History Standards: Dec '94 - Jan '95

Author: rdunn@sciences.SDSU.Edu (Ross E. Dunn) Date: Tue, 13 Dec 1994 14:38:51 PCT

A Response to:

From: Pier M. Larson (PML9@psuvm.psu.edu) Penn State University

Perhaps someone familiar with the new "History Standards" will explain the curious choice of title for the project. Why is a project which apparently seeks to reinvigorate the teaching and learning of history and to emphasize the evanescent nature of historical truth touted as a new set of "standards" in the teaching of history? While I find myself agreeing with most of what the proponents/defenders of the new standards are saying, the very title itself I find disconcerting.

When President Bush and the fifty governors met in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1989 to discuss national education goals, they identified history as one of five core disciplines for which national standards of achievement should be developed. Educational standards in the U.S, they said, should be "world class" and comparable to those of other industrialized countries. Subsequently, educators undertook "national standards" projects in a number of disciplines, including geography, civics, economics, and social studies. As I understand it, the National Council on History Standards (appointed to advise the National Center for History in the Schools in developing history standards) discussed at some length the form that "standards" ought to take.

The terms "standards," then, has been used since 1989 to characterize the projects in several disciplines. The history standards in critical thinking take the form of an outline of specific skills that students should acquire. The content standards (which take up the better part of the three published volumes) take the form of specific "understandings" that students should demonstrate. To make these "understandings" concrete, the history volumes include examples of student achievement, that is, specific classroom activities by which students might show that they understand the "standard." There are 2,599 of these exemplary activities in the U.S. and World History volumes combined. (I paid my neighbors 7th grade daughter $10 to count them for me! If anyone wants to check us, please give me your results.) These exemplars are not the standards as such, though hostile critics of the project have focused almost entirely on them, picking out exemplars here and there that they can construe as having a "liberal bias."

I should add that the history standards volumes are not compilations of historical conclusions or assertions that students are invited to absorb.

In short, the term "standards" is not an entirely satisfactory one to describe what the volumes contain. This is the word that Bush and the governors used to describe the goal of high achievement in certain core disciplines. It's the label that has consistently been used to describe, however imperfectly, the projects in all the disciplines.>

Author: Pier M. Larson (PML9@psuvm.psu.edu) Date: Mon, 12 Dec 1994 21:12:45 -0500

Penn State University

Perhaps someone familiar with the new "History Standards" will explain the curious choice of title for the project. Why is a project which apparently seeks to reinvigorate the teaching and learning of history and to emphasize the evanescent nature of historical truth touted as a new set of "standards" in the teaching of history? While I find myself agreeing with most of what the proponents/defenders of the new standards are saying, the very title itself I find disconcerting.

Author: David Dorman
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 1994 21:08:31 -0500

Manhasset High School, Manhasset, NY

Hello H-WORLD. I teach AP (advanced placement - Mod) European History and am wondering if anyone out there has some good ideas on how to incorporate the new World History standards, which I think are wonderful, into a rigorous curriculum - maybe over two years for honors-type high school students. Send your replies to DavidD2414@aol.com

Author: Paul Filio
Date: Sun, 11 Dec 1994 15:30:33 -0500

Cincinnati Public Schools

For those of you who have been following this particular thread, you may be interested to know that Diane Ravitch has written a thoughtful but harsh critique in the latest edition of Education Week ("Standards in U.S. History: An Assessment", Dec. 7, 1994). Although her article focuses on the U.S. History Standards, her criticism is also aimed at the World History Standards. Her major complaint is that the standards contain "a persistent strand of political bias that is unaceptable in a document that aspires to set national standards."

Also in the same issue of Education Week, is a notice that Lynne Cheney has started a National Review Panel to "critique proposed voluntary national education standards." She apparently doesn't believe that NESIC can do an good job. Note who the funder is: Readers' Digest Association.

I hope people will take the time to read her comments and I would be interested in hearing responses.

Paul Filio, Curr. Spec., Social Studies, Cincinnati Public Schools pfilio@iac.net
Home Page- http://iac.net/~pfilio

Author: Sandi Cooper
Date: Fri, 9 Dec 1994 10:20:20 -0500

Graduate School, City University of New York

To underscore the importance of Joyce Appleby's recent posting regarding the war on the NEH, NEA, etc., I cite statement in a recent "New Yorker" article by David Remnick entitled which assesses Newt Gingrich's intellectual baggage. Towards the end, Remnick writes:

"Now conservatism, including Gingrich, wants desperately to make its domestic agenda the new crusade, the fill-in for that great absence in American life -- the Cold War. Irving Kristol, who remains important in the movement (and not only as William's father), wrote last year in "The National Interest," 'There is no 'after the Cold War' for me. So far from having ended, my cold war has increased in intensity, as sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos... . Now that the other 'Cold War' is over, the real cold war has begun. We are far less prepared for this cold war, far more vulnerable to our enemy, than was the case against a global Communist threat.'"

