It’s never an easy task. These big kids in big jeans and ball caps worn backward come to his history classes believing that history is about as useful as Latin. Most are either unaware or unimpressed that the area’s iron forges once produced artillery cannon for George Washington’s army. Their sense of history orbits more narrowly around last month’s adventures on “ShopBite Strip,” the students’ nickname for downtown West Milford, once a factory town, now a magnet for middle-class vacationers.
Cosgrove looks uncommonly glum as he thumbs through a stack of exams in the teachers’ lounge. “I can’t believe anyone in my class could think John Brown was the governor of Massachusetts,” moans Cosgrove, 28, pointing to one student’s test paper. “He had to be sleeping for days on end.” The same morning, students in his college-bound class could name only one U.S. Supreme Court justice-Clarence Thomas. All his wit, energy and beyond-the-textbook research can’t completely reverse the students’ poor preparation in history, their lack of general knowledge, their numbness to the larger world. It’s the bane of history teachers at every level. When University of Vermont professor James Loewen asked his senior social-science majors who fought in the Vietnam War, 22 percent answered North and South Korea. Don’t these kids even go to the movies?
Americans are born, and then they are made. Tradition has it that history teachers have been anointed with the crucial task of infusing our country’s facts–and myths–into its youngest, most malleable citizens. Their classrooms were used to spoon out either morals, nationalism, or Eurocentric pride, depending on the decade. But today, their purpose is in a state of confusion. There is no longer agreement on which history to teach, nor how best to teach it.
The American story has been lost in the culture wars churning through America’s body politic. The first national standards ever compiled are under attack for harping on America’s failures at the expense of its triumphs. Textbooks are being criticized for being sterile, irrelevant or just plain wrong –and sometimes all three. Academic history of the old school–great men and their deeds–has been converted into a remarkable new style: history told from the points of views of non-whites, women and ordinary folk. “No one owns history anymore,” says Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley. “There is no consensus. Just a discordant babble of historians.”
That babble has given way to a cacophony of unanswered questions. Is one history as good as another? If more gets included, what gets left out? Do nations need to keep their shape by molding their citizens’ understanding of the past? And if our public institutions–especially our schools-don’t declare who we were, and who we are, then who will?
These are issues that should keep serious citizens up at night but are instead left to high-school teachers to answer – and that’s not a happy consequence for any side. The general sense has been that “anyone could teach history,” says John Pyne, West Milford’s social-studies supervisor and head of the New Jersey Council for History Education. And, anyone has. A 1990 report prepared by UCLA’s National Center for History in the Schools states that 13 percent of the teachers surveyed had never taken a college history course. Less than half had master’s or even bachelor’s degrees in history, or a major with some history in it. A separate study found that one in 12 history teachers is a gym teacher first, a history teacher by default. Educators used to joke that “coach” was the first name of most history teachers. “You do have teachers,” says Jean Fleet, a teacher adviser to the national world history standards project, “who are historically illiterate.”
In many schools, history as a distinct discipline was swallowed by the rubric of social studies–a catchall department. Too often that left history as little more than a dash through the past, coupled with a dose of current events. About 10 years ago, in fact, high-school history teaching had become an endangered species. But when the National Endowment for the Humanities reported in 1987 that two thirds of the seniors tested couldn’t identify the correct haft-century in which the Civil War was fought, alarms sounded. Many states, including New Jersey, added a mandatory third year of history (two U.S. one world) to graduation requirements, And textbook publishers scrambled to incorporate the latest academic scholarship. Educators, says Loewen, began to wake up to the fact that “if history is not taught well, we will have social stupidity.”
Up until the ’60s, the story of America was presented as a straight-and-narrow narrative. Americans were important cast members in the “epic march toward social improvement,” according to Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob in their 1994 book, “Telling the Truth About History.” Much was omitted when it interfered with the parade of flag-wavers. Christopher Columbus was always a visionary mariner, never a greedy conqueror. And much of it was just outright wrong, Betsy Ross may have known how to thread a needle, but no one truly knows if she ever hemmed a flag.
For the first two centuries of its existence, the federal government never considered stepping in to commission a national history. The idea seemed, well, un-American. Washington, it was thought, should refrain from imposing correct curriculums on schoolchildren. Yet by 1989, the concern and confusion were too noisy to ignore. President George Bush and the nation’s governors agreed to set national goals in various subjects: literature, geography, mathematics, history, etc. The purpose was to give K-to-12 teachers the benefits of the latest scholarship while raising the level of expectations for all students. Lynne Cheney, then the NEH chairwoman, set the standards movement in motion.
Times change. When the history standards were released last October, they were greeted with a hail of criticism from … Lynne Cheney. Her movement, she claimed, had been hijacked. Cheney accused the history committee, co-chaired by Gary Nash of UCLA’s National Center for History, of offering a “gloomy” picture that promotes “blame the West first” revisionism. Famous white men such as Thomas Edison were overshadowed by more minor characters such as slave turned underground-railroad activist Harriet Tub-man, Cheney complained. Nash responded that while Cheney counted names in the index, she missed the larger point. He was promoting a history of issues, such as the causes of the Civil War, instead of the exploits of great generals. He wanted to encourage serious thinking, not more memorization of facts.
