RALEIGH – It’s happened again. I wrote a piece just last week about our state’s shameful record of setting low academic standards that mislead rather than lead. Now, according to a new study commissioned for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, North Carolina ranks in the bottom tier of states nationally in its expectations for student mastery of world history.
I responded viscerally to this latest evidence of the state’s educational deficiencies for at least two reasons. First, the lead author of the report was Walter Russell Mead, a celebrated scholar and author of the fascinating book Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. It’s one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read in years.
Second, I have long believed that if taxpayer-funded education is to fulfill its legitimate role at all – which is about citizenship and strengthening the Republic, not about job training or babysitting – then high standards and performance in history instruction are indispensable. (This is an important, if implicit, theme running through Special Providence). It makes me profoundly nervous to imagine the thought process of voters who can’t locate Iraq or Afghanistan on a map, understand at least a little why rising powers China and India are so different, or reflect on the lessons of America’s wars because they know virtually nothing about them.
If I’m right to worry about the significant of history in shaping the minds of young North Carolinians, then everyone else will be right to worry about the findings of the new Fordham study. North Carolina received a grade of F. Admittedly, it was one of 20 states so graded. But that’s cold comfort. And several of our neighboring states – South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia – received As. Our Southern embarrassment continues.
What did Mead examine? Whether states have set high, meaningful standards for history knowledge and designed a curriculum to meet them, primarily. About North Carolina, the report observed that in the lower grades our public schools introduce historical content by region, rather than by chronology, which “breeds repetition and discontinuity.” At the high-school level, North Carolina’s evident deficiencies include a lack of specific concepts and information to be imparted and an attachment to airy concepts such as “the conditions, racial composition, and status of social classes, castes, and slaves in world societies and analy[ing] change in those elements.” Mead did praise North Carolina for mentioning specific African civilizations in their standards, which was most welcome and apparently most uncommon. Students will learn much more by studying actual cultures, be they Songhai or ancient Zimbabwe, rather than studying about “Africa” as an abstraction.
Rather than play in a wind-swept sandbox, North Carolina students should be encouraged to build their understanding of history and culture on solid foundations of specific content, Mead concluded. The state’s amorphous objectives have “little meaning and [are] more likely to confuse students than improve their understanding of history,” he wrote. “The state needs to dig its heels in and supply actual content if it hopes to deliver on its promise to prepare its students for life in the twenty-first century.”
Consider his motion seconded. All in favor?
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.