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Before getting to critical thinking, students need facts
John C. Chalberg
Published 12/09/2003

When it comes to the current debate over history standards, I'm Will Rogers. All I know is what I've read in the newspapers. So why should you bother reading on? In the first place, I'm a veteran of better than three decades of teaching American history at a local community college. Secondly, I applied for a slot on the standards committee, but was rejected. No sour grapes here. Just a statement of record.

One more such statement. When I was a young teacher and quite full of myself I thought my task, in part, was to "de-mythologize" America's past. Did my students know that our hallowed Founding Fathers were slaveholders, land speculators and Indian fighters? If not, I was on hand to remind them--and maybe even re-remind them. Oh, and did I mention that some of those same founders had a sharp eye for a well-turned ankle (maybe even a slave girl's ankle)? To be sure -- and all in the name of de-mythologizing, debunking, and otherwise defrocking the founder.

Well, here I am, older, maybe even old, and not nearly so full of myself. Besides, recent generations of students come well-schooled in the fine art of critical thinking. They already know a good deal about the dark side of Thomas Jefferson and crew. Trouble is, that's all they seem to know. I don't know what's been accomplished here beyond substituting one set of myths for another.

Yes, yes, I find myself saying all too often, Jefferson may well have slept with Sally Hemings. And, yes, he may well be labeled cowardly for his decision to flee from British troops during the American Revolution and his repeated nondecision to free his slaves. But this remarkable man did do a number of remarkable things, not the least of which was to draft the Declaration of Independence.

Students could do worse than to take the time to memorize healthy chunks of that remarkable document. They also should be able to spout the entirety of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. That, of course, would require students to do something that is very much frowned upon these days. Didn't memorization go out the door with the McGuffey Reader? Well, maybe not that long ago, but in recent years the learning and, yes, even the memorizing of basic facts has certainly been unable to withstand the ongoing assault on critical thinking.

One of the critics of an early draft of the proposed new standards continued that assault by dismissing historical facts and elevating, guess what, critical thinking, as though the two were somehow mutually exclusive. At least that's how it read in the newspapers.

I come from a somewhat different school. At the start of every term I tell my students that memory work is a necessary part of what they will be doing. How else do you get to that critical "critical thinking" stage without first knowing something? And actually knowing something means much more than hopping on the Internet.

More than that, I'm still full enough of myself to suggest to my students that one of two things has happened when a teacher uses that fateful first day to tell students that they need do no memory work. Either those students were just lied to or they suddenly realized that the course in question is without much substance.

Of course, the mastery of facts and critical thinking about those facts are not mutually exclusive. If anything, they ought to be mutually reinforcing. But why is it that proponents of critical thinking are so quick to give the back of their hand to the learning of facts? And why is it that critical thinking about America's past so often means nothing more than being critical of that past? In its best sense, critical thinking ought to mean using one's brain power to arrive at meaningful generalizations, dare I say truths, hard or otherwise, about the past, rather than simply to debunk it.

Facts, to be sure, can be elusive things. Worse than that, there are oh, so many of them. But before we head off into that sometimes airy realm called critical thinking, let's make sure our students know a few of them.

At the start of this fall semester I gave my 160 introductory students a 100-point pretest of what I like to call "walking around" knowledge of American history. I guesstimated that the average score would be somewhere in the low 70s. Instead a lone 74 turned out to be the top score. The average score was 27. Here are a few troubling examples of the results. Not a single student could identify Nathan Hale as having regretted he had only one life to give to his country. Given critics' concerns about the non-mention of the Great Society in an early draft, it might be noteworthy that four students thought Lincoln was its architect, while all of two mentioned Lyndon Johnson.

A whopping (?) 95 did name Lincoln as our Civil War president, while only 52 could pinpoint the 1860s as the decade when the war was fought. Forty-four recognized that Theodore Roosevelt was the "Rough Rider," while 13 knew that Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in 1980. Sixty-eight linked the Brown vs. Board of Education decision with school desegregation, and 60 could identify Germany as the primary foe during World War I.

Rather than shake our heads at yet another piece of evidence concerning the sorry state of our students' historical knowledge, let's put all our heads together to take advantage of yet another opportunity to fix what's broken. In the process, let's also keep in mind, dare I say remember, that facts are also stubborn things and that genuinely critical thinking is impossible without them.

John C. (Chuck) Chalberg teaches at Normandale Community College.

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