As John Patrick Diggins wrote recently the "The New York Times" about the History standards project, it reflected the liberal corruption of the University by not privilging charismatic leaders of the past as heros for children and young people. And Diggins, appointed to the CUNY Graduate Faculty by the successors of Gertrude Himmelfarb, insists that leftists inhabit most of academia. [Himmelfarb for the uninitated is William Kristol's mother as well as a distinguished historian with little patience for social history.]

The struggle that Joyce Appleby anticipates will be a very long march.

Author: Joyce Appleby
Date: Thu, 8 Dec 1994 17:26:27 -0500

History Department, UCLA

If Charles Krauthammer is in the loop, the criticism of the NATIONAL STANDARDS is part of an orchestrated attack on the NEH. In Thursday's WASHINGTON POST he made the following instructive comments, after recognizing a "willigness to go after middle-class welfare" in a letter addressed to Newt Gingrich, "Co-President for Domestic Policy."

"A nicely symbolic start would be the elimination of those welfare check writers for the intellectual classes, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The beauty of these cuts is the cultural side benefit that comes from strangling agencies that cannot--it has by now been proven--be kept out of the hands of the academic left. The recently issued American and world history "standards," which turn political correctness into a federal mandate, are an object lesson: federal 'culture' agencies are beyond redemption."

People who have devoted their lives to education have been reduced to members of an "intellectual class," self-interestedly trying to promote the production and teaching knowledge - just another interest group out there.

It's challenging in a sense to have to defend our work and the values it is predicated upon, but we had better get organized if we want to do it effectively. I wrote today to the president of my university and the president of my alma mater. I hope many of you will do the same. We need to work quickly to reach both supportive and hostile members of Congress, and our presidents probably have the most influence upon them. I urge you all to get the NATIONAL STANDARDS FOR UNITED STATES HISTORY and WORLD HISTORY, $18.95 each plus $5. postage and handling from the National Center for History in the Schools, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90024. If the STANDARDS is merely a staging ground for a larger war on the NEH, NEA, NPR, and NHPRC and everything else that involved federal support of education and culture, then let's take our bearing now for the fights ahead.

Author: Haines Brown
Date: Sun, 4 Dec 1994 23:57:00 -0500

Central Connecticut State University

I've tried to restrain myself from throwing myself into this interesting debate, but Chris Garton-Zavesky's latest contribution destroyed my resolve. I'll try to follow his good example and be brief, and I will address only the first four of his seven points.

1. If I understand him correctly, Chris is saying that while a broad view of history is unobjectionable, it should not have led the writers of the standards to study social forces rather than invidiuals.

I'm not convinced this is a real issue. I suspect most historians, and perhaps Chris himself, assume that BOTH individuals and social forces are the engine of history. That would seem a common-sense view, but the modern West European ideology of individualism on one hand and a mechanical model of natural processes on the other, persuaded many people in the nineteenth century that the determination of natural forces contradicted human free will and moral responsibility. For a century now, this naive view has not carried weight in scholarly circles. For one thing, the development of thermodynamics late in the nineteeth century and quantum mechanics in the twentieth make clear that in many, if not all areas of science, de- terminism is probabilistic, not unequivocal. An (objective) probabilistic determinism gives plenty of scope for the efficacy of individual struggle and moral responsibility.

2. Chris seems to imply that placing the particulars of history in relation to a broader situation should not obscure the primacy of the particular and how the particlar of European history explains how we got where we are.

The issue of the relation of the particular and the general or universal is certainly an old one, but to insist on the primacy of the particular seems peculiarly modern and West European, in fact, 18th and 19th century German and perhaps English, the fruit of Newtonian atomism. A reduction of history to the particular raises enormous problems. If the past determines the present, then history should wind down, not up. Where then is the creative and moral responsibility? Surely the course of history is as much a result of struggles in the present as it is of the weight of the past, and if so, then the relation of the particular to the general must surely be as significant as the particular itself.

