Student's Making Decisions From Historical Facts : Historical Manuscripts Used

Excellent perspective on learning and teaching. Text books are a condensed opinions of the authors and what author writes the book is fought over by supporters of one's personal perspective of what actually happened in history. What should be taught is fact, and not how someone wants to change what actually happened in history to fit an a present day ideology.

Allowing student to make their own decisions when given actual transcripts of events teaches history as fact, not changing history as a fictional interpretation based on current ideology demands.

Students Could be Taught to Analyze Primary Sources
By Stevi Knight

In the past year there has been quite a bit of controversy, especially in Texas, regarding history curriculum. When the Texas Board of Education voted in November of 2014 on textbooks in Social Studies, History and Government the backlash over the historical interpretations of the books was overwhelming. The National Education Association, The Washington Post and the New York Times all criticized the way the textbooks dealt with various historical topics ranging from slavery to the Founding Fathers. Opposition continued into the new school year as NPR reported teachers’ concerns and parents reacted to the new curriculum.

But it is important to remember history textbooks are secondary sources — Researchers, scholars, historians and various other professionals comb through the facts, data, articles and documents of history all to summarize, interpret and condense the information into bite size pieces with bolded vocabulary words and chapter summary questions.

Primary sources are the documents that come from one who experienced the event. These are the journals, newspaper articles, letters, speeches and artifacts that instruct us about what happened in past.

Textbooks are helpful in that they condense history into manageable and related sections. The vast array of sources for historical study could be overwhelming but a textbook provides a false sense of competency. Students need to be reminded that they will not know everything when they graduate, rather they should be life-long learners, continuing to pursue knowledge and truth.

The debate over textbook interpretation begs the question, are we teaching students how to think rightly about history? Perhaps rather than relying on textbooks, students should be taught to analyze and interpret the primary sources for themselves. If handed an entry from a slave’s diary during the pre-Civil war era, wouldn’t the history be more potent to the student then reading “Slaves in the South endured great hardship such as whippings, poor living conditions and lack of education” in a textbook?

Rather than using a book that does all the work of analysis and explanation, developing citizens who can critically engage with and interpret primary source documents would allow students, guided by their teacher, to reach their own conclusions about history. The controversy over political correctness and historical emphasis would be muted as students would be the ones reaching their own conclusions.

A while back I stumbled across “Selected Case Studies in American History,” a 1970 history text that taught students how to analyze primary sources, looking at historical documents to reveal information instead of relying on a publisher’s analysis. What if students were taught to investigate history for themselves?  Perhaps studying history would be more invigorating then the current textbook-reliant tradition and perhaps