Past Meets Present

Yesterday, I had a very interesting conversation with Jeff Utecht, in China. (Syke is a wonderful thing.) Jeff explained to me that he thought that standards should represent skills, often thinking skills, that all students should master in order to function effectively in society. These skills should be important forever. They should not depend on the current body of existing knowledge. However, since the body of existing knowledge changes so rapidly the contexts within which students learn these skills will evolve over time. If I understood Jeff correctly, there should never be a standard for example that says that students should know how many planets exist. Instead, students should have the skills to integrate knowledge from multiple sources to determine how many planets exist. The substance of the sources will changes, the skills themselves will not.

After my conversation with Jeff, I got to thinking. Isn't it important to know some substantive knowledge about the past? Isn't it important to know the content of classical literary texts? Why/why not?

If it is important, there's got to be a good reason why it's important. My suggestion: It's important to know about the past and the substance of classical literary texts to the extent that this information helps us understand the world within which we live. But even so, is it important for students to know about the past or know how to find out about the past to understand the present? I'd argue that it's more important to know how to find something out than to know it.

Just last night I was working on a curricular unit for the on-line curriculum World History for Us All. (There's a great seven minute video on the history of the world, here.) I'm writing a unit on the aftermath of World War II. I was thinking about the Chinese revolution. Why should students care that the Communist party won control in the very late 1940s and kicked the nationalists off the mainland?

Well, should kids care about copyright infringements on music? (Do they find this kind of thing interesting?) Should kids care that China is the fastest growing economy in the world? Should kids care that the Chinese culture is different than the West's culture? If they are going to understand these ideas and the reasons for these ideas than they have to understand the revolution that took place in China in the 1940s. The current Chinese culture stems from this period in history and earlier. I'd argue that the time period within which we live makes this understanding vitally important. The only way to understand the present is to understand the past. (Students don't need to know the names and dates of when things happened. Instead they should have the ability to look at today's context and ask questions that propel them into considering the past.)

Some readers might be asking, so what about those parts of history that aren't directly connected to major current events? Is it OK if students don't learn about these events and phenomena? Won't the knowledge be lost? I think I'd argue that in the K-12 educational system we are not training professional historians. We are training competent citizens. But there is a role for professional historians. Professional historians should make sure that knowledge of the past remains intact, and growing, so that when current events call for it, we can look back and understand how we got to where we are.

What do you think?

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