National Standards
for Ideas
October 28, 1995
The current debate
over the National Standards for United States
History has focused on the content of the
standards. As an example, conservatives have
criticized the emphasis of the Sierra Club over The
US Constitution. Liberals
have countered by claiming that the critics are
really upset because the document is not
“celebratory enough.”
But questioning the contents of the standards is
secondary to the first questions, which should be:
what is the purpose of the standard? Should the US
government be involved in writing any such
standards? What is the purpose of the approval of
the National Educational Standards and Improvement
Council?
History is a set of
ideas. It is a view of what the world was and how
the present world came to be the way it is. It is
an investigation, a determination of facts and of
the cause and effect relationship between the facts,
and a series of value judgments by the historian as
to which facts are relevant and which causes are
primary. To set a standard on this process is to
define and prescribe a method to this process of
identification and judgment, thus the stress on
“historical thinking skills over rote learning.”
For the federal government to fund, and then
“approve” this process means that the government is
funding and approving a certain method of
thinking, and of evaluating ideas. This is Thought
Control.
Defenders of the
standards claim that independent teachers will be
able to use the standards as a “resource rather than
a bible,” that they are strictly “voluntary.” But
this is ludicrous. If so, then why “approve” them?
Why not simply publish them, along with the list of
the distinguished names who shared in their
development, and made available as that resource?
No, the proponents want the approval and sanction of
the federal government, the purpose of which must be
to place government authority behind the use of the
standards in the evaluation of teaching institutions
pursuing federal money. The institutions would then
(voluntarily???) use the standards as approval
guidelines and measure the performance of individual
teachers against them. Then the institutions could
then be approved or not, depending on the adherence
of the teachers to the approved standards. There
will be no national debate over a specific school
who decides not to follow the standard, and any
individual teacher who decides not to follow them
will be left impotent and alone, to face forced
compliance or loss of livelihood.
If this involvement
is accepted and made the norm, it will be proper to
extend the concept into other areas. There will be
no principle to stop such a trend. How about a
“National Standard for Religion” in which the US
government can lay out the proper method of teaching
religion? Of course, no particular type of religion
will be promoted, merely certain “thinking skills”
to be used in the teaching of any religion. The
same could apply to the National Standards for
Language, Psychology, Journalism, Economics,
Political Science and every other field into which
National Thinking Skills are found to be important.
Before supporting or
opposing the content of these standards, consider
whether the federal government should be in the role
of prescribing any kind of proper thinking methods.
Method drives content; it is because method is so
important that there should be no “National
Standard” for it. I most certainly have an opinion
of the content of the History Standards, but that is
secondary to the primary issue. I would be opposed
to the formulation and approval of the standards,
even if they agreed completely with my own ideas.
Published in The Historian,
Michigan State University
Fall, 1995
