments of it. But the
systematic problematizing of memory—the insistence on subjecting it to endless
rounds of interrogation and suspicion, aiming precisely at the destabilization
of public meanings—is likely to produce impassable obstacles to the effective
public commemoration of the past. Historians have always engaged in the
correcting of popular misrenderings of the past, and that is a very important
and useful aspect of their job. But “memory studies” tends to carry the
debunking ethos much further, consistently approaching collective memory as
nothing more than a willful construction of would-be reality rather than any
kind of accurate reflection of it. Scholars in the field examine memory with a
jaundiced and highly political eye, viewing nearly all claims for tradition or
for a worthy past as flimsy artifice designed to serve the interests of
dominant classes and individuals, and otherwise tending to reflect the class,
gender, and power relations in which those individuals are embedded. Memory,
argues historian John Gillis, has “no existence beyond our politics, our social
relations, and our histories.” “We have no alternative,” he adds, “but to
construct new memories as well as new identities better suited to the
complexities of a post-national era.”
The audacity of this agenda could not be clearer. It is nothing
less than a drive to expel the nation-state, and completely reconstitute public
consciousness around a radically different idea of the purpose of history. It
substitutes a whole new set of loyalties, narratives, heroes, and notable
events—perhaps directed to some post-national entity, or to a mere abstraction—for
the ones inhering in civic life as it now exists. It would mean a complete
rupture with the past, and with all admired things that formerly associated
themselves with the idea of the nation, including the sacrifices of former
generations. Ernest Renan argued that a nation was “a large-scale solidarity,
constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and
of those that one is prepared to make in the future,” as part of a “clearly
expressed desire to continue a common life.” That solidarity, that quest to
continue a common life—all would surely be placed in jeopardy by the agenda
Gillis proposes.
* * *
It is at precisely this point that the recent controversy over
the new Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History framework comes into play. Not
that the College Board—the private New York-based organization that administers
the advanced placement exam to American high school students—openly espouses
such a radical agenda. Instead, the College Board argues that its 2014 revision
of the AP exam has sought to make the exam more perfectly reflect the contents
of a typical collegiate introductory survey course in American history. On the
surface this would seem to make sense, since the avowed purpose of AP is to
provide a shortcut to college-level credit. But it is also a huge problem,
since, as Thomas Bender himself has observed, the introductory survey course,
once the glorious entryway to a college history department, is now its
neglected and unwanted stepchild.
The Advanced Placement exam has become a fixture in American
education since it was introduced in the years immediately after the Second
World War, and many colleges and universities in the U.S. (and more than 20
other countries) grant credits or advanced placement based on students’ AP test
scores. For many American students, the AP test has in effect taken the place
of the required U.S. history survey course in colleges and universities. This
makes its structure and makeup a matter of even greater importance from the
standpoint of civic education, since many of these students will never take
another American history course. The pervasive use of the test has had many
sources, but surely its widespread adoption is testimony to the general trust
that has so far been reposed in the test. The test has retained this trust by
striking a sensible balance between and among different approaches to the
American past. In addition, rather than issuing detailed guidelines, the
College Board until very recently has made do with a brief five-page document
outlining the test’s general framework for the use of teachers, and leaving to
them the distribution of their teaching emphases. This was a reasonable,
respectful, and workable arrangement.
In this light, the 134-page framework in the 2014 iteration of
the test represents a radical change and a repudiation of that earlier
approach. It represents a lurch in the direction of more centralized control,
as well as an expression of a distinct agenda—an agenda that downplays
comprehensive content knowledge in favor of interpretive finesse, and that
seeks to deemphasize American citizenship and American world leadership in
favor of a more global and transnational perspective. The new framework is
organized around such opaque and abstract concepts as “identity,” “peopling,”
and “human geography.” It gives only the most cursory attention to traditional
subjects, such as the sources, meaning, and development of America’s
fundamental political institutions, notably the Constitution, and the narrative
accounting of political events, such as elections, wars, and diplomacy.
Various critics have noted the political and ideological biases
inherent in the 2014 framework, as well as structural innovations that will
result in imbalance in the test and bias in the course. Frankly, the language
of the framework is sufficiently murky that such charges might be overstated.
But the same cannot be said about the changes in the treatment of American
national identity. The 2010 framework treated national identity, including
“views of the American national character and ideas about American
exceptionalism,” as a central theme. The 2014 framework grants far more
extensive attention to “how various identities, cultures, and values have been
preserved or changed in different contexts of U.S. history, with special
attention given to the formation of gender, class, racial, and ethnic
identities.” The change is very clear: the new framework represents a shift
from national identity to subcultural identities.
Indeed, the new framework is so populated with examples of American history as
the conflict between social groups, and so inattentive to the sources of
national unity and cohesion, that it is hard to see how students will gain any
coherent idea of what those sources might be. This does them, and all
Americans, an immense disservice. Instead of combating fracture, it embraces
it.
If this framework is permitted to take hold, the new version of
the test will effectively marginalize traditional ways of teaching about the
American past, and force American high schools to teach U.S. history from a
perspective that self-consciously seeks to decenter American history. Is this
the right way to prepare young people for American citizenship? How can we call
forth the acts of sacrifice that our democracy needs, not only on the
battlefield but also in our daily lives—the acts of dedication to the common
good that are at the heart of civilized life—without training up citizens who
know about and appreciate that democracy, care about the common good, and feel
themselves a part of their nation’s community of memory? How can we expect our
citizens to grapple intelligently with enduring national debates—such as over
the role of the U.S. Constitution, or about the reasons for the separation of
powers and limited government—if they know nothing of the long trail of those
particular debates, and are instead taught to translate them into the
one-size-fits-all language of the global and transnational?
* * *
We often speak these days of global citizenship, and see it as a
form of advanced consciousness to which our students should be made to aspire.
But global citizenship is, at best, a fanciful phrase, abstract and remote,
unspecific in its requirements. Actual citizenship is different, since it
entails membership in the life of a particular place. It means having a home
address. Education does young people no favors when it fails to equip them for
that kind of membership. Nor does it do the rest of us any favors. We will not
be able to uphold our democracy unless we know our great stories, our national
narratives, and the admirable deeds of our great men and women. The new AP U.S.
History framework fails on that count, because it does not see the civic role
of education as a central one.
As in other areas, we need an approach to the past that conduces
most fully to a healthy foundation for our common, civic existence—one that
stoutly resists the culture of fracture rather than acceding to it. This is not
a call for an uncritical, triumphalist account of the past. Such an account
would not be an advance, since it would fail to give us the tools of
intelligent and morally serious self-criticism. But neither does an approach
that, in the name of post-national anti-triumphalism, reduces American history
to the aggregate sum of a multitude of past injustices and oppressions, without
bringing those offenses into their proper context—without showing them as
elements in the great story of a longer American effort to live up to lofty and
demanding ideals. Both of these caricatures fail to do what we have a right to
expect our history to do. Nor, alas, will professional historians be much help,
since their work proceeds from a different set of premises.
Historians will find their public again when the public can find
its historians—historians who keep in mind that the writing of our history is
to be for that public. Not for in the sense
of fulfilling its expectations, flattering its prejudices, and disguising its
faults. Not for in the sense of underwriting a particular political
agenda. But for in the sense of being addressed to them, as
one people with a common past and a common future, affirmative of what is
noblest and best in them, and directed towards their fulfillment. History has
been a principal victim of the age of fracture. But it can also be a powerful
antidote to it.
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