In Defense of Facts and Memorization

Randall Stephens

I recently had a student in a large survey class who did not appear to be prepared for an exam. That's not unusual. But this student answered the essay question on the test in a very unusual way. She/he wrote a poem describing how much she/he hated "history." (I was glad to be spared from his/her wrath, at least in the poem.)

This got me thinking about why students say they despise history. It certainly could be related to how history is presented to them: dry-as-dust fashion, or one-damn-thing-after-another mode. Perhaps such students think of lectures, textbooks, and history classes in general as producing storms of useless facts, unconnected to reality. Some non-majors complain that they did not come to college to learn about the past or irrelevant dead people.

Some students might not have an aptitude for history, plain and simple. That's fine.

But how much of the undergraduate complaint against history has to do with an unwillingness to learn content? Surely one needs to know real details about the past in order to understand it.

It strikes me that historians can be a little too defensive about teaching too many of the facts, the details of history. To be sure history is not a collection of pointless facts, as I tell my students. Among other things history helps us undertsand who we are by examining who we were. I like how Peter Stearns puts it in "Why Study History" on the AHA site: "The past causes the present, and so the future. Any time we try to know why something happened—whether a shift in political party dominance in the American Congress, a major change in the teenage suicide rate, or a war in the Balkans or the Middle East—we have to look for factors that took shape earlier."

A student will need to know what actually happened in the past before he or she can go on to write history, tell a story, formulate arguments, and do the interesting work of interpretation.

That's not unique to history. Content and some basic memorization are a the heart of most disciplines. Biologists have to learn anatomy and classifications. Others in the hard sciences must memorize formulas and need to have a grasp of mathematics. Language requires plenty of memorization. And on and on.

History professors, though, blush a bit when they ask students to memorize a list of names, ideas, dates, and the like. A student of Antebellum America should know the difference between John Calhoun and John Brown. A student in a course on the Early Republic should be able to distinguish a Federalist from an Anti-Federalist. A student in a colonial history course will need to know that the French and Indian War came before the American Revolutionary War.

OK, I may be overstating the case, or grossly oversimplifying things . . . But, I'd like to say nothing more than this . . . facts matter, memorization has its place, and history does require exposure to and understanding of real content.

Oh . . . and George Washington never drove a Dodge Challenger.

What Do Undergrads Know about History?

Randall Stephens

Some years back I taught an American history survey, 1877-present, at a Florida community college. In an exam one of the students wrote an essay in which he/she placed the American Civil War in the early 20th century. I was shocked. Was I that bad of a teacher? Did incoming students not know the basic chronology of American history? Was this student just particularly thick? Was the state of historical thinking worse than in previous generations?

Several years ago my colleague Joe Lucas interviewed Sam Wineburg in Historically Speaking. Wineburg, author of Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Temple University Press, 2001), had been studying history education for some time. Has knowledge about the past declined among high school and college students? asked Lucas. "There is something almost comical about a group of adults wringing their hands, yearning for a time that never was," replied Wineburg about the supposed declension.

Regardless of whether students understand less about the past now than, say, they did in 1963, history professors are faced with a problem of figuring out just what a student does or does not know. (I've been thinking about organizing a Historically Speaking forum based around the question: "What Do Undergraduates Know about History?")

History professors enter the classroom every fall and spring, often wondering what they can assume their students know or don't know about history. Will the typical freshman have any knowledge of the basic chronology of western or American history? Do they have any ideas about what made the Roman Empire important? Would they know, approximately, when Rome thrived? (Perhaps they carry with them some general Sunday School knowledge about that or have seen Gladiator.)

What about American history? Would the typical student know who fought the U.S. in the war of 1812? What about the reasons for that war? Could an incoming major or non-major describe what was happening in the U.S. between 1877 and 1917? Could they say anything about what transpired in the American colonies between 1690 and 1740?

I've come to the conclusion that I should assume that most students know little upon entering the class on the first day. But, there are variables here. Depending on where one teaches, the students will know more or less. Perhaps those who scored higher on SATs and ACTs will also come pre-equipped with basic historical knowledge. Students who had good high school history experiences probably also fare better.

It helps to pause and think about this now and then. It's always wise to stop and meditate on your pupils' historical perspective before launching into that intricate lecture on the roots of 18th-century republicanism.