Chris does not identity his social location, and so who is the "we" he is talking about? This is a list on world history, with subscribers all over the world, and it draws the participation of social groups whose relation might possibly be contradictory. So therefore the use of the term we, as Chris does here, where he the particularity and iden- tity of a particular we, must strike most people as rather colonial. In my own city, people of European heritage constitute a minority. The elements of African, Caribbean and Native American culture blend with the traditions of Europe, both East and West, in complex ways that have given rise to various syntheses that are not easily revolved into simple constituent elements. To reduce those proud traditions to that of Europe would only be insulting, and, more importantly, fly in the face of the facts.

Culture is a complex flux that necessarily is undefinable. Everyone's culture is different, and everyone participates in the active construction of culture. To reduce that complexity to European culture is unrealistic, and to freeze that culture by identifying it simply as an inheritance of the past, and to identify that culture in practice with the mental activity of a few white rich males, seems perverse. We all create our own culture, and although we don't create it just as we please, but in terms of the various traditions with which we come into contact, we nevertheless are sui generis, not simple agents of the past.

There is a long-standing debate between the advocates of Western Civ and of world history, and their difference revolves around the very point that Chris raises. People who advocate Western Civ are indeed seeking the roots of the power culture in the US today. But does world history pretend to do that same? Sometimes it is said that we are all citizens of a global village, and by learning the tradition of our fellow villagers, we acquire identity as global citizens. I'm not pursuaded, but it does illustrate that not ALL history necessarily is a search for roots.

3. Chris feels that popular history is all well and fine, but the common people count less in the weight of history than some unmentioned others whom he does not care to label or define.

Well, if history is a discovery of "our" roots, my roots are of very common folk, I assure you. So therefore I should be studying only common people, if I follow Chris' perscription. But I'm sure this is not what he meant. What he meant were the shakers and doers of history, or at least what a small group of intellectuals decided were the shakers and doers. But if history is the product of the thoughts and actions of people of wealth and power, then what happens to my free choice and moral responsibility, since I'm not one of them and neither were my ancestors. If the Golden Rule is that He who has the gold, rules, then are we not back to objective historical forces that swallow up the individual? I don't see how Chris can reconvile a rugged individualism that springs from the breast of human nature, and the objective forces that make some indviduals count and not others.

4. I don't want to belabor this. The term "social history" means quite different things in different national traditions. It is not clear that there is a distictive methodology of social history. The Annales School is just one kind of social history, and I'm not sure there is a common methodological thread even there. I'm not sure what it means to say the Annalists "assembled a documentary record," or why the Annales tradition is presumed to be over. What method is Chris thinking of? "Thick description" with coherence a function of a presumed commmon human nature? But that seems awfully close to the position Chris artculated in his earlier points. I would not presume to dismiss anyone else's chosen field as illicit, nor would I presume to reject a methodology without stating what it is.

Haines Brown

brownh@ccsu.ctstateu.edu
ZOC (V2.00) under OS/2 2.11

Author: Chris Garton-Zakesky
Date: Fri, 2 Dec 1994 13:06:44 -0500

For the record, let me state again my objections to the standards.

1. In the name of "seeing a wider picture", history becomes the study of "world forces" rather than individuals --- sounds a good deal like predestination and all that rot.
2. Under the guise of "placing European history in its world context" or some equally pompous educational expression, the fundamental importance of European history in getting us where we are now is being submerged. No, it's not being eliminated completely, but I remain unconvinced that either history (european or world) is done justice by trying to cover too much.
3. If you have a semester to cover the War between the States (that's another discussion), you can clearly examine in some detail the "common people" in so far as records of these people exist -- but when we must introduce hundreds of years of history in one year, we do not have time to examine "common people" without doing serious harm to the remainder of the picture. (This is, in some respects, a subdivision of #2).
4. The methodology of "social historians" who seek to study "the common people" and "democracy" and all that rot is quite unproven. To anticipate the obvious objection, the Annalistes assembled a documentary record from which to draw their conclusions, but such work is rarely done by modern social historians. History is not merely a subset of sociology.
5. Statistics and history are not the same thing.
6. As just one example among many, the Bishop of the Diocese of Raleigh has used what he calls an "African proverb" to couch his newly defined mission to the children of his See: "It takes a whole village to raise a child". Problem is, he presents this as if it is something uniquely African -- what I call the Benighted tribes theory of history. The French (to name the case I know best) have had this approach for years, but instead of quoting it as a principle of French (or European or whatever) society, he insists it is an African proverb.
7. "Have you read Shakespeare in the original Klingon?"

Food for thought.

