Recently a physical fitness expert came to a local school to work with staff and students on promoting healthy habits. Before leaving he brought forth a pile of prizes to award to students who were able to answer seemingly innocuous questions. One of his questions, “Who can tell me the capital of California?” was met with blank stares. Finally, one brave young man raised his hand, yelling, “I know! Capital C!” Silence resumed until he was awarded the prize for effort and cuteness. After all, technically, he was correct. The scene worsened as adult onlookers audibly groaned, however, when the students were unable to name our nation’s first president.

Amidst the sadness and humor, the history lovers present recognized the poignancy of the moment: our students often do not even know their geographic location, let alone how we came to be a nation. They might decode words, read short passages, and solve for x in simple equations, but fall short when faced with the task of speaking to other content areas. They learn the basics of what we teach them, gaining the ability to critically tackle tests, moving forward through respective grade levels. In the end, many do not learn the basics of geography, the history of our nation, the importance of civic function, or the meaning of constitutional freedom.

As an educator and teacher trainer I have taught and observed scores of teachers over the years and have witnessed many debates about our national decline in the quality of history education in America. In the past three years, observing in over 300 elementary classrooms, I witnessed little history instruction—but plenty of reading and mathematics and a smattering of science. In time I began informally asking why teachers were not teaching history and received typical answers: no time, too much emphasis on standardized testing, etc. One teacher retorted, “Can I really be expected to teach history when these students can’t speak English and need to pass a reading test at the end of the year?” When it comes to explaining why our students are falling behind in their history education, time-consuming preparation for standardized reading and mathematics testing seemingly reigns supreme on the list of reasons.

But alas, is testing truly the only culprit here? Among the issues, I see a critical point often overlooked: American schools segregate subjects instead of allowing the natural overlap between them. For example, the single subject of reading currently taught as a skill-based activity through anthologies containing short, irrelevant reading passages, could be instead utilized to teach history and prepare students for civic involvement. Classical Education proponent Leigh Bortins notes that “Whether reciting one of Cicero’s addresses . . . or the Mayflower Compact, since the early 1600s schoolchildren in America were expected to memorize and effectively deliver influential political statements in order to ensure they understood the role of a citizen” (1).

We gasp, however, upon encountering the sophisticated language in these classics and primary sources, and for the same reasons we struggle with the language of Shakespeare, we stumble through the documents, speeches, and accounts of history: we simply do not study them, let alone use them to teach reading or serve as models for our own writing. Moreover, if indeed we write the way we speak, one can easily surmise the sharp contrast between our language skills and those of our forefathers, especially in our world of tweeting, texting, and slang. Thus, the chasm widens and we stand little chance of instilling in students the value and skill of using civic language through the characters, plots, and settings of formulaic reading curricula during their daily block of reading instruction. Therein lies a source of major challenge in our schools: American students inherently view reading as an isolated skill rather than a tool invaluable to further learning.

Truthfully, there is no subject that exists apart from history, an all-encompassing and constantly growing subject. Because every new thought, idea, effort, occurrence, and event becomes a part of its realm, it stands to reason that the less we read, instruct, and learn of the history and legacy of our nation and world, the further behind we fall.

The condition of history education in elementary schools is conflicted and fragile. I live and teach in the state of Virginia, where the state requires my 4th-grade students to pass an end-of-year 40-question multiple-choice test, which covers all of Virginia history, geography, and economics from 1607 to present day. The district I teach for allots a total of 25 minutes per day for me to cover all that material. Twenty-five minutes a day for more than 400 years of story.

The Standards of Learning (SOLs) in Virginia were created and implemented about 15 years ago, just at the beginning of my career in 4th grade. As a 4th-grade teacher, my students only had one SOL test to pass: Virginia Studies. We were given 45 minutes daily for social studies. My first year, I had five students out of 25 pass the test, and my class’s passing percentage was the highest of all four 4th grades. According to the promotion/retention policy of my district at the time, a student could be retained solely on the basis of failing that Virginia Studies SOL test. Virginia was very serious about her students knowing her history.

