Similarly, another class I took, not a large survey class but a discussion-style class of about twenty students on the Russian Empire, served the same purpose in a different way. The class was taught entirely through memoirs and a couple of pieces of fiction, and it posed broader historical questions that pushed me to further research (Russian history, incidentally, is my principal area of interest). The other courses I took either had a practical approach that I found restrictive (the Enola Gay one being one example) because the professor wasn’t really pushing us to pursue our own interests or were meandering and somehow failed to impart any actual historical content during the semester (or at least nothing that stuck).

In a way, writing this comment, I’m coming around to your perspective, just from a different angle. I suppose what I’m saying is that yes, content should push students to do later research on their own and learn what they never could in four years, but that there should be enough options in any history program to allow students to take courses that are going to spark that interest. If I had been able to take say, six or seven classes on East European history, I don’t know that I’d be as embarrassed as I am now when I say that it was my focus but then have to admit that only two classes were offered and in fact I learned very little on the topic.

Haha, maybe all I hope is that professors will one day provide their students with comprehensive bibliographies, so we don’t find ourselves searching about the Internet for good syllabi when we want books that will teach us more.

So, Judith–you’re a intelligent person who likes history and thinks about it deeply. How on earth could 4 years as a History major ever teach you enough “content?” How is that the sole responsibility of your former faculty members? Do you really think even if you had a few more courses that you really liked, and fewer courses like your mandatory research on the Enola Gay controversy, that you’d feel like you had learned all you needed to learn about history?

I think thefrogprincess is right: “What we can aim for is that students leave our classes knowing how to teach themselves history.” You probably know now that a book by a popular author like David McCullough is going to be very different than a university press book. You know the difference between a primary and a secondary source, and you probably are shrewd at discerning which primary sources might be more useful or reliable than others. You can continue to learn more “content” as you see fit. But you wouldn’t have learned that by sitting in content-driven, textbook-based courses. I think it’s much more important to force students to be active participants rather than passive cyphers in the classroom.

Although you don’t have a particular interest in public history, my bet is that your exposure to the field and its questions and central concerns has made you a more thoughtful history student. Public history students have to confront the constructed nature of history and the choices historians have to make in presenting history much more than students of traditional history, traditionally delivered. (My department has long had a public history M.A. program, and although I am not a public historian, I think it’s great because it forces our students to think in more sophisticated ways about history.)

Those of us in the humanities tend to continue our education, work in an unrelated field, get additional training, etc. If we are prepared for a particular job right away it may be because of an internship, because we learned a language, or have a particular skill. Does that mean our actual degree program didn’t teach us enough? I don’t think so.

I earned a B.A. in History in 2006. I learned a lot in college – about relationships, about living away from home, about maintaining my sanity, about being a responsible adult, and about being an employee. I also learned some academic skills, such as how to research and what is “acceptable” in a paper. What I regret, though, is that I didn’t learn more content.

I was initially turned onto history through a 12th grade AP European History teacher. For the first time in my life, I actually enjoyed the subject. We delved deep into social history, read memoirs, and yes we did a lot of memorizing, but I enjoyed it. I liked knowing and understanding the themes and movements of history. As an undergraduate, I did learn some things, but it was all very jumbled. My university – we’ll call it Bark Dog U – did a lot with public history and the practice of history and I wasn’t all that interested. They offered to extend my scholarship so that I’d only have go one more year and get a Masters for free and I declined, because I had no interest in doing public history or working in a museum or what have you.

I know that not everyone shows up for the same reasons, but I think that for undergraduates, content is a big deal. Get people interested in the content, and then they’ll want to know more – they’ll want to go on to the practice. Graduate programs can teach them all they need to know about research and historiography and *doing* history. One of our required courses for the B.A. was a historiography course, and it was by far the worst course. Why? Because we had no choice as to the topic. We had to focus on the Enola Gay and the Smithsonian exhibit and really I was not. interested. The same would be true with the whaleship example. I’m sure I would’ve got something out of it but I also would’ve hated that professor with the fire of a thousand suns for the topic. On the other hand, I loved my senior thesis class. We had to do a renaissance or reformation topic, but that was all the limits. I wrote about the discourse of male homosexuality in 14th and 15th century Florence and Venice and had an absolute ball. I loved researching, I loved being in the library. It was fabulous.