His good intentions have been overwhelmed by political reality. In January the U.S. Senate voted 99-1 (in a nonbinding resolution) to denounce the U.S. and world-history standards for showing scant respect for the contributions of Western civilization. The Council for Basic Education, an independent group armed with $200,000 in foundation money, has enlisted top educators and historians to review the standards. Meanwhile, 20,000 copies already sent out to local schools are likely to sit comfortably unread in faculty lounges.
The confusion at the top has been matched by chaos at the bottom. As might be expected, all history politics is local. In New York, the state history curriculum put forth a few years back was a tribute to finely honed ticket-balancing; it was political correctness run amok. Slaves were referred to as “enslaved people,” minorities were referred to as “part of the world’s majorities.” Virginia worshiped at a different altar. Gov. George Allen championed back-to-basics standards in core subjects for his state’s 1 million children. He wanted a return to phonics over literature, memorizing facts over critical thinking. This can be excessive, too. It took a unanimous vote by the Virginia Board of Education last week to remove from Allen’s proposals the references to African slaves as “settlers,” alongside the Dutch, the English, and others. The furies such proposals set off cannot be underestimated, but, says Theodore Sizer of Brown University’s Coalition of Essential Schools, they are often beside the point. “Frankly,” he says, “most teachers are so overwhelmed by the daily grind that they don’t have time to be part of the debate.”
Far removed from the culture wars, Scan Cosgrove makes his stand-in five different classes, each meeting five times a week. His formula is hardly the subject of patenting: enthusiasm, imagination, information, all linked with taking the kids in his care seriously. He knows how to reach them–by connecting their TV shows, their fuzzy memories of current events, to the not-so-arcane past. “Did Newt Gingrich invent nasty politics?” asks Cosgrove, darting around the room in khakis and a blazer, the uniform of hi s preppy past. “Truth be known, there was no nastier political climate than 1800.” Incumbent President John Adams tarred his rival, Thomas Jefferson, as an atheist and an adulterer, Cosgrove says. Jefferson, in turn,charged Adams with sending an envoy to London to procure four prostitutes for White House entertainment. “Sex. Violence. Mudslinging. Americans love it. Always have,” Cosgrove says. “It’s democracy. It’s not always nice.”
Cosgrove is about being more than Robin Leach to the rich and once famous. Yes, he’ll tell the kids that Andrew Jackson’s beloved wife was called a whore by his rivals. Or that Martin Van Buren was accused of wearing women’s undergarments. But the point isn’t just titillation. It’s a little easier to make sense of today’s cut-and-thrust over Vincent Foster or Whitewater or Newt’s book deal if you weren’t born yesterday.
Cosgrove is a born-again historian. Burnt out by his soulless existence on Wall Street, he scrapped plans to study law and followed instead his undergraduate major: U.S. history, Jacksonian era. He calls himself a “conservative Republican and a Jeffersonian liberal,” and he’s steered clear of easily labeled teaching methods. Cosgrove long ago sidelined what he calls the “antiseptic” textbook favored by many of his fellow West Milford colleagues. He prefers staging mock trials to delivering straight lectures. He’s not fond of writing notes on the board for his students to copy, but he will, at the drop of a glove, re-enact Andrew Jackson’s numerous duels. (Old Hickory walked away from them all.)
For conventional teachers, history is a neat chronology of events and a celebration of the past. For Cosgrove, it’s a tool to decipher the not-so-pristine past in order to cope with the present. America in Cosgrove’s class is a land of crooks, of heroes, of violence, triumphs, and fundamental contradictions. In his classes, it is taught that Helen Keller was not just as a mythical deaf-mute child, but a vocal socialist. The lives of slaves are brought to life through real diaries from the time, including the writings of poet Phillis Wheatley. His students study the roots of racism by deconstructing Southern intellectuals’ rationales for keeping slavery alive. They read 19th-century scientific documents that claim to prove the inferiority of the African. “It’s potentially troublesome, especially for the one or two black students in the room,” says Cosgrove. “But we’re all, perhaps, recovering racists. They need to understand where it comes from.”
In his spare time, Cosgrove worries that the entire diet will only feed West Milford teens’ well-developed sense of cynicism. His class still faces the unpleasant episodes of McCarthyism next year, along with Japanese-American internment camps, Vietnam and Watergate. Cosgrove’s personal view is also Abraham Lincoln’s: “America is the last best hope of earth.” But what do his students believe? Jeff Gonzalez, 16, gives him some reason to hope. “What can be better than a country that admits its mistakes?” says Jeff. It’s democracy. And it’s not always nice. But in Scan Cosgrove’s hands, it’s never dull.
How well do the following people represent American ideals in the way they live their lives? (Those saying very well or somewhat.) 76% Michael Jordan 75% Oprah Winfrey 73% Bill Clinton 72% Hillary Clinton 56% Colin Powell 49% Newt Gingrich 27% G. Gordon Liddy 16% Madonna THE NEWSWEEK POLL, JUNE 19-25, 1995 NEWSWEEK POLL Which comes closer to your view: Immigrants today strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents BLACKS WHITES HISPANICS 37% 38% 55% Immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing and health care BLACKS WHITES HISPANICS 52% 53% 39%
