Stories stick in our mind. History is full of great ones. High-quality curriculum should include them.
From its founding, the lodestone of the Knowledge Matters Campaign has been evidence-based, content-rich English language arts (ELA) curricula. A possible unintended consequence of the success of this movement has been reduced instruction in science and social studies.
I love reading and discussing books, and my broad understanding of history, geography, economics, and human behavior—all of which are taught under the banner of social studies—makes reading more enjoyable. These knowledge domains are fundamental to literacy.
This past November I traveled to Boston to learn more about Massachusetts’ Investigating History Curriculum. The visit underscored how much good history instruction contributes to kids’ reading skills. I talked with a fifth grader whose class was learning about people who lived in North America in the 1750s. His task was to determine which values informed their identities.
Describing Theyanoguin, a Mohawk clan leader, the boy said, “He was a Christian.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“See here,” he responded, pointing to the text. “It says he was baptized by a Dutch missionary.”
He wouldn’t have described it this way, but the boy was making an inference. The clan leader’s religion wasn’t stated explicitly, but the student could make a reasonable guess from the facts he had.
Writers assume we bring knowledge to a story. If they had to explain everything, their tales would be long and boring. They know that “baptism” implies a set of values that inform that character’s life and behavior.
The meaningful manner in which we connect ideas is what cognitive psychologists call “inferential comprehension.” It’s one of the powerful ways we learn. And research shows that narrative texts—stories—have incredible power for making knowledge stick. A research review led by Canadian professor Raymond Mar, looking at 33,000 participants across 150 different reading studies, concluded, “People have an easier time comprehending and recalling information presented in a story compared to that presented in an essay.”
In one sense, this should come as no surprise. The stories that Homer codified as the Odyssey, or that the Rabbis collected as the Bible, feature compelling characters struggling with powerful forces. Love and hate. Greed and kindness. One-eyed monsters, prophets swallowed by giant fish, rocks that crush ships. Great stories stick in our minds.
But not all great stories are fictional. Daniel James Brown’s The Boys in the Boat tells the gripping saga of nine athletes who came from rural Washington to triumph at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Ron Chernow’s Hamilton is the basis for a wildly successful musical about a Caribbean immigrant who arrived in New York with nothing and charted the course of a new nation. A man with God-given gifts who, like a Greek hero, was laid low by hubris.
For decades, we’ve bemoaned how remarkably little our students know about history. There are many reasons for this, but a critical one is that we rarely take advantage of their first years in school to provide structured and consistent social studies instruction. This is compounded by our failure to provide elementary teachers much, if any, history training during their preparation classes. The result is that teachers are often uncomfortable teaching it.
Lacking a coherent curriculum, students get history by the month. In October, it’s a lesson on Día de los Muertos for Hispanic heritage. In February, they decorate bulletin boards for Black history. March? Women’s history projects. These celebrations are an understandable reaction to a collective ignorance or minimization of the roles of marginalized people, and students should learn about the impact of people like Abigail Adams, Frederick Douglass, and Fred Korematsu. But how much stronger it would be if they did so in the natural course of studying the period in which they lived? Our Balkanized approach, consisting of names, dates, and places unanchored in time and devoid of context, ignores the interconnected nature of history and powerful “stickiness” of stories.
A comprehensive, content-rich history curriculum offers a superior approach, one that distinguishes between truths and myths, primary sources and secondary ones. Exposed consistently to coherent, compelling stories, students would build a cohesive understanding of our history that prepares them much more effectively to carry on the civic work of perfecting our imperfect Union.
Of course, history is written in many ways. It can reinforce social expectations and national narratives, or it can challenge them. From facts, students gain an understanding of the time and space in which history occurs; from myths like George Washington and the cherry tree, they learn how a nation wants to see itself. But absent a high-quality history curriculum, accompanied by well-integrated professional learning, few students will develop the civic sensibility and judgment essential to keeping our republic.
In the coming months, the Knowledge Matters Campaign plans to visit schools and districts to chronicle the journey of principals, teachers, and administrators who have recognized history curriculum’s power. One feature we expect to see in these materials, like I saw in Boston, is the use of well-crafted, age-appropriate stories.
We do our nation and our children a grave disservice by failing to take advantage of elementary school to lay a historical foundation. Students should know that Abigail Adams’s advice for her husband about how a new nation should govern itself was “action civics,” long before the term was fashionable. Frederick Douglass shows us what individual initiative can accomplish in the face of incredible barriers. And well before it was popular to chant “no justice, no peace,” Fred Korematsu opposed prejudice, even as it alienated him from his own community. Stories like theirs deserve to be told more than once a year as superficial nods to their gender or ethnic origin.
Matthew Levey has worked as a diplomat and strategy consultant. In 2013, he founded a charter elementary school in Brooklyn. His essays on education have been published widely. Matthew helps lead StandardsWork’s “history matters” initiatives.