City Watch – Rachel Burstein
“Why can’t history classes show students why history matters? That’s what I thought as I read through a new framework for teaching K-12 history in the U.S.—California’s History-Social Science Framework. This is supposed to be the new, 21st-century approach. It spans hundreds of pages of minute detail. But the document privileges comprehensiveness over vision. This history framework doesn’t seem to recognize the value of history…To make the necessary changes, we could start with those few state standards that try to say something about the value of history…Any guide to teaching history should …concentrate on what history education can do for students. It teaches them how to make sense of the world around them—so that they might make history of their own.”(more)