Stewart D. McLaurin, President of the White House Historical Association, wrote an op-ed regarding the needs and methods of improving civics and history education in America.
His well-intended marketing of the White House Historical Association touches on the main point of needful improvements in education of all kinds, especially civics and history. He notes terrible degrees of measured proficiency in civics and in history. As commonly known, others have found these mirrored in math and reading, continuing a downward trend begun before and independent of the inappropriate and harmful pandemic school lockdowns. In a recent “person in the street” interview, two UCLA students could not name our nation’s capital city and thought the ocean on the eastern side of the U.S.A. was the Pacific. While deep resources such as the WHHA are laudable, more emphasis is needed on learning history and civics, not about history and civics. That means old-fashioned memorization of the train of events leading up to the Revolution, and the follow-ups such as the Articles of Confederation, Constitutional Convention, the Bill of Rights, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and all the more modern evolution of our civic structures and functions. The initial depths of these subjects should be plumbed in the written works of those engaged at that time, rather than histories written by scholars who may present incomplete or biased views. School libraries should have many yards of shelves populated by the published works of historical figures such as the Framers, our elected officials, and important other actors in our civic history such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B.Dubois, Malcolm X, and many others of all genders and ethnicities and beliefs. Evaluating their works must be based on the foundational intents of our well-constructed civil society. Only then can students independently decide where and when we may have strayed. Of course, many works of social studies propaganda may need displacement. While virtual tours of the White House are fantastic, what we really need is a new Andrew Carnegie to fund a Library of Congress standardized compilation of original works to be distributed to all public and school libraries. Web-based versions of these works by the persons who made our civic history would be a valuable addition. Deeper sources of study via vetted links to sources such as the WHHA can be provided for those students who choose to be autodidacts. Creating self-sustaining independent learners is the goal of all education. Training in evaluating information is a crucial part of any education in any subject. But civics’ education’s foundation must be ingrained knowledge of what happened, when, and how our civic structures actually work today. That ingrained knowledge method, followed by learning methods of evaluation, is just as critical for math and reading. For too long we have abandoned what to know and how to know in favor of what and how to think.