Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone)

WHY LEARN HISTORY (WHEN IT’S ALREADY ON YOUR PHONE)

Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone)

Sam Wineburg

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-35718-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-35721-8 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-35735-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226357355.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wineburg, Samuel S., author.

Title: Why learn history (when it’s already on your phone) / Sam Wineburg.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018013233 | ISBN 9780226357188 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226357218 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226357355 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: United States—History—Study and teaching—Technological innovations—United States. | United States—History—Study and teaching—United States. | Education—Effect of technological innovations on—United States. | Internet and education—United States. | Internet in education—United States. | Educational tests and measurements—United States.

Classification: LCC E175.8 .W57 2018 | DDC 973.007—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018013233

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Lee,

without whom none of this would have happened

Contents

Introduction

PART 1: OUR CURRENT PLIGHT

1  Crazy for History

2  Obituary for a Billion Dollars

3  Committing Zinns

PART 2: HISTORICAL THINKING ≠ AN AMAZING MEMORY

4  Turning Bloom’s Taxonomy on Its Head

5  What Did George Think?

PART 3: THINKING HISTORICALLY IN A DIGITAL AGE

6  Changing History . . . One Classroom at a Time

7  Why Google Can’t Save Us

PART 4: CONCLUSION: HISTORICAL HOPE

8  Famous Americans: The Changing Pantheon of American Heroes

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

In October 2010 the Washington Post broke a story about a fourth-grade textbook called Our Virginia, Past and Present. The book describes the role that African Americans played in the Civil War. If you are a movie aficionado and have seen Glory and know the story of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry and the 180,000 African Americans who served the Union—constituting over 10 percent of the fighting force—you might expect that to be the focus. Wrong. Our Virginia, Past and Present presents Virginia’s fourth-graders with some questionable historical information: Thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson.¹ For this statement to be true, it would have to have occurred at the height of the Civil War, since Thomas Stonewall Jackson died by friendly fire from the Eighteenth North Carolina Infantry Regiment on May 10, 1863.

It has long been known that the Confederate army forced slaves into service as cooks and laborers who provided backup for weapons-bearing troops. We know of dozens of cases like this. We even have some scattered photographs of slaves suited up in uniform sitting next to their masters. But that’s not what we’re talking about. We are talking about the formal mustering of thousands of black soldiers under Jackson alone and, by extension, thousands more under other generals, who trained them in weaponry, organized them into battalions, and taught them to fight for the South. We are talking about enslaved black Americans voluntarily risking their lives so that they could remain enslaved.

Common sense balks at these claims. The only document we have from the Confederacy about drafting African American soldiers comes in the waning days of the war, a last-ditch effort less than three weeks before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. If thousands of blacks were already bearing arms for the Confederacy, the South would not have had to enact General Orders #14 on March 23, 1865, to try to draft black soldiers to the South’s cause. Even this late in the war, the proposal was so controversial that its authors felt compelled to issue a disclaimer: Nothing in this act shall be construed to authorize a change in the relation which the said slaves shall bear toward their owners.²

Where would Our Virginia, Past and Present find support for a claim rejected by every reputable Civil War historian we could think of?³ There’s no documentation for claims that so contravene common sense and, I might add, human nature. What would slaves be fighting for—their right to remain in chains? When queried about her sources, author Joy Masoff told the Washington Post that she conducted her research . . . on the Internet. Her publisher, Five Ponds Press, sent the Post the links that Masoff consulted, some of which led to the website of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, a patriotic, historical and educational organization, founded in 1896, dedicated to honoring the sacrifices of the Confederate soldier and sailor and to preserving Southern Culture.⁴

Our first reaction might be shock at Ms. Masoff’s carelessness. And it’s unfortunate that her assertions ended up in a book for schoolchildren. However, I want to suggest something different. I want to consider the possibility that Joy Masoff is not so different from you or me.

We live in an age when going to the library means turning on our laptops and making sure we have a wireless connection. Being on the Web and searching for information is radically different from how anyone learned to do research a generation ago. In those days of yore, libraries and archives represented quiet stability. I was eleven when I engaged in my first act of library research (a report on the Bermuda Triangle assigned by my incomparable sixth-grade teacher, Diane Abbey). I took a city bus to an imposing building with Corinthian columns in my hometown of Utica, New York. In hushed tones, the librarian revealed to me the card catalog, bestowed upon me a stubby, eraser-less pencil, and taught me to write down cryptic strings of numbers that sent me deep into the stacks. Obviously, it was never the case that just because something was printed meant that it was true. Mrs. Abbey taught us that in 1969. At the same time, we often ceded authority to established figures. We relied on them to make sure that what we read was accurate, that it had gone through rounds of criticism before it met our eyes. Only a small number of us were published authors. Most of us consumed information others had created.

