History

Happy President’s Day! On a day that honors our nation’s history, it’s fitting to take a moment to consider how we’re passing that history down to our youngest students. When we think about the skills and knowledge children need to master in PK-3, our minds tend to go first to language and literacy--with good reason, because language and literacy are gateway skills that open to door for children to master further learning, and these are critical years for language and literacy. We also tend to think about social and emotional development and, sometimes, mathematics.

But that doesn’t mean PK-3 education should neglect children’s learning in the content areas--including history. As E.D. Hirsch argues persuasively in The Knowledge Deficit literacy isn’t simply a matter of accurately decoding text--to be truly proficient readers, children need to develop an extensive vocabulary and content knowledge, in order to understand what they’re reading and place it in the framework of what they already know. That means that elementary school students need to become familiar with basic content in science, history, geography, and so on.

Unfortunately, American public education has a poor record of teaching history to early elementary school students. Historian Dianne Ravitch writes,