History is Bunk

I repeatedly heard the same troubling message when I attended the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in Chicago last month.

History teaching is disappearing. Memory is fading. The connections between generations of professionals are broken.

Historians of education complained that their courses are being eliminated, and senior scholars in the field are not being replaced when they retire.

Prof. Vincent Anfara, a nationally recognized expert on middle schools, told me that the founders and thought leaders of the middle school movement were now either dead or no longer active. The current generation of middle school leaders, moreover, hardly even knows about these founders or their ideas. The current crop of leaders have no clear idea why middle schools were created, and are falling prey to such "innovatons" as standardized curricula and testing that would nullify everything special about middle schools as places to explore and learn in developmentally appropriate ways.