There has recently emerged a refreshed concern over the fact that almost no American high school students read one complete history book while they are in school. This habit has been obscured by other concerns, over poor performances in math and basic reading, while Social Studies (including History) has faded from the views of EduPundits and school leaders of various kinds.
The near total absence of history books in the high schools has several unfortunate consequences. Students, even at some Ivy League colleges, have been found reluctant to attempt to read an assigned nonfiction book, because they have never read one before. In addition, the knowledge that could have been acquired from reading one or more history books in high school is not available to help students make connections with what they are hearing in lectures.
Some secondary students, not knowing any better, are reading history anyway. Since 1987, I have published 1,562 serious (average 9,000 words) history research papers by students from 47 states and 48 other countries in 142 issues of The Concord Review. As time has gone by, more and more of these papers are submitted as Independent Studies, suggesting that they are being done quite outside the expectations of their school Social Studies (or English) Departments.
One author, a Korean student at a highly selective private school in Massachusetts, wrote a 14,000-word paper (in his second language) on John Law, which we published. I had lunch with him when he went to Harvard and I asked why he had not offered the name of a teacher he had worked with. He said that no one at the school knew he was writing that paper. There was a Korean listserve, on which he had heard about the journal, and he decided to write the paper on his own. An autodidact. This sort of self-starting scholarship has characterized more and more of our authors as time has gone by.
Schools still do not assign history books or history term papers, but numbers of secondary students have discovered that if they spend a lot of time on them and do a lot of reading, there is a chance for their history essays to be published in a very well-established quarterly journal dedicated to the work of secondary students of history.
The journal only publishes 5-6% of the papers submitted, so that means that many students do not see their work in print. Nevertheless, what we hear, over and over, is that the effort to meet very high academic standards has enabled them to learn a good deal of history and greatly improved their nonfiction expository writing abilities. Even without getting published, they are proud of their effort and they feel they have gained a lot from the work.
Colleges seem to appreciate students doing serious work in history at the secondary level, and about 50% of our authors have gone to the Ivy League, Chicago, or Stanford. Others have gone to MIT, Wellesley, Amherst, Berkeley, Oxford, Caltech, Cambridge, and so on.
Colleges naturally look for students ready to do college work, and our authors, who have read extensively for their long serious history papers, have clearly gained and demonstrated that readiness.
In the wider world, as well, the ability to read nonfiction and write well are valued highly. Engineers and scientists, among others, also need to be able to read and write. The Pentagon recently complained about the problems they are having with maintenance crews who cannot read the manuals for the equipment they are assigned to take care of.
Fine literature is, of course, of fundamental value in a secondary education, but there is no excuse for allowing it to push aside any effort to have students read history books and work on history term papers.
Will Fitzhugh was born in Boston in 1936, and has a vague memory of Pearl Harbor. He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard, and started The Concord Review in March 1987, while on a sabbatical from teaching history at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts. (tcr.org)
