By Abigail Perkiss
It’s no secret that historical awareness in the United States is on the decline. To cite just one example, a 2008 study from the Washington, D.C., think tank Common Core found that nearly 25 percent of American teenagers could not identify Adolf Hitler, and more than a quarter believed that Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue after 1750, not — as the elementary school poem tells us — in 1492.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. In 1998, a National Constitution Center survey found that only a quarter of the 600 respondents knew that the Constitution was drafted in Philadelphia. By contrast, more than 75 percent could identify the ZIP code of Beverly Hills — 90210.
The numbers paint a troubling picture: Americans are becoming increasingly historically illiterate. It is up to educators to reverse this disturbing trend.
As an assistant professor of history at Kean University, I spend my days pushing students to make these connections between what’s happened before and what’s happening now. Last semester, I introduced my classes to an innovative teaching approach known as “Reacting to the Past.” Developed at Barnard College in the late 1990s, the program calls on students to play the parts of historical actors during key moments of great change. Students, in essence, become these historical players, acting out and reacting to historical episodes as though they were genuinely inhabiting that space.
But these classes are not scripted for some predetermined outcome. Just the opposite. The central premise of the “Reacting” program is that ideas influence the real-life experience of people, and the real-life experience of people influences the evolution of ideas. Students are bound by the context of the historical moment and the sources that existed at that time, but they re-enact history as though it has not happened yet.
For 14 weeks, in a class called the Emergence of Law in Society, my students negotiated the complicated worlds of ancient Athens in the wake of the Peloponnesian War and 18th century France in the midst of revolution. As they worked to rebuild a system of Athenian democracy and to contend with mounting bedlam in the streets of Paris, the student got to experience firsthand the way history gets made, the deliberate decisions by individuals and the intended and unintended consequences that emerge as a result.
The results were unexpected and ahistorical. In their scenarios, King Louis XVI was assassinated — a poisoned macaroon was smuggled into a meeting hall — and a tyrant rose seemingly from nowhere to commandeer the Athenian assembly and subvert its democratic intentions.
These developments allowed students to reflect on the historical crises that they re-created, their feelings of impotency in the face of chaos, and the very human impulse to react and respond to situations without taking the time to deliberate and evaluate.
Then, in the final moments of the class, one student made a striking connection. The poverty, uncertainty and politicking that had been so present in our class-constructed French assembly? They are, the student asserted, the same feelings that millions of Americans are experiencing across the nation today. And the sentiments of discontent and restlessness that brought together mobs of angry French people in the streets of Paris? These same sentiments have emerged across the United States, from New York’s Zucotti Park to Newark’s Military Park to Oakland’s Ogawa Plaza.
The French Revolution of the 18th century provided a group of 20 students in a tucked-away classroom at Kean University the analytical tool kit to understand the social, political and economic upheaval of 21st century America.
Innovative techniques can, and must, bring the past alive, so that students can understand our present and negotiate our future. By understanding what has come before, we are better able to take an active role in determining what comes next.
Abigail Perkiss is an assistant professor of history at Kean University and a fellow at the Kean University Center for History, Politics and Policy.