So I feel that if universities offer undergrads a ton of “content” topics, and really let them go their own way and learn about the periods and subjects that fascinate them, they’ll eventually come around to the practice if that’s what they want. And others, like me, who have no interest in historical practice but a deep interest in reading and learning history, will have an opportunity to do just that, and go off into whatever graduate studies or professional field with a refreshing perspective.

I take your point that critical thinking can be taught in a variety of disciplines. However, you won’t find me defending history on the terms you stake out. This is probably because by the time people get to university classes, they’re down with the survey and what that kind of knowledge that imparts. I find that my greatest contribution is when I deconstruct history as it were, to introduce doubt, and encourage students to think about the constructedness of history (epistemology).

And, John F.: no, my critique really is of the concept of the survey, whether it’s taught to 15 or 1,500 students at a time. They are more egregious and irreseponsible the larger they get, but they remain fictions. I think it’s fine for students to get a “broad sweep”–I just don’t think those courses should be privileged in the history curriculum the way they are now.

Since it’s the non-historians in this thread who take umbrage with ditching the survey because they value it so much, I invite them all to take a turn teaching it. I guess the old saying really is true: history is too important to be left to the historians!

I’m somewhat on both sides of the philosophick questions pertaining to coverage versus uncoverage, comprehensive versus thematic, etc. But I wanted to quibble a bit with one part of Shoemaker’s argument, that the lab course is “a better metonym for [sciences'] discipline than the primary document is for ours,” because it “replicates scientific inquiry from inception to discovery to interpretation of results.” What the standard undergratuate laboratory course replicates is only scientific “replication” itself, which is but a small part of the spectrum of scientific inquiry.

That is, you pour a small quantity of a well known and common acid on a small quantity of a well known and common let’s say schist, then watch the bubbles emerge, profuse, diminish, and disapear. If you have to ask the prof (or post-doc) “why this rock just exploded,” the first responders are probably already on the way over. So no new knowledge is (hopefully) being created, even in tiny, controlled amounts.

This is more like the now-standard “primary source document analysis exercise” that is a part of many history courses than it is like the history seminar she actually describes when she talks about “the thrill of the chase, the wonder of holding an old thing in one’s hands, the discovery of something no one else knows.” Most document readers are pretty lame, and not by accident. We all know that there is/was a phenomenon described as “republicanism.” Somebody finds a petition that seems to indicate that there was also a variation called “artisan republicanism.” (Or “pirate republicanism,” “Indian republicanism,” your category goes here). Students read it and are led in tiny steps to see the analogues, or their absences. Their questions are fairly predictable (“why do the bubbles look brown,” not “why did the rock explode”), and the instructor stays safely in intellectual control of the whole experience. Better than the 270-seat auditorium lecture, to be sure, but not really the broad spectrum of elements that define “those aspects of history research that give so many historians so much pleasure.”

I’ve often looked for a documents package, or CD-ROM bursting with squirrelly documents that would compel the prof. to say “damned if I know, what do YOU think?… Maybe this, maybe that, let’s try something else…” The text that doesn’t describe any kind of republicanism, any sort of middle ground, any sort of imagined community, any sort of paradigmatic thing at all. Just the chaos of human experience. This would more fully replicate what keeps us all in the archives until after the bars close, but it would require a less than comfortable indulgence in pedagogic vulnerability. It would also doubtless disquiet a lot of the students.

