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  • Teaching World History: Problems and Possibilities
  • Theodore K. Rabb (bio)

The world of education at the beginning of the 21st century has its share of intractable problems, but none seems quite so bereft of remedies as the teaching of world history to schoolchildren. There are both excellent reasons for introducing the subject to the young, and powerful forces demanding that it enter the curriculum. But in this case the how is much harder to answer than the why.

The problem affects millions of American middle and high school students, and one can predict that it will gradually spread throughout the globe. In the United States the issue is complicated by the fact that each state determines its own curriculum standards and graduation requirements. In well over half of the states students must take one year of world history if they are to complete high school. At the same time, the standards for demonstrating competence in the subject (also determined by each state) are a jumble of vague and unattainable goals: in Arkansas, for example, students in a single year, covering all of world history, must master sixty-four separate goals, such as the ability to "describe the causes of mass migration (e.g., famine, disease, war, religious persecution, ethnic cleansing)." The Fordham Foundation surveyed the frameworks and standards in 2006, state by state, and concluded that two-thirds deserved a Dor an F. Even those curricula that earned a higher grade because of the richness of their content (as opposed to a focus on skills) would tax the most brilliant teachers and students. How did we get into this maze, and what is the way out?

The American demand for education in world history is without precedent. None of the great empires of the past felt such a need. The Romans were happy with accounts of their own deeds, granting an occasional nod to their neighbors, the Greeks. The Chinese had little interest in the background of countries that lay beyond their borders. And even the empires on which the sun never set—the Spanish and the British—were content to focus on what they themselves had accomplished. Growing up in London after the Second World War, I, along with thousands of schoolboys, read Henrietta Marshall's Our Empire Story: Stories of India and the Greater Colonies, which had been a best seller since 1909. Filled with tales of derring-do, it paid virtually no attention to the peoples or cultures on which Britain had imposed her empire. Nor did there see many reason to do otherwise. What mattered was a narrowly defined heritage:Where did we come from? How had we achieved so much? What did we need to know so as to join the tradition and extend it? The history of those who had not been part of the tradition, which might be extended to Western Europe and the Mediterranean littoral, but not much further, was of small moment.


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The Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, posing with an elephant. Terai, India, ca. 1876. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LCUSZ62 61243].

In the last fifty years all that has changed. Revolutions in communications, in transportation, in economics and finance, and in border control shave meant the dissolution of the notion that the West, let alone Britain, houses a population with a distinct and homogeneous culture. As is often noted, one can go quite far down Oxford Street,London's main shopping area, without hearing a word of English spoken—and this in an island nation that had welcomed no major immigrant group since the Huguenots, exiled from France in the late 17th century. America, by contrast, may be a land of immigrants, but the assumption until World War II had always been that its cultural unity derived from its Anglo-Saxon, or at most European, origins. Significantly, Japanese Americans were interned as a potentially dangerous fifth column during the war, while German Americans were not. But here, too, the decades that followed were a time of fundamental transformation. Changing social values fueled the acceptance of minority rights,and the responsibilities of international power prompted a...

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