In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone) by Sam Wineburg
  • Sasha Coles
Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone) by Sam Wineburg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 241 pp.; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index; clothbound, $60.00; paperbound, $20,00; eBook, $18.00.

We all know that the Internet changed the game for accessing information about the past. In just a few clicks, you can sift through library and archive catalogs, peruse hundreds of years of digitized primary sources, and answer those nagging questions about names and dates. Users can also find manipulated images and videos, invented footnotes, falsified evidence, and fabricated stories, courtesy of profit-hungry "clickbait" entrepreneurs and Internet trolls. It turns out that both children and adults are not well-equipped to tell the difference between the reliable and the spurious. A new book by Sam Wineburg, Margaret Jacks Professor of Education and History at Stanford University, summarizes the situation in one word: bleak. A study that Wineburg and his team performed between January 2015 and June 2016 revealed that middle school, high school, and college students—the Tweeting, emailing, cell-phone wielding generation—could not evaluate the credibility of information online. In Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone), Wineburg argues for a reckoning and a reinvention. Historical thinking may be able to save us from this "digital free-for-all" (6).

The problem, according to Wineburg, is a perfect storm of out-of-touch standards, "rigged" testing, ineffective teaching, problematic textbooks, and tired taxonomies that do not prepare students to think historically, even when claiming to do so. Research shows that national multiple-choice tests evaluate a student's test-taking strategies, not historical literacy, and teach them that studying the past is about "collecting disconnected bits of knowledge" (29). Something similar happens in the classroom, even after robust attempts at professional development. The [End Page 170] Teaching American History program (TAH), a federal government investment of $1 billion in partnerships between school districts and history content providers from 2000 to 2012, sent teachers to summer institutes and MA programs, but program evaluators rated lesson plans low in the historical analysis and interpretation categories and found no hard evidence that TAH improved student achievement. History textbooks also deserve some blame, a point that Wineburg illustrates with Howard Zinn's world-renowned, widely read A People's History (1980). Zinn deserves credit for incorporating more diverse experiences and perspectives, but like textbooks in general, A People's History misuses sources, fails to respond to historiographical developments, and elides complexity. Historical thinking's other enemies include the Common Core's "close reading" approach, which asks students to focus exclusively on the text and ignore context, and Bloom's Taxonomy pyramid, a schema that implies that "the world of ideas is fully known" (92). None of these practices make history seem fun, interesting, or worthwhile. And none of these practices encourage asking questions, interpreting evidence, or solving problems. No wonder people struggle to stay afloat in a digital ocean populated by technologically sophisticated sharks.

We can and must do better to prepare ourselves and our students for "digital snake oil salesmen" (3). One of Wineburg's suggestions is to use history to "train students in ambiguity and build their tolerance for complexity" (175). Readers will enjoy the discussion of PATHS: Promoting Argumentation Through History and Science, a program funded by the National Science Foundation. Wineburg and his colleagues provided fifth- and sixth-graders with "Archive Bins" full of primary sources to let them practice "the intellectual work of making and verifying knowledge" (106). The book contains encouraging anecdotes about kids taking charge of their own learning, debating questions of bias, point of view, and interpretation, and enjoying themselves in the process. Educators and researchers should pay attention to another piece of advice from Wineburg: master new ways of reading and thinking suited to the digital world. The kids are not the only ones who need help coping. Wineburg and his associates found that historians failed to evaluate a source on the Internet because they read vertically, up and down the screen. Professional fact-checkers, on the other...

pdf

Share