Chris Garton-Zavesky

Author: Bob Bain
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 16:00:46 -0500

John Carroll University

Chris Garton-Zavesky wrote:

Students do need to look beyond mere data to see a larger picture and to challenge whatever assumptions they have formed. They are only able to do this when they have data beyond which to look and discernable assumptions to challenge.

and

An absence of standards, and in this case an active campaign to study "world forces" without a framework to understand them, is destructive to the well-being of the children and thus to the future of society.

Chris:

It seems to me that there is a contradiction here -- the world history standards you dismiss are trying to engage students in painting the "larger picture" and "to challenge whatever assumptions they have formed." I would think you would love them for creating that larger framework, thus enabling students to "look beyond mere data," and to establish another level of generalization.

Unless I have misread the standards, I think they provide exactly what you seek.

Bob Bain
John Carroll University

Author: Raymond Lewis
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 1995 12:35:24 -0500

Eastern Kenticky University

Ron: your message was quite to the point. Here in the "perfect" state we have those who are attempting to make Margaret Atwood's novel come true. As a Canadian she sees us far more clearly than most American politicos ever could. Food for thought and not to start a flame!

Ray

Author: Ron Smallwood
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 1995 21:34:26 -0500

Northern Lights College

I am one very saddened Canadian. Do These American politicians really believe that a republic can survive without an open and honest look at history? Often facing the truth is hard but the whole point of teaching history is so that other generations will not make the same mistakes. Do Do they really believe that America is perfect, and hasn't made mistakes like England, Russia, ... and Canada? I am very worried about what I see happening "south of the border". I hope and pray that logic and truth will prevail.

Ron Smallwood, Instructor, Northern Lights College

         Box 860, Fort Nelson, B.C., Canada   V0C 1R0
         ronald_smallwood@sfu.ca, (604)774-2741  and  fax: (604)774-2750

        Winter Blues: Knowing that the mosquitos are only 6 months away.
                              THE NORTH - I LOVE IT!

Author: Ross Dunn
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 1995 22:08:53 -0500

San Diego State University

To: History and Social Studies Colleagues

I want to thank many of you for your messages supporting efforts by the National Center for History in the Schools to pursue rational discussion of the history standards. I also want to thank Tom Martinson for putting the main headings from the world history standards on line. The center is working with the publications office at UCLA to get the topical headings for both U.S. and world history uploaded to the H-Net directly from the printer's diskettes, which are on the Quark system. I know nothing about the technical issues here but hope to have some answers early next week.

It has become increasingly clear that the Senate action to censure the standards was a sense-of-the-Senate tactic to keep Sen. Gorton's hostile proposal from becoming an amendment to the Unfunded Mandate Reform Act. The action was the sense of the Senate on January 18, 1995. That's all. The sense of the Senate might be very different on another day. It is also perfectly clear that the great majority of Senators have not yet read or even seen the standards. A few weeks ago the History Center made an effort to work with Washington agencies get accurate information to every member of Congress. The ball was dropped somewhere along the line, but renewed efforts are being made to provide corrective information.

Mrs. Cheney is of course getting much mileage from the Senate vote, declaring that even Sen. Kennedy is against the standards, and so on.

On the brighter side, Congressman David Skaggs (D, Colorado) questioned Mrs. Cheney sharply during her House subcommittee testimony regarding her misrepresentation of the standards and her own implication in their development during her tenure at NEH. I would recommend messages of appreciation to Congressman Skaggs. His e-mail address is skaggs@hr.house.gov. Sid Yates (D, Illinois), a member of the same subcommittee, also wants to be helpful.

Many of you will have seen Frank Rich's article in the NYT on January 26th. I would like to quote part of it:

"As the historian Jon Wiener documents in The New Republic, few had actually read the standards to verify Mrs. Cheney's mischievous, at times inaccurate characterization of them. The standards are in fact an imperfect, middle-of-the-road committee product--and voluntary to boot.

"As Mrs. Cheney distorted the standards, so she also may have distorted the chronology of how her once-beloved project 'went wrong.' According to three sources who worked on it, a 100-page draft of the opening section was available to Mrs. Cheney when she was still at the NEH and still singing the standards' praises. That draft contained some of the same elements--the treatment of the Constitution, for instance--that Mrs. Cheney so strenuously denounces now.

