I have been reading a lot over the last several months about the ways schools will be teaching subjects and how changes are supposed to make everything better. Do you know if these changes will affect how history is taught?

Yes. What you are referring to is called Common Core. It has been agreed upon by 45 states and the District of Columbia. This includes Louisiana. First, let me say that generally, I am in favor of national standards if they will make our region stronger, but not if they backfire. Let’s focus on teaching history.

Prior to the 1920s, most school children in rural areas in this country went to one-room school houses for their education. Unless you lived in big cities, even larger schools were tiny by today’s standards. Education was fairly standard across the United States. You learned to spell from blue-backed spelling books, and you learned to read from a series of progressively more challenging McGuffey Readers. They were very far ahead of their time and are still age-appropriate difficult today.

The progress of a child in the Midwest could be compared to a child in the Deep South without the need for extensive testing to see if he or she met standards. There were not many. At the same time, children were promoted to the next grade by performing the basic requirements for passing to the next level. This was simple, inexpensive and generic.

As this progressed and the amount of information to be learned increased exponentially, educational theorists decided each state should be required to judge how each pupil was achieving.

Every state created new levels of administrators to check on the advancement of students across their jurisdictions. Some states did better than others. Following the concept that wealthier states had better school systems than poorer states, an attempt was made to clone those programs. Still, states could create their own achievement tests or use one of several national models.

One thing remained the same in social studies. Over a 12-year teaching cycle, in each region, state histories were taught at least twice, American history was taught at least twice, and world history was taught as an option. Children across decades were exposed to history as a central theme to make them better citizens.

Some states dropped steeply in their rankings when they were compared to other states and regions. The answer, so the theorists surmised, was to create a national standard by which all students can be compared. In a modern version of the old McGuffey reader days, any student would be directly compared to any other student. This is Common Core. It is very controversial. Teachers should have more leeway in when they teach material and how they teach material, but at the end of a school year, all students should know the same material across the country. This is not a bad idea. I have doubts about whether local school districts will allow this leeway. What I am most disturbed about, however, is that, due to the amount of required information to be imparted, some things are going to the wayside. In Louisiana, for example, there will be no more eighth-grade Louisiana history. It will be reduced to one or two units following the high stakes testing. How do you instill pride in your state if you are not allowed to learn it? How do you know what is important to save and preserve if you don’t know about it? Will there ever be another Archie MacDonald, Eric Brock or Lyle Saxon? If we are not careful and don’t create new avenues for learning, we may be asking a different set of questions. Why does it matter if we don’t know what is important?

Dr. Gary Joiner is the Leonard and Mary Anne Selber Professor of History at LSUS, where he is also director of the Red River Regional Studies Center. Questions for “The History Doctor” may be addressed to editor@ theforumnews.com.