Now a History for the Rest of Us : New standards look to common people’s roles

U.S. history is the history of the Americans, all of us. That simple and uncontroversial-sounding thesis has in fact something revolutionary about it. Gary B. Nash, director of the UCLA National Center for History in the Schools, is not exaggerating when he calls the just-released “National Standards for United States History” for grades 5 through 12 “nothing short of a new American revolution in history education.”

The revolution they represent is a historiographic rather than a political revolution, and as such is part of a world movement. The short and simple annals of the poor, as poet Thomas Gray called them in his “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” have been growing steadily longer and more complex as historians have turned their attention away from kings and battles and toward the common people and their concerns.

FIXING A DISTORTION: In the American context, this new inclusiveness necessarily and properly entails a new attention to groups such as black slaves, native peoples and women. Their relative absence from history books has distorted the history of a nation defined in so many ways by their contributions.

But we are happy to report that this new inclusiveness entails no new, politically correct exclusions. When the guidelines suggest that a fifth-grader, to demonstrate knowledge of the Constitution, be ordered to “draw upon a variety of historical sources such as paintings, biographies of major delegates, and narratives of the Constitutional Convention to construct a description of who the delegates were and why they were assembled in Philadelphia,” nobody is air-brushed out of the famous paintings. The framers are all still there.

THE RUSH REACTION: Some critics have suggested otherwise. Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing talk show host, says that the still-to-be-ratified standards--whose development was begun by the Bush Administration and completed by the Clinton Administration--should be “flushed down the toilet.” On a more serious plane, Lynne V. Cheney, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, cries political correctness and maintains, in particular, that the standards slight the Constitution. But political correctness is social censorship, and these standards censor nothing. As for the Constitution, would that college graduates could all meet the standards for knowledge of the Constitution that are set here!

When the standards project was first announced by the Bush Administration, we were skeptical. It seemed all too easy for the federal government to issue new standards rather than assist the states in meeting the standards most had already set. However, national standards are reasonable in principle, and these voluntary standards quite probably go beyond anything that any state has yet dared.

Whether teachers and students can put such high standards into practice is another matter, of course, but standards should challenge even the brightest. We commend UCLA’s National Center for History in the Schools for setting the toughest standards seen in years.