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Prioritizing History is Hard
A though experiment
History may be the only discipline where laypeople regularly accuse the professionals of misteaching the subject. It makes no difference how thoroughly an educator explains why particular events were included or deleted from the curriculum; laypeople continue to accuse the educators of “whitewashing” history.
Before questioning the history curriculum, laypeople should conduct the following thought experiment: Make a list of events in American history that all students should know.
To do so, we must first understand how little time students have to study the subject. Then we have to determine the significance of an event before it’s listed.
TIME
Assume a kid had one hour of history class every day from first to twelfth grade. Now we’ll turn all of the hours into days. An hour per day, five days a week, is 20 hours per month, or 240 hours per year. After twelve years, the student has 2,880 hours. Divide that total by 24 hours, and we have 120 days.
Students actually have less time. Summers and holidays are not taken into account. Students in this experiment study history all day. Even with the rigors of the student’s daily schedule, there is still insufficient time to cover the previous 400 years, let alone 4000.