The reality we inhabit now is very different. The Internet has obliterated authority. You need no one’s permission to create a website. You need no hall pass to put up a YouTube video. You need no one’s stamp of approval to post a picture on Instagram. Tweet to your heart’s content—just look at the president. Go ahead—be an author! What determines whether you go viral is not the blessing from some academic egghead, but from the digital mob.⁵ In our Google-drenched society, the most critical question we face is not how to find information. Our browser does a great job. We’re bombarded by stuff. But what do we do once we have it? Digital snake oil salesmen compete with reliable sources for our allegiance. Can we tell the difference? A recent national survey suggests not.⁶

Between January 2015 and June 2016, my research team tested students in twelve states and analyzed 7,804 responses. Our exercises measured online civic reasoning, students’ ability to judge the information that streams across their smartphones, tablets, and computers. At each level—middle school, high school, and college—we encountered a stunning and dismaying consistency. Young people’s ability to reason about information found on the Internet can be summed up in a single word: Bleak.

At the middle school level, 82 percent of students couldn’t distinguish between an ad and a news story. Almost 70 percent couldn’t explain why they might question an article written by a bank executive about millennials’ need for fiscal advice. Despite their adeptness with social media, three-quarters of high school students missed the significance of the blue checkmark showing that an account was verified by Facebook. Over 30 percent thought a fake news post was more trustworthy than a verified one. Viewing a screenshot of nuclear flowers supposedly taken near the site of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, four in ten considered it to be strong evidence of environmental damage, even though there was nothing in the picture to indicate that it had been taken near the site—or even in Japan.

At the college level, students struggled mightily when confronted with a site that hid its backers. We sent undergrads to MinimumWage.com, a project of the Employment Policies Institute, which styles itself as a nonprofit organization that sponsors nonpartisan research. Less than 10 percent of college students were able to suss out that Employment Policies Institute was a front group for a DC lobbyist or, as Salon’s headline put it, Industry P.R. Firm Poses as Think Tank! Searching Employment Policies Institute with the word funding turns up the Salon article along with a string of other exposés.⁷ Most students never moved beyond the site itself.

It’s not just the students who are in trouble. We all are. If you think I’m an alarmist, consider what happened in Rialto, California, a community outside of San Bernardino. Middle school teachers created an exam inspired by the new Common Core State Standards, an educational reform effort adopted by forty-two states and the District of Columbia.⁸ Teachers surfed the Web and culled a set of documents they believed made credible arguments, each representing a different position on a historical controversy. The issue under debate was the Holocaust. Students were given a set of documents and told to write an essay arguing whether the Holocaust was real or whether it was a propaganda tool concocted by world Jewry for political and monetary gain.⁹ One of the credible documents handed to students came from biblebelievers.com.au, an anti-Semitic Australian website.¹⁰ According to Is the Holocaust a Hoax? The Diary of Anne Frank was a fake; pictures of piled-up corpses were actually murdered Germans, not Jews; and there are compelling reasons [why the] so-called Holocaust never happened. Many students found this document the most convincing. "There was no evidence or prove [sic] that there were gas chambers, wrote a student who also needed work on spelling. With the evidence that was given to me, it clearly was obvious, and I wouldn’t know why anyone would think otherwise, wrote another. A third asserted, I believe the event was a fake, according to source 2, the event was exhaggerated [sic]. I felt that was strong enogh [sic] evidence to persuade me the event was a hoax. This last essay earned 23 out of 30 points. The teacher commented, You did well using evidence to support your claim.¹¹ When the story got out, the Rialto school board held emergency meetings. They ordered teachers to undergo sensitivity training" at Los Angeles’s Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance, the presumption being that this assignment came from an animus toward Jews and the teachers needed prejudice reduction.¹²

I think this is a gross misdiagnosis of the problem. There’s no evidence that these teachers were particularly racist or prejudiced or bigoted. I doubt they needed an Rx for sensitivity training. I believe their sin is that they, too, were overwhelmed by what the Internet spews, and they regrettably put a spurious document on the same footing as legitimate historical evidence. My hunch is that they would’ve come up with a similar assignment had the topic been black Confederates or any number of historical issues where fake sources crowd out the real thing.

These teachers—like their students, like Joy Masoff, like us—are living in an age where changes in how information is created and disseminated outpaces our ability to keep up. The Internet teems with made-to-order history by pseudo-scholars who invent footnotes and Photoshop images to shore up fraudulent claims.¹³ We are spinning in a moment when the tools we have invented are handling us—not the other way around. Throw in for good measure the Common Core and the scant professional development that teachers received to implement it, and you have the recipe for a perfect storm. That’s what happened in Rialto. A perfect storm with all the ingredients amply supplied by the Internet.

