But What About the Donner Party?:
What’s Important to Know?

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There’s almost nothing a teacher can present that is value free, that doesn’t state what she or he stands for as a school or as an individual. Here’s an example: In the part of the study where my students try to determine who fired the first shot of the War for Independence, we look at British and American accounts of what happened on Lexington Common on the morning of April 19, 1775. We read and talk about what the witnesses wrote. Students see that because of the writers’ geographical vantage points as well as what beliefs and attitudes they brought with them to the scene, they witnessed different things, although all of them may have felt they were telling the truth. That conclusion- the idea that one’s perception of an event is influenced by what one brings to it, is, in my opinion, very important and it’s gratifying to me when students learn it.

But to commit a week or two studying this one episode while our colleagues and their students in other schools are jogging briskly onward toward Yorktown, the Articles of Confederacy, the Constitution, and the War of 1812 means that to stay here is not to go there. An implied but nonetheless clear value of the school is that it’s more important to provide time for careful consideration and study than it is to touch on a list of famous bases without much reflection. We aren’t textbook reliant and we use a lot of different and slower ways to get at information and concepts: we use primary text and image resources; we look at art and make art; we do role plays, we take field trips; we do independent research, etc. Again, this is a statement not only of our beliefs about the centrality of the children to the educational process and the ways that children learn best, but also about what we feel is most important for children to know.

But what about the Donner Party? And will they learn about the XYZ Affair? You know, very few parents with whom I speak who remember the experience of being dragged at breakneck speed through one of those ponderous history textbooks (now even fatter because of the additional generation of history) say to me, "Now that was the way to learn history! God, I loved those chapters!" When I was growing up, I had a friend named Joe. Whenever any one of us mentioned the Revolutionary War (It didn’t come up that often, but we were in school), Joe would chime in cheerily, "Taxation without representation!" I was and am pretty sure that Joe had little idea what the issue of taxation was about, except for some vague idea about some Indians dumping tea into the water in Boston, and that he had no idea whatsoever about what the term representation meant, much less without representation. The phrase was just a shiny pebble he’d picked up and put in his pocket and took out and showed off once in a while.

One of the things I noticed almost immediately when I first came to Bank Street was that my students remembered what they had learned one, two, four, six years ago in other studies. And they knew what they were talking about. I’m as certain as I can be that this was and is a result of the methodology. Less is more. Or, maybe more accurately, more with less. Students will go into far greater depth with fewer topics, and make important connections to ideas that are transferable from one social studies unit to another and to their own lives. On the cafeteria line one day, a cynical graduate student said to me that she thought what Bank Street social studies entailed is a role-play in which the interviewer goes up to Vasco Núñez de Balboa and says, "How do you feel about having discovered the Pacific Ocean?" I laughed. But I think that what really happens, excesses aside, is that when students have the time to gather information and to consider historical events deeply, they develop the ability to notice the kinds of subtleties, the kinds of more universal understanding of why people act the way they do, that are reflected in the anecdotes at the beginning of the article.

Continued

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