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Brian Lehrer: One more reason we might need to worry a little bit about the nation's teens but one that we're going to take a slightly lighter approach to, a report on national test scores last week from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, what they call the NAEP scores, showed that 40% of eighth graders scored below the basic level in US history, what they call the basic level. Only 13% scored high enough to be considered proficient.

Additionally, less than a quarter of eighth graders scored proficient on the civics test. Now, in both subjects, scores are lower than they were four years ago, there may be a pandemic effect here, and have been on the decline since 2014. There's more than a pandemic effect here. While we consider what's going on here, we're going to invite you to call in about what you learned in history class. What lessons from history or social studies do you remember best?

Tell us about something that you learned in class that stuck with you in history or civics from when you were a teenager. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Anything about history or civics that you learned when you were about in eighth grade that made an impression on you and maybe affected you. Maybe it was a way of teaching, maybe you had a really good teacher. We're going to talk to a person who's primarily an author, but who I consider a really good teacher of history in just a minute as part of this.

Did you learn about the electoral college and think, "Oh, that's how it works. That's what's good and bad about that"? Do you remember reading, I don't know, the autobiography of Frederick Douglass? Were you shocked to learn about the blacklists of the 1950s in the McCarthy era? What did you learn about history in school or about civics that stuck with you? Would that lead to any advice for teaching in a way that engages more kids and maybe will raise these test scores? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. If anybody has a memory or a story, we'll take your calls and talk to Kenneth C. Davis right after this.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we're inviting your calls on the thing you actually remember from history or social studies class or civics, if they actually taught civics when you went to eighth grade or thereabouts. 212-433-WNYC. Joining us to help take your calls and talk about the recent test scores and how we teach history and social studies and civics is Kenneth C. Davis, author of the Don't Know Much About History series of books and most recently Great Short Books: A Year of Reading–Briefly.

You might recognize Kenneth C. Davis even if you don't know his books. He's been on the show quite a few times talking about history and busting historical myths. Hey, Ken, always great to have you. Thanks for joining today.

Kenneth C. Davis: Brian, it's always a pleasure to be with you. Thanks for having me. The first thing I want to say is that I listened to the previous segment, and the two issues are not unrelated. Clearly what's going on with social media and teenagers is clearly having an impact here about not only teaching history but what's going on in our schools. I'd like to say right off the bat I think that our nation's children are not failing. Our nation is failing the children. Our nation's teachers are not failing. The nation is failing the teachers. I want to be really clear on that.

This is not a new problem either. It didn't start five years ago or 10 years ago. I wrote Don't Know Much About History 30 years ago and it was already a longstanding problem then. This is not new news.

Brian Lehrer: Is it about being accessible? Obviously, we don't want to blame teachers when there's so much structurally that's going on. One of the great things about your original book, Don't Know Much About History, and all the ones that have followed, I think, is how accessible they are, accessible enough to actually get people engaged and into it who might not otherwise get so. I'm curious if you have a sense of what seems to be missing or what can be done in the best way to get kids as engaged as they can in history and civics.

Kenneth C. Davis: I'll start where I started more than 30 years ago when I wrote Don't Know Much About History. People said it's so boring. It's dates and battles and speeches but it's not. History has to be talked about, written about, taught as a human story, that this is the story of real people doing real things, and it has something to do with our lives. That's the really important connecting point.

I have to say, I speak to a lot of teachers and a lot of students. I've been in a lot of classrooms either virtually or in person over the last 20 years. I find that kids and their teachers are really interested in this stuff but they just want it in a way that's a lot more interesting than the textbooks were. There's also a really important issue and I think The Times story about the testing the other day raised this, is the last 20 years has seen this incredible move towards standardized testing as we all know, the No Child Left Behind, then the vogue for teaching coding and STEM, which is science and technology, taking precedence.

Social studies, what we used to call history, social studies actually includes history, civics, economics, and geography as well as a few other topics all grouped together. There's no question that we've been spending far less time teaching those subjects than we used to, and that's part of the problem as well. Social studies was moved to the back burner as we went too overboard on this teaching of STEM and coding and English language arts, is the current vogue term. There's a lot of structural problems in education that are part of this but I do believe it goes back to not exactly what we teach but how we teach and talk about it.

Brian Lehrer: Let's hear some things that people have actually retained from eighth grade. Elizabeth in Inwood, you're on WNYC. Hi, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Hi. Thank you so much for taking my call. I remember very clearly in high school that my social studies teacher said that knowing something is not nearly as important as knowing how to find out something. You said specifically about eighth grade. In New York State, the eighth-grade social studies curriculum in the early '70s was Asian and African culture.

I remember very clearly learning about apartheid and being shocked that that was even possible. I was profoundly disturbed by this and went home and asked my dad about like, "How does this even happen that a minority can control the majority in as oppressive a way as was the case then in South Africa?" He reminded me about The Holocaust and that governments will, sometimes, rise up and oppress people in powerful awful ways that include extermination and, just 50 years later, I still remember that very clearly.

Brian Lehrer: Elizabeth, thank you very much. Ken, what an example of how something that somebody learned in eighth grade really had a profound effect on how they viewed the world as an adult.

Kenneth C. Davis: Yes, a couple of things come to mind. First of all, Brian, one of the things the caller said is very important, that teaching history, again, it's not about dates and battles, it does help us to think and analyze. That's what education should be. Education is not the filling of a pail, it's the lighting of a fire. Some people say Yates said that. I've never found any evidence that he did, but it's still a great notion.

