Why We Need to Start Teaching History in Kindergarten
Mistaken assumptions about what kids will be interested in end up putting many at a disadvantage
Two recent initiatives bring much-needed attention to the sorry state of history and civics in K-12 schools. But they embrace baseless and harmful assumptions about what our youngest students are capable of learning.
Imagine you’re in first grade, and it’s time for social studies. You have two choices.
Option One: A lesson about “American symbols”—the bald eagle, the American flag, the Statue of Liberty—which will focus mostly on the concept of a symbol. You’ll hear that the flag’s 13 stars stand for the 13 colonies, and that it symbolizes independence. If you don’t know what the colonies were or what “independence” means in relation to the United States, too bad. The lesson won’t go into those things, on the assumption that you’re too young to understand them.
Option Two: A true story about how, one night in 1773, a group of men disguised as Native Americans threw tea into the Boston harbor because they were angry about British taxes; how that led King George to close the port; and how some people suffered as a result. You’ll be asked if you think the colonists should try to work things out with the king peacefully or declare war and try to become a new country. You don’t know yet what the colonists decided, and you’re eager to find out.
At the same time, you’ve learned enough from previous lessons to understand today’s story. And over the next few weeks, you’ll listen to stories about the the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the Declaration of Independence, and more. You’ll participate in class discussions about all of this, and you’ll learn vocabulary like freedoms, independent, and president. Eventually you’ll be asked to think about whether women, Blacks, and Native Americans were included in the promise of liberty and justice for all. And in the unit’s last lesson, you’ll learn about American symbols, including the flag and the bald eagle.
I’ve been in classrooms where both types of lessons were being taught, and I strongly suspect most first-graders would choose Option Two. And yet, Option One is almost certainly what they’ll get, if they get any social studies at all.
If you ask educators why this is so, you might hear a supposedly evidence-based argument that historical topics are “developmentally inappropriate” for young children, or you might just get a shrug indicating that this is the way it’s always been. But whatever the justification, it’s clear that the current approach bores children, wastes precious time, and prevents our most vulnerable students from being able to keep up with their more privileged peers at higher grade levels.
There’s long been concern about American students’ lack of history and civics knowledge. On national tests, 85% of eighth-graders score below proficient in U.S. history, as do about 75% in geography and civics. Now there’s also hand-wringing about whether it’s possible to teach these subjects in an even-handed way. But a more basic problem is that many students reach middle and high school without enough background knowledge to grasp much history at all, let alone understand it in all its complexity—especially if they haven’t been able to pick up historical knowledge at home. In the current polarized climate, that leaves them vulnerable to oversimplified versions of the country’s past.
In recent weeks, two civics- and history-focused initiatives have been unveiled. One is an evaluation of state standards in history and civics by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank. The other is a bipartisan, star-studded effort called Educating for American Democracy. Both groups advocate “rigor” and “depth.” But the approach they endorse for kids in K-2 is the same old superficial pap.
Fordham rates 20 states’ standards “inadequate” in both civics and history and another 15 “mediocre” in at least one of those areas. Only five jurisdictions—Alabama, California, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C.—get “exemplary” ratings in both. But even those miss the mark when it comes to K-2. (The Fordham report’s ratings cover K-12 and, as applied to the elementary level, evaluate standards in terms of what students will have learned by the end of fifth grade; I am looking solely at K-2 standards and what the report says specifically about them.)
Only one jurisdiction, D.C., includes anything of much historical substance: a first-grade unit on the Maya, Inca, and Aztec civilizations. Aside from that, all display only these typical features of K-2 social studies:
· Random, context-free lists of historically significant individuals—for example, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington lumped together with Neil Armstrong, Wilma Rudolph, and others.
· Random, context-free lists of holidays (Presidents’ Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, Veterans Day, etc.).
· The “expanding environments” approach, which starts with “all about me” and moves on gradually to the family, the neighborhood, and so on, on the baseless assumption that young children are primarily interested in their immediate surroundings.
· Abstract concepts like “then and now.”
Educating for American Democracy has produced a “Roadmap” with educator resources, but the listings for K-2 are meager—only nine, as compared to 89 at the high school level—and generally superficial. Predictably, there’s an activity on “then and now,” using images of objects from the past and their modern counterparts, and a unit on migration that starts with butterflies and caribou and sticks mostly to ahistorical generalities. The only resource that appears to have real historical content is a 21-page story about George Washington’s family at Mt. Vernon, but it’s told in a way that could easily leave listeners unaware of his historical significance.
Not every country assumes history is off limits for the young. Norway, for example, includes the subject in its national curriculum for children ages one(!) to six. A 2017 study found that Norwegian kids in this age group eagerly absorb history when teachers use storytelling supplemented by trips to museums and old houses or dress-ups in period clothes. Children retain a lot of information, are highly curious, and—through the accumulation of knowledge—develop a sense of the past. Even older children and adults take in information more easily through stories or narratives, which makes history the ideal vehicle for transmitting knowledge of civics and geography as well as history itself.
Is it really so important to begin teaching history in kindergarten or even earlier? Actually, yes. The earlier we start, the more likely it is that kids will understand what history is all about. “An important insight that the teachers gained,” the Norwegian study reported, “is that repetition over time, year after year, produces results over time. Even if children do not understand the concepts immediately, early experience can lay the foundations for later learning.” As cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham has observed, “If you wait until you are certain that the children will understand every nuance of a lesson, you will likely wait too long to present it.”
The K-2 years present a unique and currently wasted opportunity to introduce children not just to history but to knowledge of the world in general. At this stage school is still new and exciting, kids’ curiosity is insatiable, and they absorb information like sponges. But rather than enabling them to soak up rich content, we give them superficiality and abstractions—on the puzzling theory that they’re too young to understand stories about the past but well equipped to grasp abstract concepts like “symbols” and “chronology.”
It has to be noted that, to a large extent, this debate is currently moot. Reading and math have taken over almost the entire school day, often pushing social studies out of the elementary curriculum entirely. Given evidence that more time on social studies is correlated with higher reading test scores—and that more time on reading, which mostly consists of practicing illusory comprehension “skills,” is not—that’s short-sighted. But history is worth teaching to young kids for other reasons as well, not least of which is that, if it’s done right, they love it.
This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.