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.

"Kids, what's the Matter with Kids Today"

Randall Stephens

A fruitful discussion this past week in the NYT's "Room for the Debate" section. The topic: "Have College Freshmen Changed?" The introduction to the forum asks: "Are social, academic and financial pressures on freshmen becoming more intense? Have freshmen changed? Does the fact that many students are used to 'helicopter' parents monitoring and guiding all of their activities affect the transition to college?"

Participants note that less academic work is expected of current college students than it was a generation or two ago. Students now spend less time on homework. (Hours and hours on Call of Duty.) They also, according to some observers, have more difficulties with failure and tend to lack "perspective." The assessments are bleak, for the most part. Take Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State: "[Freshmen] also always heard they were special, and told to single-mindedly pursue their goals. 'Generation Me' is higher in narcissism and lower in empathy than previous generations." Or, Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, former president of George Washington University, "Leaving home and coming of age has always been hard. With the democratization of higher education, with an increasing percentage of American young people enrolled in post-secondary institutions, do we need more vigorous programs to help students adjust to the changes as they mature into adults?"

I suppose every history professor has stories of students who come up to them after a midterm, despondent, asking, "Why did I do so poorly on the test?" The professor asks: Did you spend time going over the study guide? Did you attend the TA's study group? Did you write out a few outlines for the essay questions? To which the student replies: No. And then asks again, "But why did I do so poorly on the test?" (Reminds me of the "Brawndo has electrolytes" scene in Idiocracy.) My favorite excuse a student gave for poor performance--this was back in my University of Florida days--was that she figured she was allergic to something in the classroom. This, she told me at the end of the semester . . . and in upspeak, nonetheless.

I think that making generalizations about a generation is dicy business. I never wore plaid or listened to bad reraw grunge while I was in college in the early 1990s. My parents did not have flashbacks. The music from The Big Chill was not the soundtrack for their life. They lived in Purdy, Missouri, during the Swinging 60s.

Still, the NYT forum deserves a close read. All professors could benefit from thinking about the challenges a new generation might pose to teaching and learning.