I think that we have to really move away from the idea that education is indoctrination but an attempt to get us to think for ourselves. History and learning history is the perfect way to do that. The earlier segment also mentioned media literacy. History is a great way and social studies is a great way, and I know teachers are doing it right now, to talk about media literacy. I believe that a lot more kids who are maybe 14 and up are much more media savvy than their parents are.

Brian Lehrer: Let's see. Bobby in Peekskill, remember something you learned in eighth-grade history? Bobby, you're WNYC. Hello.

Bobby: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I grew up in Beverly, Massachusetts. I was in eighth grade in the early '70s, and it was a public junior high school, about 1,500 students, maybe two Black students in the entire school. Anyway, I had an eighth-grade social studies teacher who, the first semester was all about learning about Black history and the famous Black leaders, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman. We actually talked about leaders of the Black Panther movement. I just think about the contrast then with now how you couldn't even teach this stuff anymore in some states in this country. That's what I want to say.

Brian Lehrer: Bobby, thank you very much. I'm going to go right on to Emma in Halifax, Nova Scotia. You're on WNYC. Hi, Emma.

Emma: Hi there. I also grew up in Massachusetts, interestingly enough. When I was in eighth grade, I was in a private school where most of us had the same parents from the same background. Then I switched to our giant public school where people were from a hugely different diverse group of backgrounds. What stands out is that, in one of my teacher's classes, we were talking about war, I can't remember which one, and we asked in the class, how our families had been impacted by war. We had kids who were refugees from Haiti and kids whose great-grandparents had fought in World War I and folks whose fathers had been involved in the Gulf War.

I was in high school during 9/11, so for us, this was a way of connecting history to the present, but also understanding about difference, and that you can't make any assumptions around any of these historic events that someone sitting next to you could have been impacted by them.

I've noticed, now I take my kid to the playground and there are all these Ukrainian immigrants and refugees because we have a huge influx here in Canada. [unintelligible 00:11:32] have influenced how I react to the other immigrants in my community and how I'm raising my son to think about all of these issues. [unintelligible 00:11:44] it's not about names and dates, it's about the personal connections and then connecting those dates so suddenly it becomes much more real.

Brian Lehrer: Emma, thank you. We're getting great stories, Ken. Let me go right on to Claire on the Lower East Side. You're on WNYC. Hi, Claire.

Claire: Hi, Brian. A long time, first time. I'm 65 years old and I still have the notebook that Joe Wolf, at Great Falls High School in Great Falls, Montana, helped me fill with a two-period class. It was called Humanities at the time. It incorporated everything from history and social studies and religion. I'll never forget how he taught us about Savonarola, [unintelligible 00:12:28] and Islam and the pillars of the faith.

The one thing that stands out in my mind is the passion and the patience he showed for us. He played an LP of the entire opera of Rigoletto to a classroom of 16-year-olds over the period of about a week-and-a-half of two-period classes acting out the drama beforehand each class. At first, we were bored and by the end of that, most of us were gripped by the story, and a few of us became lifelong opera lovers. It's the passion and patience of teachers and of the system that helped me to become a lover of the arts and a history major in college.

Brian Lehrer: Passion and patience. Claire, great call. Thank you very much. Well, Ken Davis, what do you want to react to from those calls? We've only got a minute or two left. One thing that jumps out at me, going back to Bobby in Peekskill and talking about the war on teaching history right now, at least teaching a certain kind of fullness of history, is I wonder if by making it prohibited, by making it a hot button thing, it might actually get more kids more engaged like, "What is all the fuss about?" rather than seeing it as boring names and dates and battles.

Kenneth C. Davis: That's a good point, Brian. I'd say first of all, to the point of teachers with passion, there are a lot of teachers right now, not so much obviously in the metropolitan area, but teachers I talk to around the rest of the country who are really scared. They are scared of the politics, they're scared of what they are allowed to teach, and that if they say something, that some parent is going to come in. When a parent comes in now, there's a new element to it. There's tremendous fear in the teaching community and a lot of very passionate teachers are leaving because they can't deal with that anymore. That's one point.

Another thing, I think, when we talk about how to deal with this, how to do a better job, we have to make this more human, we have to get kids out of the classroom. Parents, take your kids on those field trips. I went to Gettysburg when I was nine years old and it was transformative for me. I remember standing there in those fields and thinking something extraordinary had happened here.

That's one of the things I tried to do with some of my recent books, like In the Shadow of Liberty, which written for younger people. I also wanted parents to read those books so that they could have a conversation around the dinner table about history and the fact that enslaved people were once the property of some of the most famous presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, in the shadow of liberty. When we make this a human story and we talk about it around the dinner table, it's no longer filling in the bubbles on a standardized test. It becomes real and meaningful and human.

Brian Lehrer: Kenneth C. Davis, author of the Don't Know Much About series of books and most recently, Great Short Books: A Year of Reading–Briefly. Always great to have you, Ken. Always great to hear your insights, and what great callers we had today with those stories, right?

Kenneth C. Davis: Thank you, Brian. It was great. I'd love to do it again.

Brian Lehrer: Of course. Brian Lehrer, WNYC. Thanks for listening today. Stay tuned for Allison.

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