Doing History: A Skills Approach

FOR a number of years now, the cry has been abroad in the land that the explosion of knowledge is so extensive that we must place increasing emphasis on teaching students how to learn. What they know may not be so significant as knowing how to learn what they may need to know at any given moment. Unfortunately, American educational practices have not sufficiently kept pace with the need to change, reminding one of Mark Twain's statement about New England weather: Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. The teaching of history from grade school through graduate school seems particularly impervious to change in this regard. While teachers and scholars in other fields have been working for the last decade to articulate the structure of their disciplines as one way to approach the problem of helping students to learn how to learn, the very few historians who have devoted their time and energies to history education in the schools have either ignored or sidestepped the problem of identifying the structure of the discipline after some desultory debate over whether history has or does not have a structure in the first place.