Over the next decade, I worked hard to raise the bar for both my students and myself. With the support of my administration and my district, I took workshops with the Library of Congress, participated in TAH grants, created teaching materials, learned about using primary sources, and even got some hands-on experience through a teacher institute at Yorktown. I spent my summers and weekends traveling around the state of Virginia scouting out potential field trips, as well as just seeing history up close, photographing and collecting information about all those people and places we were required to teach: Monticello, Gunston Hall, Mount Vernon, Natural Bridge, Luray Caverns, Frontier Culture Museum, Richmond, Skyline Drive, etc. I’m proud to say that as a result of all this effort, our 4th graders have maintained an average of about 85% passing for the past five years.

But the cold hard fact is that due to No Child Left Behind and my school’s lack of “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP), the pendulum has definitely swung away from the focus on history in 4th grade. Now my 4th graders are required to take SOLs in math and reading, in addition to the Virginia Studies test. But it's only the scores for the math and reading that count towards our AYP. Now we are given 25 minutes a day for social studies. I have the skills and the knowledge. I know the curriculum, and I have collected primary sources and created lessons with primary sources as the center. What I don’t have is enough time in the day to actually use the lessons and resources I have. In addition, with the focus on making AYP, nearly all of our resources are going towards programs and materials for math and reading.

For example, we used to get money from the district to take our students to Jamestown and Yorktown for a capstone fieldtrip in May. Last year was the first year that we were told that we couldn't have the money for the buses. Consequently, our 4th graders missed the trip. Ironically, last year was also the first year that we were required to implement the revised Virginia Studies SOLs, revised by the state to add content. Less time, more content. Less money, less resources, less of everything except expectation of what our 4th-grade citizens should know, understand, and be able to explain.

Admittedly, I am an elementary school teacher, so I have most of my students in my classroom all day. In order to cover the Virginia Studies material, I have been making good use of the 50 minutes allotted to writing, and the 75 minutes allotted to reading and integrating social studies into language arts. We have done vocabulary study on words like "underground" which my 4th graders are surprised to learn can mean "secret." We have been reading historical fiction mysteries, biographies, and all those Dear America diaries. We have written biographical essays, and letters to Disney telling them all the historical inaccuracies of their Pocahontas movies.

But again, two years ago the district adopted a new scripted writing program and so we lost that 50 minutes of writing time. As the district chips away at the flexibility I have in managing my time in my classroom, I lose the ability to integrate the historical thinking and social studies curriculum into other subject areas. The basic problem, as I understand it, is that with a finite amount of time in a school day, something's got to give. It's educational triage; who or what do we make the priority? The federal government tells the state that reading and math are paramount. The state has to follow along or lose federal funding, but they are not willing to let go of their high expectations in the other areas as well. At the district level, we have to answer to both.

In my school, in my classroom, what's my choice? In my mind, historical thinking and citizenship are crucial to raising productive, participating, and aware adults. So I choose to strive and find ways to teach social studies in a meaningful way. But I am highly trained, passionate about history, and experienced. This year my 4th-grade team alone will take on three new teachers. Without the support of the state, the district, or our administration, and with only 25 minutes a day, what will their choices be?

In U.S. 5th-grade classrooms, students typically study math, language arts, science, physical education and fine arts, and social studies, which is often focused on history from early Atlantic encounters through the American Revolution. In all of these academic and artistic fields, 5th graders engage new material using knowledge and skills they have developed sequentially since kindergarten—that is, in all the fields except history.

Unlike their experiences in the other disciplines, elementary students do not systematically, year-by-year, learn the heuristics or skills to analyze and interpret historic sources; they are not given the tools to develop historic accounts, grapple with historic causation, or learn historical chronologies; and they are not given opportunities to explore relationships between geography and human experiences over time. The fact that we plunge 5th graders into history without allowing them to develop discipline-specific skills and knowledge in earlier grades suggests that we don’t expect them to study the past with integrity or depth of understanding. Instead of teaching history as an interpretive, evidence-based process that requires discipline-specific skills, we teach it as an exercise in memorizing codified narratives and disembodied dates and facts.

Since 2001, Teaching American History grants have funded an alternative to the status quo; the Bringing History Home (BHH) K-5 curriculum and professional development project in Iowa. In participating school districts, the project has engaged all K-5 teachers in systematically teaching historical thinking skills on U.S. topics sequentially across the grade levels. K-5 students in BHH classrooms read trade fiction to gain understanding of historical contexts; analyze original sources using an explicit set of heuristics; construct timelines to develop their knowledge of chronologies; illustrate maps with historic events and geographic trends; and construct historic accounts. Formal external evaluations of 3rd through 5th graders in the project have found highly significant student learning outcomes in both historical analysis skills and knowledge of historic events, figures, and eras.

