Here’s a story in USA Today last week on yet another survey of U.S. history knowledge on the part of students. (Other surveys are here [scroll down to “Losing Our Memory”] and here.) Researchers asked 2,000 high school juniors and seniors across the country to name “the most famous Americans in history” — excluding U.S. presidents. Tabulating the results, researchers came up with this ranking:
1. Martin Luther King, Jr.
2. Rosa Parks
3. Harriet Tubman
4. Susan B. Anthony
5. Benjamin Franklin
6. Amelia Earhart
7. Oprah Winfrey
8. Marilyn Monroe
9. Thomas Edison
10. Albert Einstein
Traditionalists will wince at this list, and it’s hard not to agree wtih KC Johnson here that the placement of Amelia Earhart and Harriet Tubman above Alexander Hamilton — or, we might add, Daniel Webster, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, John Marshall, John D. Rockefeller, Booker T. Washington, Harriet Beecher Stowe . . . — is a regrettable sign.
The question did ask for “most famous,” though, not most important. That any pre-1990s figures made it onto the list may be cause for at least some relief, even though the selections indicate just how far out of the way current social-studies curricula go in emphasizing women and African-Americans.
On that issue, though, the researchers haven’t a whisper of criticism. In fact, they’re happy with it. Stanford professor Sam Wineburg speaks of “a kind of shift going on, from the narrative of the founders, which is the national mythic narrative, to the narrative of expanding rights.” He proceeds to say that Oprah Winfrey enjoys “a kind of symbolic status similar to Benjamin Franklin” — a “fantastical” assertion, Johnson notes, and if it’s true it doesn’t seem to bother Wineburg a bit.
Another voice in the USA Today story is Dennis Denenberg, author of 50 American Heroes Every Kid Should Meet, who also doesn’t mind the orientation of the list. “The cold war is over and gone. The civil rights movement is ongoing.”
What to say, except that for an educator to consign so easily a historical reality of the scope of the cold war to an irrelevance for young people is beyond slack. It’s irresponsible, and a betrayal of the historian’s duty. If the kids listen, no wonder they end up knowing so little, and thinking that they don’t need to know any more.