"What did Mrs. Cheney know and when did she know it? The answer is important not only because it tells us whether she is a hypocrite but because it will indicate to what extent she has manufactured this whole controversy for political ends. Did Mrs. Cheney turn against the standards and the NEH because both have changed so radically since the '92 election--or simply because she will stop at nothing to be a major player in the Gingrich order? The evidence suggests she has deliberately caricatured her own former pet project as p.c. hell incarnate so it can be wielded as a Mapplethorpe-like symbol to destroy the agency she so recently championied."

"Mrs. Cheney, meanwhile, continued to misrepresent the history standards in her testimony. When Mr. Skaggs recited chapter and verse from the standards' text to challenge her erroneous assertion that they emphasize a single book about a Hiroshima victim in teaching about World War II, she nervously backpedaled, saying, 'If I said that, I misspoke," and, "Maybe I read them too quickly."

In her testimony before the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee on January 24, Mrs. Cheney made a number of statements about the standards to show that a highly politicized academic establishment betrayed the NEH by failing to spend federal money in the way they "promised." Here are a few of her statements that distort or disregard the facts.

Cheney: "The application [to the NEH] promised to build standards on the basis of a previously published document, LESSONS FROM HISTORY, that presented the story of the U.S. and Western civilization fully and frankly."

[There is no evidence that the National Center for History "promised to build standards on the basis of" LESSONS FROM HISTORY. When the focus groups of national professional organizations met for the first time to talk about the direction world history standards should take, they were given LESSONS as a starting point for discussion. (I was a member of the AHA focus group.) All the groups concluded that while LESSONS was a valuable resource for teachers, the National Council for History Standards should start fresh in developing an architecture and set of guiding criteria for world history standards. Mrs. Cheney was certainly "promised" one thing: that standards development would be a consensus-building process. The educators consulted in the early phase of this process (including many practicing middle and high school teachers) concluded that LESSONS was an inadequate foundation for developing the standards. It is also curious that the head of a federal agency would expect to be "promised" a particular product in spite of the very broad writing and review process that she herself initiated.]

Cheney: LESSONS FROM HISTORY [presumably unlike the published standards] "paid attention to our traditional heros: George Washington, Daniel Webster, Robert E. Lee."

[If we want to play the "mentioning" game, George Washington is mentioned precisely three times in LESSONS, not counting a picture caption. Robert E. Lee, whom she says is not mentioned at all in the U.S. standards, is mentioned precisely once in LESSONS and not even with his full name. There is also a picture caption. She has complained that Ulysses S. Grant appears in the standards only once. But that's also how many "mentionings" he gets in LESSONS and then only by his last name.]

Cheney: Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Jonas Salk-- "none of these figures appear in the standards."

[Einstein is invoked in a standard in the World History volume on p. 262. There is also a suggested student activity on the same page: "Investigate the life of a scientist or inventor such as Thomas Alva Edison, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, or . . . Marconi." Jonas Salk appears in the K-4 standards on p. 51. Because the standards are sets of topic guidelines, not comprehensive narrative textbooks, this issue of how many times particular names appear is on the whole beside the point. Mrs. Cheney is arguing, however, that certain names have been SUPPRESSED by the "politically correct" operatives who presumably wrote the standards. It turns out that many of the people she cites as having been stricken from our historical consciousness turn up on pages of the standards that she (or her lieutenant John Fonte) failed to read.]

Cheney: The only thing that students are encouraged to learn about how [World War II] was ended is "to read a book about a Japanese girl of their age who died a painful death as a result of radiation from the atomic weapon that the United States dropped on Hiroshima."

[This assertion before a committee of the U.S. Congress is contradicted by so much evidence that I can only refer readers to pp. 201-204 of the U.S. standards and pp. 266-269 of the World History volume. Rep. Skaggs challenged on this assertion by reading from the volumes. Mrs. Cheney then admitted, and this after sustaining a four-month attack on the standards, that "maybe I read them too quickly."]

Cheney: "No mention is made of the death and destruction that the Japanese inflicted on others. The rape of Nanking is not discussed, nor is Pearl Harbor, nor is the Bataan death march."

[Students are encouraged to study the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and China, pp. 199 and 200 of US Standards. World History standard: "Explain the German, Italian, and Japanese drives for empire in the 1930s." Three different activities on Pearl Harbor on pp. 199 and 200 of the US standards.]

In short, Mrs. Cheney made a number of assertions before a committee of Congress that were plainly untrue.