Case studies of small student groups and individual children in BHH schools have revealed detailed pictures of how 3rd graders can learn and explore history. These studies offer a different picture than does much of the existing research. Previous U.S. research focused on children that had not systematically acquired historical analysis skills, and so researchers concluded either that children cannot accurately infer the meaning of historic images, or will use only material culture cues like clothing or car styles to form inaccurate inferences. In contrast, BHH studies have documented that children can learn historic political and economic concepts and events and use them to interpret unfamiliar history sources. Similarly, in contrast with U.S. and British research that has found students' grasp of historical chronology lacking, BHH studies have documented that children can accurately date and situate unfamiliar events in historic contexts with which they are familiar.

Even in light of the BHH project evidence for young children's abilities to study history, however, I have little hope that our education system will embrace teaching history systematically in K-5. One of the barriers to this change lies in existing research on K-5 history learning. It has largely failed to document the extent of children's abilities because it has been based on studies of children who have not studied history systematically. Because the research does not allow social studies methods faculty to form accurate expectations for student learning, the faculty cannot prepare teachers to help students reach their potential.

Another barrier is that in our high-stakes testing era what is tested usually determines what is taught. Multiple-choice tests that can capture middle-elementary children's historical analysis skills have not been designed, and existing social studies multiple-choice standardized tests for 5th graders do not assess historical analysis skills. An overhaul of existing tests to include the skills could provide an impetus for teaching history as evidence-based and interpretive. History testing faces an even more formidable foe, however, and that is the broad disagreement over what should be tested. Because historical interpretation is individual by its nature, and is vulnerable to political manipulation, it provides little or no common ground on which constituents with conflicting values and perspectives can agree.

Instead of testing, then, the current movement to teach information literacy may offer the best hope for a wider adoption of history in K-5. The skills we use to study the texts of the past also empower us to critically interpret today's ubiquitous online texts. If history professionals joined the U.S. education fray to emphasize that alignment, they might help make the case for history in K-5 classrooms. Meanwhile, in a handful of Iowa BHH school districts, students already systematically study history throughout the elementary grades. In most of the rest of the nation, the gap between what is and what is possible remains a chasm, with no bridge abutments in sight.

Kearney, J. et al. Evaluation of the Teaching American History Project: Bringing History Home II. Iowa City: University of Iowa Center for Evaluation and Assessment, 2007.

Lee, P.J. "Putting Principles into Practice: Understanding History." In How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom, edited by S. Donovan, S. and J. Bransford, J. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2005.

Levstik, L. and Barton, K. Researching History Education: Theory, Method and Context. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis group, 2008.

Levstik, L. & Tyson, C. Handbook of Research in Social Studies Education. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis group, 2008.

Wineburg, S. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.

Too often elementary history education in America consists of only exposing students to who did what, where, and when in hopes they will remember and appreciate it. The common tools employed in this shortsighted approach to history consist of the textbook, trade books, and possibly a video that present the subject in a predigested form where historical thinking has been subtracted from the lesson and replaced with reading skills at best. Little evidence exists to prove the effectiveness of these instruction techniques, but they continue to be used. If student math skills were equal to their history skills, a call for improved strategies would have been made long ago. Think of how often "man on the street" interviews ask a history question just to hear the dumb answers people give. How did we come to the point of asking history questions for humor?

The pressure to prepare for state assessments in other subjects overcomes thoughts of implementing innovative techniques that will make history not just memorable but also a vital part of the curriculum. These tests are known to narrow the curriculum, usually at the expense of teaching history. In one study, teachers reported spending 30 minutes per week on social studies instruction while enfolding the subject into novel studies or skills instruction the remainder of the time. One teacher admitted covering social studies "superficially in order to cover the greatest amount of material in the shortest amount of time" (1). The reality of testing cannot be ignored, but ignoring history instruction overlooks a valuable test preparation tool.

Elementary teachers work hard at their craft, but new ideas need to be considered when it comes to teaching history. If teachers and administrators understood that history involves skills such as investigating texts, objects, and images with questions, then the problem of replacing history lessons with more test preparation time would be solved. History instruction should be seen as something to be done rather than just something to remember.

