By KRISTIN KNAUTH
History teachers, professors, authors and scholars gathered at the Library on March 1-2 for what they hoped was a historic occasion: the launch of a national campaign to restore history education to a central role in America's schools.
Convened by the Library, the National Council for History Education (NCHE) and the Council for Basic Education, the "Symposium on Advancing History in America's Schools" was a response to recent reports showing that most American students' knowledge of history has fallen far below established American and world standards.
At the close of the two-day session, the 145 participants declared that the decline in Americans' historical knowledge can be reversed. They offered recommendations for revitalizing history education.
The event attracted distinguished historians and writers including Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough; William McNeill, professor of history emeritus at the University of Chicago; Spencer Crew, director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History; Mary Beth Norton, professor of history at Cornell University; Vartan Gregorian, a historian and president of Brown University; and Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's magazine.
The event was organized by Theodore K. Rabb, professor of history at Princeton University and chairman of the board for NCHE. Dr. Billington's "enthusiasm and support were crucial, as were [Director of Scholarly Programs] Prosser Gifford's," to staging the symposium, Dr. Rabb said. "First, the Librarian is a very distinguished historian himself. Second, if any major American institution can put its weight behind the need for history in the schools, I can't think of a weightier and more resonant institution to do that than the Library. . . . [The Library] is our national memory embodied."
One of the meeting's goals was to unite teachers from every state and all levels of education -- kindergarten through university -- with leading American historians. With support from the Ford Foundation, NCHE selected 120 teachers from a nationwide pool of applicants to participate in the conference and discussions.
History teachers can be key to reforming America's "present-minded society," emphasized Dr. Billington in his remarks. "It's the teacher, the human interface . . . who, at the end of the semester, remains the key to learning.
"In this society -- and particularly in this city," he continued, "the study of history is too often subordinated to the preoccupations of the moment. As a historian myself, I have long been deeply committed to the value of understanding the past if we are to make sense of what is happening now and may happen in the future."
Mr. McCullough, author of Truman and Brave Companions: Portraits in History among other works, told how he became a historian. "I became a historian by pure chance," he recalled. While touring the Library's Thomas Jefferson Building with his wife, he happened to pass a table where some historical photos lay waiting to be filed. They were "amazing photos of the Johnstown flood of 1889. . . . The extent of the violence revealed in them was so overwhelming that we felt we had to read about it." Mr. McCullough went on to write a book about the Johnstown flood -- but, more important, the photos became "the springboard that launched me into a whole new career."
While a guest lecturer at Cornell University, Mr. McCullough tried to give his students a similar experience by randomly distributing historical photographs and telling the students to write about the photos in any way they chose. Most of the students attested to the potency of the exercise, and several are now working as historians.
"One cannot underestimate the fascination and the effect on us of stories," Mr. McCullough concluded.
Other speakers addressed the crucial role of history education in helping students become good citizens.
Lewis Lapham joked that he had majored in history but "lacked the fortitude" to become a history professor. "Seriously," he added, "the absence of history knowledge [in today's students] is alarming to me. I give it a sense of danger and urgency because, if you don't know where you came in in the story, you're at the mercy of the mass media. . . . History gives people a sense of their kinship with the wider self."
The symposium produced three major recommendations for improving history education. First, secondary education should include at least four full years of history instruction between grades seven and 12, and social studies in the elementary grades should be history-centered. Second, history teachers should meet certain minimum requirements for certification. Finally, history instruction should focus on stories, "habits of mind" and the ways people learn about history; it should cover "four centuries of U.S. history and every major era of Western civilization and/or world history."
The recommendations will be finalized and published by NCHE, a nonprofit organization whose mission is "to create a grass-roots commitment to history," according to Dr. Rabb. NCHE publishes a national newsletter, History Matters!, as well as scholarly papers, and conducts a variety of national conferences and professional development programs for history educators.
At the end of Friday's session, Robert Zich, director of electronic programs for the Library, and Martha Dexter, project manager with the Library's National Digital Library (NDL) Program, gave an audiovisual presentation on the resources NDL offers to history teachers and scholars using the World Wide Web.
Educators and K-12 students are one of the primary constituencies of NDL. Early this year NDL unveiled the Learning Page, a World Wide Web gateway tailored specifically to helping this group access the Library's historical collections (URL: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu; see story on page 100).
"We will be keenly interested in your reactions because we are all clearly on the threshold of new possibilities," said Dr. Billington. "Being able to combine music, maps, photographs, film, text, voice in an integrated way and make this accessible via the Internet can make history come alive for students."
Kristin Knauth is a free-lance writer/editor working in the Public Affairs Office.