The Sunday (Jan. 29) New York Times was just delivered to my doorstep, and I find that Al Shanker in his paid column has made another hit on the history standards. He completely misrepresents the Senate action, alleging that the Senate "debated" the standards, when he knows perfectly well that the only "debate" was hostile speeches by a few Republicans. On Jan. 12 Al Shanker attended a meeting in Washington to discuss criticisms of the standards with associates of the National Center for History. This meeting (greatly urged by the NEH, Congressional staffers, and others) was to have been a forthright exchange of views and an effort to respond to criticisms of particular passages and exemplars in the standards. At this meeting Mr. Shanker made a series of sweeping, critical statements about the standards, then left before it was over to catch a plane. His current ad in the NYT, demonizing the standards more stridently than ever, seems to confirm that he regarded this meeting with contempt.

I encourage you again to contact your Congressman, asking them to read the standards and perhaps consult a few practicing teachers about them before joining in any official action.

Ross Dunn
rdunn@sciences.sdsu.edu

Author: Chris Garton-Zavesky
Date: Sat, 28 Jan 1995 13:42:51 -0500

North Carolina State University

Hmmm. Food for thought from Pier on the subject of civilization. More grist for the mill -- or rather, more evidence to support my contention about language.

"Civilization", if I remember my Latin correctly, comes from a word that means "to citify" [if I can invent such a word]. Thus the understanding of "to bring out of a savage state": cities require different rules of operation than nomadic drift. As we poor western sods came to think of city life as the norm for intellectual activity, commerce and all that, the notion of "superior" came to be attached to the word.

Here's a parallel example, drawing on Mr. Clinton's State of the Union address. The word "bourgeois", by origin means nothing more complicated than "city dweller". As city dwellers were neither those who had hereditary estates nor those who were tenant farmers, the term "middle class" came to be used in English to describe the same phenomenon. As of Mr. Clinton's address, "middle class" has somehow acquired the sense of "superior", and the term "bourgeois" is being lost to the political diatribes of the left --- who are still waiting for the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is nothing inherently better or more evolved about city dwelling merchants, but history is told as if the emergence of a "middle class" is a mark of civilization. Very little could be further from the truth.

Chris Garton-Zavesky
gartoncj@hcl.chass.ncsu.edu

Author: Pier M. Larson, PML9@psuvm.psu.edu, Date: Thu, 26 Jan 1995 12:08:40 -0500

Penn State University

Thanks to Thomas Martin for posting an outline of the National Standards for World History.

I must comment on what I see, although from an altogether different direction than the public brouhaha from conservatives.

Simply: The standards appear not to problematize that central concept of "civilization" which the history profession in this country holds so dear. What is clearly valued in the history standards is the teaching of civilization, its rise, its transformations, its tensions, permutations etc. Thus the suggested historical vision is one which runs from the evolution of humankind, through pastoralism, into agriculture and finally into the "grand" civilizations: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus Valley. Then we come to "Classical Traditions and major Religions and Giant Empires" etc.

Besides the fight over emphasis within the overall framework, I see little difference in the historical view of the authors of the standards and their very public detractors. We are to value civilization. History is how civilizations (characterized here, it seems, through high population density, urbanization, agriculture, writing, permanent architecture, and the like) become, change, interact. Thus we are asked to study ancient Egypt and not the nomads of the Sahara. We are to look at ancient Kush and not the people of the African forest. Every continent has its parallels in the standards.

What is new here? The Standards appear to me as another expression of the historical identity which the Western academic profession has fashioned over the last century and a half. The dispute between the authors and their proponents on the one hand, and the conservative detractors, on the other, is simply one of which continent ought receive primary attention and value.

I hear no noise over the organizing paradigm of "civilization" and its continuing implications of superiority in the minds of 99.9% of the American people. AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY, "Civilize. v.tr. To bring out of a primitive or savage state; educate or enlighten; refine." Our most "progressive" historians are themselves trapped in this powerful, dangerous, yet silly worldview. What is so compelling about "civilization" that we must reiterate it constantly? Manifest destiny seems very much alive here, and the ugly things attached to it linger there in the background.

For these reasons, I find the standards both unconvincing and pernicious. The Western world view of the late 19th century is repackaged for our youth (and ourselves) in 1995 as an "objective," "revised," "thoughtful," "thorough," perhaps even "liberal" set of teaching standards. There are other "Western" views, not to mention those from various cardinal directions.

Why not something fresh, inclusive, valuing of all types of human organization and endeavor, and something which does not carry the ugly baggage of an outmoded intellectual paradigm? This one sure dies hard!

