Are America’s Youth Disinterested in Learning History?

A few weeks ago, at my job at a summer camp at a Philadelphia rec center, I overheard a conversation that, word to Krs-One, still has me thinking very deeply. The conversation was with a bunch of my male African American coworkers who are mostly high school students. None of them are older than the age of sixteen.

The discussion was about how one of the workers was unfamiliar with the writings of the renowned writer, Maya Angelou. In fact, he claimed to have never even heard of her. The other workers were stunned by the young man’s ignorance. After all, Ms Angelou is one of the most highly regarded figures of not only African American culture, but also of American culture as a whole.

In defense of his ignorance, the young worker quickly responded by questioning the significance of Angelou’s work. However, his next question was what really caught my attention.

After he questioned the importance of learning of figures like Angelou, he questioned the importance of learning history in general.

He stated that he couldn’t see how learning history was helping and that it felt unnecessary for him to learn about things that happened “back in 200 B.C.”, as he put it.

Me being a history lover and one of the elders of the group, automatically felt compelled to answer his question. I told him, “Learning your history helps you to get a better understanding of the world around you and it helps you to get a knowledge of self.”

Despite my comments and ones from the other young workers promoting the importance of history, the young man still remained adamant in his stance on history.

That interesting exchange did not make me question why this particular young man had a disinterest in history, but it made me ask what causes young people in general to dislike learning history.

I thought back on my days as a student in Philadelphia’s public schools learning “Social Studies” which, as most people know, was the name for anything encompassing civics, history and cultural studies.

Then I had to ask myself, “Was I really interested in learning history in my elementary and middle school years?” As it turns out, I was probably about as interested as most students are today.

I realized that I really hadn’t really gained a passion for learning history until I began to put down the school textbooks and began read on my own, which was partially due to the influence of my father, an avid reader and a history buff.

This revelation opened my eyes to what’s the underlying problem in student’s disinterest in history. The problem lies in not solely the students who are dispassionate, but more so, the problem lies in the way that this history is taught, the people who teach it, and the curriculum which is caught.

Too many young students are taught to memorize dates and recite names without learning to think critically and analyze the context of historical events and people.

Also, it’s no secret that the history curriculum of most of America’s schools is extremely Eurocentric. In America, a country where over 30% of the population is of non-European descent, it shouldn’t be surprising when many non-White students develop a dislike for history when the contributions of people who look like them are underrepresented in the history textbooks.

Also, too many schools teach a distorted, sugarcoated version of history which I call the “Disney version” of history, where the traditional heroes such as George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and even Dr. Martin Luther King are presented as unrealistically infallible. This causes history to be looked upon in an almost mythical sense and makes people out of touch with the realities of the world in which we live.

If America wants our future generations to learn from the past, we need to do a better job of teaching them about the past. Otherwise, as the old saying goes, “History repeats itself because no one was listening the first time.”

Posted by:

Marvin DeBose Jr