Teaching Writing Through History

ENGLISH TSU is not a subject, like physics or geography or Latin. It is a universal skill, and every teacher of academic subjects should be in some degree a teacher of English.

One of the English teacher’s strongest allies is the history teacher. There are all sorts of ways in which the history teacher can and should give training in writing. He may assign research papers, book reports, précis of documents, and formal arguments in matters of controversy. And his every test should require written answers.

Yet in hundreds of high schools the classes in history, civics, problems of democracy, and so forth, do very little writing, and in some, none at all. A recent bulletin for teachers from a state board of education lists thirty-one separate “activities” which “ the modern teacher of social studies” should promote in her “classroom laboratory.” There are “planning activities,” “reading activities,” and “storing activities.” There are “reporting and reciting” and “carrying out research,” but no specific mention of writing.

Part of this lack of interest stems from the change from history to social studies. A generation ago, the study of history in many schools was a meaningless round of learning dead facts and regurgitating them on paper. In justifiable rebellion against this profitless business came the idea that the study of man in society should concentrate on real problems, such as public housing or agencies for world peace, instead of the KansasNebraska Act or the Tariff of 1816. Students should be trained in social skills, such as making oral reports and carrying on discussions.

Now, writing is not an obvious social skill. It is, in fact, a lonely business, and a person engaged in writing of necessity withdraws from the group. Indifference, even apathy toward writing is increasing. I have seen it argued in an educational journal that, while the ability to write may be a graceful accomplishment, in an audio-visual age it is no more necessary than playing the violin.

Another influence toward the abandonment of pen and paper is the so-called objective test, in which the candidate simply checks off the answers. There can be no question that objective tests have been refined until they are increasingly successful in their primary task of measuring achievement and predicting future success. The difficulty is that they have entered the classroom. Schools can purchase objective tests designed for any standard course or text. This relieves teachers of the burden of concocting their own questions and reduces correction to the purely mechanical process of checking off the right answers.

The results of the abandonment of writing have been appalling. In 1955 a College Board committee tried out simple essay questions on several hundred freshmen recently admitted to topranking colleges. At least 80 per cent of the candidates failed, and about 40 per cent failed abysmally. They did not know how to analyze a problem, or how to relate what they knew to it, or how to hitch one limping sentence to another in ordered sequence.

Objective tests have little place in a properly run history course for academically competent students. They imply that knowing history is simply a matter of guessing the right answer, and they suggest that there are simple right and wrong answers to complex problems. Above all, they encourage teachers to evade their obligation to share with English teachers the duty of teaching effective writing.

With the increasing awareness that American education has slighted the gifted, there has been a return to written tests. All the tests given, for instance, in the Advanced Placement Program of the College Entrance Examination Board are primarily written. So far, however, this program affects only the ablest students in the strongest schools. Even in this privileged area there has been too little serious thought about what written tests should do. Here is a question asked in a famous Eastern preparatory school:

Describe the four reasons for the Seven Years’ War.

The first “the” gives this question away. The boy answering it has been taught that there are four official causes of the Seven Years’ War and now is asked simply to hand them back. A question in history or social studies should be so designed that it encourages the candidate to write something approaching an essay. Furthermore, the answer should be judged for its quality as an essay, as well as for historical content.

Generalizations are fruitless unless supported. So essay questions should ask for facts, hard facts, but insist that they be related to the question. Students are tempted to parade what they remember, regardless of relevance. They should lose credit if they have not aimed the facts at the problem under discussion.

Some teachers, although agreeing that the essay question has its uses, fear that without testing on specific details students will not learn facts. Yet testing nothing but facts encourages the notion that they are important in isolation. A teacher can get across the idea that facts are vital only insofar as they have significance by the use of short written questions such as the following:

Explain the interrelationships between FOUR of the following pairs:

1) Lenin :: Mensheviks

2) Poland :: Danzig

3) Five Year Plan :: Kulaks

4) Beer Hall Putsch :: March on Rome

5) Munich Conference :: Self-determination

These keep emphasis on the generalizations which tie facts together, rather than on rote knowledge. Each is designed to produce a little essay, in which skill in written expression, judgment, and ingenuity count.