Welcome to the chilling future of learning the past, where not just our students but our teachers and textbook authors fall victim to fake history. Back in the analog Stone Age, information literacy meant learning to decipher the hieroglyphics of the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature. The challenge then was how to locate information. Gasping for air under an information overload, we face a different question: What information should be believed? We are woefully unprepared to answer. Instead of teaching the skills needed to navigate this digital free-for-all, our educational system trudges along doing the same thing but expecting a different result. Not that long ago, if you wanted to examine George Washington’s letters, you’d have to fly to Washington, DC, and curry favor with the Library of Congress archivist. Today, sitting at the kitchen table, twelve-year-olds can be inside the Washington papers in a few clicks. But in school, these same twelve-year-olds take tests on minutiae accessed more quickly on their iPhones than retrieved from memory.

An exaggeration? Sharpen your pencil and identify the achievements of Gabriel Prosser and Benjamin Gitlow. Prosser fomented a failed slave revolt in 1800. Gitlow published a socialist newsletter and was convicted under New York’s Criminal Anarchy Law in 1920. Few of us could say anything intelligent—forget intelligent, anything—about either. Yet both names appear on a test of historical facts given to high school students, the National Assessment of Educational Progress.¹⁴ That’s right, Educational Progress.

Our read-the-chapter-and-answer-the-questions-in-the-back pedagogy has a familiar coziness, but it exacts a heavy price. Teaching students to separate fact from fiction by reading textbook narratives purged of ambiguity is akin to preparing a swimmer who’s never ventured outside a wading pool to navigate the torrents of a raging sea. Facing waves of claim and counterclaim (that is, the world outside of school), current practice prepares today’s students to drown. And they do so in droves. A week after the story broke about Rialto, I gave a talk at a large state university. My presentation was in one of those old-style amphitheater lecture halls, where the professor stands in the orchestra pit and looks up at rows of students. I peered out at a sea of faces partially obscured by open laptops. When I told the story about middle school Holocaust deniers, the students gasped. Then I projected the web page for the Hitler Historical Museum, which claimed to be a non-biased, non-profit museum devoted to the study and preservation of the world history.¹⁵ When I asked, How many of you use the Internet for research? every hand went up. Keep ’em up if you can come down here and in one click show me who owns this site.¹⁶ Like the wave at a sporting event, hands fluttered down (including those of the bemused faculty in the front row). These backward-baseball-hat-wearing college students—probably grazing Facebook, Twitter, and ESPN as I was talking—were rendered clickless.

Technology has left no part of modern life untouched. Yet in the midst of these transformations, school, and what we teach there, remains stuck in the past. My book sheds light on how we got ourselves into this mess and what we might do to get out of it. The following essays are organized in four sections. The three chapters in part 1 describe our current plight. Chapter 1 describes the game we play on the young, where the testing industry rigs the system to make students look dumb before they’ve even had a chance to sharpen their pencils. Chapter 2 tells the story of the hapless efforts by the federal government to usher history teaching into the twenty-first century by spending a billion dollars between 2001 and 2012, while leaving nary a trace on the landscape of history teaching. Chapter 3 describes attempts to balance jingoistic accounts of American history by assigning Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, a work, I argue, that confuses sounding critical with thinking critically.

The two chapters in part 2 make the case that historical thinking is a unique orientation to the world, one that is desperately needed in an age of digital manipulation. I draw on the voices of participants from my research studies—high school students and teachers; scientists, members of the clergy, and working historians—to demolish the myth that the most important attribute of historical study is a supple memory. History, I argue, provides an antidote to impulse by cultivating modes of thought that counteract haste and avert premature judgment.

Part 3’s two essays take an autobiographical turn. The first tells the story of how I went from writing up carefully designed studies of historical thinking, read almost exclusively by other professors, to becoming an Internet entrepreneur, producing free, open-source materials that have been downloaded over five million times. The second chapter, composed in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, describes the challenges we face when the world comes to us via our laptops and smartphones. It tells the backstory of research with historians, college students, and professional fact-checkers who were observed as they sat before a computer screen assessing the validity of digital information. I argue that the old ways of reading won’t do. We’ll need new ones to cope with the mountains of information that threaten to bury us each day.

Part 4 contains a single essay, but one that offers a ray of hope that education can change. It draws on a national survey with 4,000 kids and adults who were asked to nominate the most famous Americans in history (not including presidents and first ladies). Contrary to pundits who insist that the curriculum remains dominated by Dead White Males, the three most-cited figures were all African American: Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Harriet Tubman. The heroes who today draw Americans together look somewhat different from those of former eras. While there are still a few inventors, entrepreneurs, and entertainers on the list, those who most capture our imagination acted to expand rights, alleviate misery, rectify injustice, and promote freedom. Finally, the book concludes with a brief afterword in which I address why, even in a future-oriented, technological society, the study of the past has an indispensable place in the curriculum.