Author: Chris Garton-Zavesky
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 1995 11:47:38 -0500

North Carolina State University

Dear gracious me! What a firestorm of disapproval and dismissal I have brought down upon myself. The purpose of the comments I made was this: to suggest that the language used in the standards, like that used in the external example I provided, covers (or sounds like it covers) a less than historically honest political agenda. "To facilitate" and "to co-ordinate" are more "comfortable" forms of the formerly useful verbs "to lead" and "to direct". Until that agenda is uncovered (or until the writers of the standards convince me and others who think like I do that the agenda doesn't exist) I will continue to oppose the standards.

One point further. Students are rightly expected to learn "what makes something a piece of literature from a certain period" -- so that they might be able to identify similar pieces in an unknown context. This is not the same as suggesting that the criteria for "periodizing"{does the word exist?} a work of literature exist a priori. Studying "world forces" assumes that these forces exist a priori, and that we humans are no more than pawns in the face of a battle between combatting forces. Such a view of history may be wholly in line with Marxist thought (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) but is hardly within the realm of REASONED thought.

Chris Garton-Zavesky
{gartoncj@hcl.chass.ncsu.edu}

Author: Annette Laing
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 1995 10:58:26 -0500

University of California, Riverside

I appreciated Jean Fleet's impassioned commentary on her participation in the development of the World History Standards, and the bizarre criticisms that have been made of them. May I respectfully suggest that as well as preaching to the faithful here on H-World, she also post (sorry, send :-) ) her letter to a reputable newspaper or two?

Annette Laing
Ph.D. Candidate, U.C. Riverside

Author: Haines Brown
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 1995 10:50:05 -0500

Central Connecticut State University

Chris Garton-Zavesky objects to the presence of the phrase "social forces" in the Standards document. I gather he sees it as manifes- ting an assumption that there exist patterns of historical change that are largely independent of individual human volition.

However, the presupposition of objective forces is typical of Western historiography. For example, the assumption that history is determined by objective forces typified ancient western historiography, which saw the power of fate as far greater than puny human aspiration. Although more qualified, a notion of predestination or a divine plan was important in European Medieval historiography as well, as reflected in a periodization centered on Christ's incarnation. Enlightenment notions of the inevitability of progress might be another example, as is the recognition of long term economic cycles in modern historiography. Given the pervasiveness of the assumption in Western historigraphy, the Standards document cannot be condemned for references to objective social forces.

Perhaps Garton-Zavesky is criticizing the document because it does not reduce history to the will of empowered inviduals. However, I suspect that a belief that there are no forces that shape historical processes except the will of individuals is peculiar to late 19th century radical empiricism. That is, it is very parochial and seems especially quaint in light of 20th century scientific progress. Garton-Zavesky has every right to embrace whatever ideological perspective he wishes, but he cannot expect to be taken seriously unless he defends his atypical views.

While the weight of western historiography has generally supported the assumption of objective forces in history, we now see a problem with that tradition. Until recent times, these objective forces were explicitly or implicitly metaphysical and therefore alien to the modern insistence on naturalistic explanation. If references to social forces today still imply a metaphysic, then I would have to agree with Garton-Zavesky. But there are a number of reasons why they do not.

One is that we are now well aware that things exist as parts of systems, and that systems manifest regular patterns of behavior that do not reduce to properties of their parts such as the intention of historical actors. The science of systems theory has been well established since WWII. Secondly, both historiography and 20th century natural science employ a probabilistic language. This implies that the outcomes of processes are never unequivocally determined by prior conditions or by circumstance; there is room for free choice, for one can always struggle against the force of circumstance to achieve desired outcomes with hope for success.

But just as our probabilistic language implies free choice, our assumption that we can't suceed without struggle implies that individual actions are also constrained by such things as social forces. If there were no such objective forces, our wildest dreams would become immediately and effortlessly realized. Just as "free choice" today implies struggle against the force of circumstance, the word "determinism" also has changed. The 19th century moral objection to unequivocal determinism has been obviated by thermodynamics. Today, in all sciences, when the word determinism is used, there is never any implication that outcomes are unequivocally determined by initial conditions, only that conditions determine the relative pro- bability distribution of possible outcomes.

Garton-Zavesky says he prefers a description of facts to abstrac tions. That's nice, but I'm sure few historians and no respected historians today suggest that history reduces to one or to the other. Some historians prefer thick description or narrative ex planations, and others prefer a more sociological approach. Where would modern historiography be without the contributions of both? If so, then I assume that any historical work can without fear of criticism refer to the existence of social forces. Garton-Zavesky would stand on firmer ground if the Standards document stated that sociological explanation was the sole legitimate approach to world history, or that particulars should be submerged beneath generali ties. But he did not substantiate that the document asserted this, nor did he even state that it did.