The work of historians can be adapted to use in elementary schools as purported by Dr. Bruce Vansledright (2). For instance, in my state instead of focusing a lesson entirely on who fought at the Alamo and the events of those fateful 13 days, students should seek to understand why people would choose to fight against such dire odds and how the battle affected people who were not there. To do so students would have to consult multiple sources. The traditional textbook, trade book, and video formula augmented with a few visual and print primary sources would provide ample resources. In seeking their answers to these subjective questions students would learn the objective information through handling the information for an authentic purpose.

Students who are taught to interpret history instead of recalling it will have no trouble answering questions on a reading assessment. Furthermore, teaching students to write out their ideas in an expository form prepares them for writing tests. My students have done similar investigations and their findings have been exciting examples of "doing history." Their test results also show them to be well prepared without completing daily test preparation worksheets.

Driving history instruction with thought-provoking questions instead of lists of names, events, and stories to memorize gives purpose to learning the past. Most children do not have their curiosity peaked by the prepackaged stories in the textbook, but give them something to argue about and they will dig in. And if they happen to be thinking critically while they do it, doesn't it make us all winners in the end?

American history or any historical study is endangered today in America’s elementary schools. As the realities of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) became the driving force behind curriculum, time committed to history shrank. Why is history taught, why is history important? History defines a people. Not surprisingly as nation states emerged, history rose in importance. The elementary school is the first point at which a person engages in the organized study of their country’s history, their past. NCLB has driven that history away—from 45 minutes a day to 45 minutes every other day if that much. History along with science was hit by assemblies, testing, and everything else to preserve math and reading times. The results are becoming clear.

Eight years ago some schools were departmentalizing their 5th and 6th grades, meaning that teachers with expertise in a discipline whether it was history/social studies, science, math, or language arts taught that subject to all the fifth or sixth graders. One could expect that student achievement and interest would rise after exposure to a teacher who had specific training in that subject and was energized by the subject. The state of history was good and appeared to be getting better.

While history teachers of all ages may wince at the historical generalizations of upper elementary students, at least they had a sense of the national story. That story may have relied heavily on Pilgrims, presidents, and heroic figures, but the students had a baseline from which they could build. They continued through the scope and sequence of adding complexity and ambiguity to the story. The goal always was to provide a base for identity and for the responsibilities of citizenship.

Today, however, middle school teachers talk about having to start from zero. Students come to their classrooms knowing virtually nothing about their nation, its government, or the duties and responsibilities of a citizen. Jefferson is crying in his tomb. How can a democracy survive when its people do not know or understand their past?

If losing or delaying until eighth grade the ability to know and understand the history of one’s nation is a problem, the state of state history is worse. When one looks at the standard scope and sequence of a K-12 curriculum, the place one learns about the history and government of his or her state and local area has been in elementary school. Fourth grade is typically where students in Wisconsin study Wisconsin history. The next appearance of state history may be in high school where it is attached sidecar style to the motorcycle of U. S. history. The history of the state is an afterthought, often unsupported by a textbook in high school. A popular Wisconsin history for high school courses is now out of print.

From the inception of public education in the United States, teaching citizenship through the teaching of the nation’s history has often been a primary purpose of education. No longer is that goal a true part of most elementary curricula. Teachers are told to teach history by reading sources to increase literacy skills. While practice improves skills, historical reading is about analysis of the content within a context. One must “do” something with the reading. That act of doing requires context beyond the document, as Sam Wineburg’s research has shown (1).

For earlier generations an appreciation of history began in elementary school by learning the stories of Valley Forge and Daniel Boone, exploring the Oregon Trail, confronting and grappling with the pain and sorrows of diverse peoples coming to live together. The stories were often simplified and romanticized, but engaged students found a way to create seed beds from these stories that were ready for cultivation later in their academic careers. In later grades students came to understand the elementary stories as models and lessons to be applied to the world. History in the elementary schools needs to be taught as a base for the search for meaning, not just as a method to improve reading levels.

A nation without history is but an empty shell. The present state of history in the elementary schools is in danger of becoming an empty shell despite the efforts of effective, dedicated teachers. We live in a nation too concerned about the now of commerce and career and not concerned with the spirit of the people we have been and may remain. Acknowledging the important place of history within the elementary curriculum is the first step toward a better education and a wiser nation.