In an age when no one regulates the information we consume, the task of separating truth from falsehood can no longer be for extra credit. Google can do many things, but it cannot teach discernment. Never has so much information been at our fingertips, but never have we been so ill-equipped to deal with it. If, as Thomas Jefferson claimed, what distinguishes democracy from demagoguery is the critical faculties of its citizens, we’ve got work to do. Let’s get started.

Part 1

OUR CURRENT PLIGHT

1

Crazy for History

The year the United States entered the First World War witnessed another first: the publication of results from the first large-scale test of historical facts. J. Carleton Bell of the Brooklyn Training School for Teachers and his colleague David F. McCollum tested 1,500 Texas students, from elementary school to college, and published their findings in 1917.¹ They drew up a list of names (including Thomas Jefferson, John Burgoyne, Alexander Hamilton, Cyrus H. McCormick), dates (1492, 1776, 1861), and events (the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dred Scott decision) that history teachers said every student should know. They gave their test at the upper elementary level (fifth through seventh grades), in high schools (in five Texas districts: Houston, Huntsville, Brenham, San Marcos, and Austin), and in colleges (at the University of Texas at Austin and two teacher-training institutions, South-West Texas State Normal School and Sam Houston Normal Institute).

Students flunked. They identified 1492 but not 1776; they recognized Thomas Jefferson but conflated him with Jefferson Davis; they lifted the Articles of Confederation from the eighteenth century and plunked them down in the Confederacy; and they stared blankly at 1846, the beginning of the U.S.-Mexico War, unaware of its significance in Texas history. Nearly all students recognized Sam Houston as the father of the Texas republic but had him marching triumphantly into Mexico City, not vanquishing Antonio López de Santa Anna at San Jacinto.

The score at the elementary level was a dismal 16 percent. In high school, after a year of history instruction, students scored a measly 33 percent, and in college, after a third exposure to history, scores barely approached the halfway mark (49 percent). The authors lamented that studying history in school produced only a small, irregular increase in the scores with increasing academic age. Anticipating jeremiads by secretaries of education and op-ed columnists a half century later, Bell and McCollum indicted the educational system and its charges: Surely a grade of 33 in 100 on the simplest and most obvious facts of American history is not a record in which any high school can take great pride.²

By the next world war, hand-wringing about students’ historical benightedness had become front-page news. Ignorance of U.S. History Shown by College Freshmen, proclaimed the New York Times headline on April 4, 1943, a day when the main story reported that George Patton’s troops had overrun those of Erwin Rommel at El Guettar. Providing support for the earlier claim made by historian Allan Nevins that young people are all too ignorant of American history, the survey showed that a scant 6 percent of the 7,000 college freshmen could identify the thirteen original colonies, while only 15 percent could place William McKinley as president during the Spanish-American War. Less than a quarter could name two contributions of Thomas Jefferson. Mostly, students were flummoxed. Abraham Lincoln emaciated the slaves and, as first president, was father of the Constitution. A graduate of an eastern high school, responding to a question about the system of checks and balances, claimed that Congress has the right to veto bills that the President wishes to be passed. According to students, the United States expanded territorially by purchasing Alaska from the Dutch, the Philippines from Great Britain, Louisiana from Sweden, and Hawaii from Norway. A Times editorial excoriated those appallingly ignorant youths.³

The Times’ breast-beating resumed in time for the bicentennial celebration, when the newspaper commissioned a second test, this time with Bernard Bailyn of Harvard University leading the charge. With the aid of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the Times surveyed nearly 2,000 freshmen on 194 college campuses. On May 2, 1976, the results rained on the bicentennial parade: "Times Test Shows Knowledge of American History Limited. Of the 42 multiple-choice questions on the test, students averaged an embarrassing 21 correct—a failing score of 50 percent. The low point for Bailyn was that more students believed that the Puritans guaranteed religious freedom (36 percent) than understood religious toleration as the result of rival denominations seeking to cancel out each other’s advantage (34 percent). This absolutely shocking response rendered the voluble Bailyn speechless: I don’t know how to explain it."⁴ Results from subsequent history tests (1987, 1994, 2001, 2006, 2010, and 2014) from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card) deviated little from earlier trends.⁵ When the first NAEP history test was administered in 1987, Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn blasted students’ shameful ignorance and issued dire warnings of impending decline. Unless we change course, young people, they predicted, will be unable to stand on the shoulders of giants because they won’t be able to tell who are giants and who are pygmies.⁶

Fourteen years later, in the