"They just don't teach history in public schools any more"
I understand your frustration, but this is a sweeping generalization that is insulting to both public school teacher and students.
I teach both Theatre and History of the Americas in an incredibly diverse, high achieving NYC public school that not only exposes students to history through our foundation in mandated classical education, but also through a rigorous four year exploration that rests not only in complex content but more importantly provides students with strong historical analysis and processing skills.
Currently in History of the Americas we are wrapping up our unit on the US Constitution. Did the kids get the basic facts through a variety of lectures and textbooks articles? Yep. But they also did in-depth analysis or several article of the Constitution, sections of Marbury v. Madison, Patrick Henry's anti-Federalist rhetoric from the Virginia Ratifying Convention, Amos Singletree's opposition from the Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, several key segments from The Federalist Papers, a chapter from Charles A. Beard's "An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States" as well as Robert E Brown's critical take down of the aforementioned article. They are not only getting the "facts" but synthesizing, applying and analyzing them in a way that I wasn't able to do until college. I know it's easy to get lost in test scores in rhetoric, but I assure you that there are public schools that "teach history" and teach it well.
I have no doubt that my students would benefit from a performance of Hamilton without having their collective understanding of history permanently marred. We've spent three years teaching them how to evaluate a wide range of sources for values and limitations and suspect that they would be able to accurately identify the limitations of Hamilton given their skill set. More importantly I think that given their diversity, critical skills and backgrounds, they would be able to identify the profound and unique values of this particularly portrayal of history.
I wish every NYC junior was able to make their way into this program! As is the program benefits Title 1 (60%+ free lunch) AP schools only. My school missed Title 1 by a very narrow margin this year and teaches an IB curriculum instead of AP, which is unfortunate for my kiddos.
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