All Garton-Zavesky does is to insist that his personal histori ographic tastes be observed by all historians. He is welcome to his opinion, but when it is so a-typical, he obviously should de fend it if he expects his points to have any credibility. One of the luxuries of conforming to the norm is that you don't have to defend your starting assumptions. Garton-Zavesky can't afford that luxury.

Haines Brown

brownh@ccsu.ctstateu.edu
ZOC (V2.01) under OS/2 2.11

Author: Thomas M. Martin
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 1995 10:38:37 -0500

San Francisco State University

Moderator's note (Pat Manning): Thomas Martin here posts text of the proposed U.S. National Standards for World History. He describes this document as:

"An abbreviated transcript of the *National Standards for World History: Exploring Paths to the Present*, published by the National Center for History in the Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles. Specifically it provides the essential wording from the standards outlined in Chapter 3, "World History Standards." The consistent omissions include the preface to each standard, "Demonstrating understandings of ...," and the topics to explain, compare, analyze, describe, evaluate, assess, etc. The detailed (and more controversial) "Examples of Student Achievement of Standard" have been omitted entirely."

• WARNING: THIS IS A LONG DOCUMENT. SAVE AND READ OFFLINE. ****

The standards are essentially an outline of major themes within each of 8 eras listed below. They are specifically designed to provide a flexible, organized system for teaching any period of world history to any level of complexity or sophistication - from elementary to AP senior high (and beyond). The published book on the National Standards also includes *examples* of topics that address the standards. (There appears to be a lot of confusion about standards and examples.)

The National Standards for World History (NOT including the examples) are listed below.

Era #: Title
(1-6) Historical Understandings

(A-E) Core and Related* Standards

Era 1: The Beginnings of Human Society

1. Biological and Cultural Processes that gave rise to the earliest human communities
   1. Early Hominoid development in Africa*
   2. How human communities populated major regions of the world and adapted to a variety of environments
2. Processes that led to the emergence of agricultural societies around the world

     A: How and Why humans established settled communities and
     experimented with agriculture
     B: How agricultural societies developed around the world*

Era 2: Early Civilization and the Rise of Pastoral Peoples 4000-1000 BCE

1. Major characteristics of civilization and how civilizations emerged in Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus Valley

     A: How Mesopotamia, Egypt and Indus Valley became centers of dense
     population, urbanization and cultural innovation in the 4th and 3rd
     millennia BCE*
     B: How commercial and cultural interactions contributed to change in
     the Tigris-Euphrates, Indus and Nile regions

2. How agrarian societies spread and new states emerged in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE

1. How civilization emerged in northern China in the 2nd millennium

BCE

     A: Achievements and limitations of the democratic institutions that
     developed in Athens and other Aegean city-states
     B: Major cultural achievements of Greek civilization*
     C: Development of Persian (Achaemenid) empire and the consequences of
     its conflicts with the Greeks*
     D: Alexander of Macedon's conquests and the interregional character
     of Hellenistic society and culture

     A: Emergence of Islam and how Islam spread in southwest Asia, North
     Africa and Europe
     B: Significance of the Abbasid Caliphate as a center of cultural
     innovation and hub of interregional trade in the 8th-10th centuries
     C: Consolidation of the Byzantine state in the context of expanding
     Islamic civilization*

     A: Feudalism and the growth of centralized monarchies and city states
     in Europe
     B: Expansion of Christian Europe after 1000
     C: Patterns of social change and cultural achievements in Europe's
     emerging civilization*

     A: Demographic, economic and social trends in Europe
     B: Renaissance, Reformation and Catholic Reformation
     C: rising military and bureaucratic power of Europea states between
     the 16th and 18th centuries
     D: Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment

To:       History and Social Studies Colleagues
           San Diego State University

      "were not developed in secret or by just a few individuals.
      They are the produce of over two and one-half years of hard
      work.  Literally hundreds of teachers, historians, social
      studies supervisors, and parents were part of this effort.
      Advice and counsel was both sought and received from more
      than 30 major educational, scholarly and public interest
      organizations."

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         National Center for History in the Schools
         University of California, Los Angeles
         10880 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 761
         Los Angeles, CA 90024-4108
  
         fax:  (310) 825-4723

Ken Wolf, Dept. of History          (502) 762-2232 or 762-6582
Murray State University             FAX (502) 762-3424
Murray KY 42071                     e-mail