The Wrong Kind of Historical Memory

Many people think that remembering isolated bits of historical information on demand is a must for every citizen in a democracy like ours. The folks who decide our history curriculum standards certainly think so, even though they know that we’ll forget most of the history we learned in school. A moment’s thought will tell you that remembering the date of the invasion of Normandy in WWII when someone asks for it is a poor indication of your understanding of history.

So let’s kill this idea right now. If you don’t know the date of the Normandy invasion, you’ll manage just fine.

I teach history in a public high school for a living, which means that I am more boring than most people. When I’m at parties or family gatherings I have very little to say. No one wants to hear about public policy or historical trends, except other history teachers and cranks with extreme political ideas who want to argue with me. So I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut at parties.

Curriculum committees place a premium on knowing isolated historical facts, but you’re better off knowing baseball trivia, or how to crochet. If you’ve ever met a real bore at a party, you know that already. When I think back to my own high school class in American history – we were required to take only one year of it, which tells you something about my high school – I barely remember a thing. Mainly I remember that the teacher told stories and showed movies. I do remember one piece of advice he gave us: If you want to be rich, get a job at McDonald’s and live as cheaply as possible so you can buy your own McDonald’s. Then use the profits to buy another McDonald’s, and so on, until you have a chain of them. The lesson my teacher wanted to convey was that most people lack the self discipline to make a bundle of money, which is why most people aren’t rich. The lesson I took from the story was that becoming rich was something so boring I would avoid it altogether, and I did. I became a teacher instead.

In the classroom I am stuck with this idea that learning facts is what history is all about, so I give tests with questions that years from now my students will not need to know the answers to, and thankfully, will have forgotten, so they can remember more useful things, like to check their mail carefully for bills. Still, my students expect these tests; if I didn’t give them, they’d be disappointed, grow despondent and probably stop working altogether.

The really important things my students do in history class don’t involve much declarative memory at all. They research, write news articles, speeches and dialogs. They interpret graphs and maps, write reports and make museum displays. They look at different interpretations of events and decide which interpretation makes the most sense. They debate and discuss. The put together collections of primary documents, organizing them into a coherent whole, and explain what the collection means. If my students ever need a fact when they’re doing any of these things, they do what I do and look it up on the Internet or in a book. And if I have taught them how to use sources properly, they will get their facts right, even the date of the Normandy landings.

Oh, yes, D-Day was June 6, 1944. Operation Overlord. Forget it.