Women's History and the National History Standards: An Introduction

In the Classroom Women's History and the National History Standards: An Introduction Christie Farnham Lynne Cheney, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), ignited a vitrioUc debate about the National History Standards with the publication in October 1994 of an op-ed essay entitled "The End of History" in the Wall Street Journal.1 The fierceness of the debate reflected the fact that it was part of the neo-conservative attack against the NEH, the National Education Association, and National Public Radio; but more important, it represented a major assault on multiculturalism. In fall 1995, Bob Dole further politicized the debate by calling the Standards "more dangerous than external enemies" in an Iowa speech during the presidential primaries, and the U.S. Senate followed suit on January 18, 1996, with a resolution censuring the Standards and demanding that recipients of federal funds for the development of student standards have "a decent respect for the contributions of western civilization, and United States history, ideas, and institutions, to the increase of freedom and prosperity around the world."2 Yet the Standards began as a bipartisan effort to address the glaring deficiencies in competency revealed by numerous measures of student performance. Fifty governors meeting in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1989 voted to establish National Education Goals. Both George Bush and Bill Clinton supported the plan, and Congress passed the "Goals 2000: Educate America Act" in March 1994, calling for the development of standards for grades four, eight, and twelve. A poU by the Public Agenda Foundation showed that 82 percent of the public supported the establishment of guidelines for the teaching of history. The National Center for History in the Public Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles, took up the task of producing the Standards, which were published in 1994, the culmination of 32 months of work and five drafts, representing the labor of several thousand teachers, historians, hbrarians, and other educators from across the nation who held a wide range of views. Additionally, nearly three dozen organizations, such as the American Historical Association and the National Council for Social Studies, participated. Despite this herculean effort at inclusion, the resulting guidelines, especiaUy the examples for teachers that they set forth, seemed to many Americans to be an unpatriotic, anti-Western, revisionist © 1997 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 9 No. 3 (Autumn) 1997 In the Classroom: Christie Farnham 141 conspiracy of multiculturalists to brainwash students into accepting political correctness. As a consequence, Gary Nash, codirector of the National History Standards Project, called for an independent panel of distinguished historians and accompUshed school teachers to review the Standards, including the examples for teachers, in order to make recommendations for correcting any cases of historical bias they might find. The Council for Basic Education convened separate panels to examine the U.S. and world history guidelines, reporting in faU 1995 that the goal statements were good but that the teaching examples asked leading questions or required students to make easy moral judgments about questions stiU subject to scholarly debate. The Council also complained that women and minorities were not sufficiently integrated into the categories of social, political, cultural, economic, and scientific/technological areas that had been devised for pedagogical purposes. Nash and his coUeagues at the National Center for History in the Public Schools immediately set out to rectify the situation based on these recommendations. Their focus was primarily on the teaching examples, which had received the greatest criticism in the press, and their method was eUmination. The results, reduced from three volumes to one, appeared in spring 1996.3 The following four essays are taken from a workshop held at the tenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women in June 1996. Surprisingly, despite the national debate over the content of the history Standards and its anti-multicultural rhetoric, none of the letters to editors, essays, and editorials, to my knowledge, examined the question of whether women— in aU of their ethnic, national, class, religious, educational, occupational, and sexual diversity—were present in these guidelines. The past 25 years have witnessed an enormous production of high-quaUty scholarship on women. To what degree has this knowledge been incorporated into...