The Trouble Is Teachers

A U.S. history teacher in Indiana says that she hates to teach the Grover Cleveland period -- the time of civil-service reform, the Interstate Commerce Act, the Populist revolt, the panic of 1893, and the first attempt at a federal income tax -- "because nothing happened." Another teacher, asked to ex plain the Monroe Doctrine, replied: "That was our attitude toward Europe plus Europe's attitude toward us." American history is taught badly, and teachers, rather than books or equipment, are mostly to blame. So say three Indiana University history professors who witnessed classroom performance in junior and senior high schools throughout that state and found their investigation to be "a traumatic experience." More than half of the teachers admitted that they had not read even one book about U.S. history during the preceding year.

Invented Authors. But that was not as shocking as the reading they lied and bragged about. In a trick question, teachers were asked to check what histories they had read from a list that had fictitious works by nonexistent authors scrambled with actual books: The Coming of the New Deal by Arthur M.

Schlesinger Jr., America and the First World War by Edwin N. Kaufman, A Biography of Old Hickory by Robert M. Shaw, Ordeal of the Union by Allan Nevins, The American Immigrant by Gerhard Engelmeier, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision by Roberta Wohl-setter, Columbus by Leslie H. Hawkins, Slavery and the Civil War by Harold Stevenson Robards, The Good Years by Walter Lord, and Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen. More than a third said that they had read one or more of the invented authors.-- The professors despairingly concluded that "if individuals checked fictitious books, it is just as likely that they checked real books without having read them." Only 15% to 20% of the 1,300 U.S. history teachers in Indiana public schools are really working at their profession, says the investigators' report.

They "read books, understand the nature and use of history, range far beyond the textbook in their classrooms." But "students deserve better odds" than that.

Armed with Popguns. Authors Maurice G. Baxter, Robert H. Ferrell and John E. Wiltz argue that the mess in Indiana can be matched in most areas of the U.S. Along with James Conant and others, they pin most of the blame on teacher preparation, which consists mainly of a few undergraduate survey courses in history. About one-third of Indiana's history teachers have not taken a single graduate course in the subject. "A teacher who invades the classroom with such a background," the authors warn, "is akin to a soldier entering battle with a popgun."

-- Kaufman, Shaw, Engelmeier, Hawkins and Robards.

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