Of the seminar that she actually taught at Connecticut, it was great, but, the phrase that the students “spent a semester with all the primary sources *I* had been able to collect…” somewhat undermines the notion that the students “discovered the pleasures of the hunt.” I told my seminarians today that I’ve changed my tune on internet-based research (partly due to recent personal practice). Where I once would have said “stay away, there are monsters out there” on the web, I’d now say there are indeed monsters–and misconceptions–out there, so be careful. Unless your school is hard by an actual repository of some substance, the Google archive is pretty much the only way to give them access to both the pleasures and the terrors of the hunt.

All this said, Shoemaker’s is the best piece of writing and thinking we have on this subject so far, I think. The last paragraph, in particular, is wisdom itself.

I sometimes ask my English students if literacy is a good thing, as a preface to reminding them that we must ask “good for what? and for whom?” Even literacy is not an immanent and inherent virtue.

“History” may have different values and purposes for general education and for historians, partly because “history” is often used to signify both a way of knowing and a body of knowledge.

It may be the case here that the debate centers on whether gen ed students benefit more from an understanding of the past–in its broad outlines, at least (a body of knowledge)–or whether they benefit more from a knowledge of how to approach the past (a way of knowing). We all know, of course, the the two questions cannot _really_ be separated: what we know is implicated in how we know it. But, if I understand Buzz, he’s right when he says gen ed. physics has only a partial relation to the actual practice of physics–that’s one of the reasons I decided to leave the field. But it may not be unreasonable to suppose that what one does as a practicing member of a discipline is not always what’s most valuable for gen ed students.

I don’t know what vision of history is most useful for non-major gen ed. students. But I am powerfully struck that this debate about the value of surveys comes at a cultural moment when students seem more than ever persuaded that the past does not constrain them. Students can well mouth all the platitudes about learning from history, but I think they really believe that technology and computers have changed the world so much that there’s a break between their world and the world of the past. I think that (other than in relation to their own families and personal experiences) they often feel free of the past, which becomes only a matter of curiosity (or not).

If I could teach non-history-major students about the past, the point I’d want to make is that we can’t know whether or not (or how) the past constrains us (in our thinking, our habits, our prejudices, practices, laws, etc) unless we know about the past.

And maybe I’m wrong, or crazy, or otherwise deluded, but knowling something about the past does seem to invoke the “body of knowledge” model.

I am all over this lab idea, but I think your critique, Historiann, is more about LARGE LECTURE SURVEYS and not about the survey (or an introduction to U.S. history course–”survey” implies mindless coverage)in and of itself. I am with Ignatz on this.

When I was completing my dissertation at Stony Brook (and had run out of funding from the history department)I took a part time job teaching AP US History at a private academy where my wife was director of residential life and where we also happened to live. (As a working class kid I had some serious issues with the place–but that is a story for another time and another post). At the same time I was also teaching the U.S. survey course at the university across the street. There were some days where I would literally step out of the boarding school classroom (wearing my required tie and sport jacket) and walk across the Long Island Railroad tracks to the university classroom. (I usually lost the tie on the way!). I used the same textbook for both courses and basically “covered” the same material, but any comparisons between the two courses must stop there.

As you can imagine, a “survey” course (even an AP History course which requires coverage!) with 15 incredibly bright young Ivy-league bound high school seniors was a completely different experience than the 100+ survey I was doing with the college freshmen at SUNY. My point here is not that public university students are somehow inferior to wealthy private school kids. My point is that size matters. I am convinced that I could have fostered a similar environment in the public university course if only I had the same number of students.

In the end, however, I am afraid Historiann is once again correct. It’s all about FTE!

Moreover, I believe you are mistaken about my opinions. I have not said anything about favoring broad coverage. In fact, I believe much more could be learned from the targeted study of history. The rote memorization of dates is of little value. What we can learn from history is how things happen and how that can guide us. This does not privilege one particular “story,” although some aspects of history are far more relevant to particular problems we face now than others. In fact, I have long thought that many of the traditional topics taught in American history classes were of dubious value, since they bear little relationship to questions we may face today.