Effective essay questions do not just happen. They have to be devised with many factors in mind: what the students have studied in class and outside, how far advanced they are, how much time is allowed, just how much progress toward a new juxtaposition of material can be fairly demanded, whether the directions are clear and understandable.

Phrasing is immensely important. A certain element of challenge can release the floodgates and make a student write better than he thought he could. Consider these two questions:

Explain the effects of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Describe what you consider to be three principal causes of the War of 1812.

There is nothing especially wrong with these, but you can nudge the pupil toward setting up an argument rather than just retelling what he knows by presenting paradoxes:

“The Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave.” Is this true?

Explain why the War for Seamen’s Rights was opposed in maritime Massachusetts and supported in inland Kentucky.

It is easy to go off the track. Here is a former College Board question which turned out badly:

How did Hamilton and Jefferson disagree on economic and political questions? Show why two political parties developed out of the conflict.

The trouble with this was that most candidates wrote not one essay but two, failing to tie together the two parts of the question. It would have been an improvement to have hitched them together in the question:

“Out of the disagreement between Hamilton and Jefferson on economic and political questions developed two political parties.” Explain this quotation.

It is important to remember that the way students are tested often determines how they will study. There is almost universal testimony from teachers that pupils will study less hard for an objective than an essay test, if only because in the former there is always the hope of guessing the answer. But assume two equally conscientious students putting in equal time on the same material, one studying for an essay test and the other for an objective test. You will find that they are likely to tackle their reviewing quite differently. The objective test, with its many items — a hundred responses an hour is standard —tends to put emphasis on particular facts or concepts, so the student prepares as he might for a quiz-kid program. The essay examination emphasizes the larger picture, and to do well the student must grasp the main ideas and relate details to them.

It is often a useful practice to give out essay questions in advance. If these are chosen with care, the students will usually study with more purpose than if left to their own devices. One could fairly well lake care of the period of the 1920s in American history by telling a class that it will be asked to assess one or the other of the following quotations:

“The business of America is business.” — Calvin Coolidge

“America has evaded her responsibilities as a world power, and has retreated into a sullen and selfish isolationism.” — Woodrow Wilson

Essay questions usually involve exposition, but they can also be used to stimulate the imagination. Each of the following questions has produced answers which revealed that some students could project themselves into the past and think in terms of a society alien in space, time, or culture:

Assume yourself to be an Athenian peasant at the time of Solon and explain what the introduction of money had meant to you and your family.

Assume yourself to be an Athenian gentleman of the fourth century B.C. miraculously transported by a time machine to America and endowed with the ability to speak English. Explain in a connected narrative your reactions to any THREE of the following: a dinner party, a professional wrestling match, a play, Congress.

Assume yourself to be the Spanish ambassador to the court of Queen Elizabeth. Write a letter home, giving your impressions of the Queen and of her foreign policy.

The above questions were given out in advance so that the students could think out possible answers, but all the writing was done in a single class period, with no more notes than could be put on a single three by five inch card. Put under pressure, students write better than if they had time to polish.

This “you were there” type of question is especially valuable when it can be tied in with contemporary source material. Having already studied a period in texts, a class can get the feel of the times by browsing through magazines of the period. The following question was designed to create awareness of that grim era when the democracies seemed helpless against the rise of totalitarianism:

Assume yourself to be someone living during the period between the Munich crisis in September, 1938, and the fall of Poland in September, 1939, and give your opinion about the future of democracy.

This produced, among other characterizations, a Nazi waiter talking to an American newspaperman in a Munich beer garden; a Polish exile in a Paris bistro; and an ex-Communist, a young man who had joined the Communist Party during the Farmers’ Holiday in 1933, while at the University of Iowa, and who was now, in September, 1939, writing to a former Comrade to explain why he had just resigned from the Party and was on his way to join the Canadian R.A.F.

The illustrations of essay questions given here have nearly all come from one school with a strong academic tradition and a selected student body. It may be argued, therefore, that the training in writing and analysis suggested is beyond the reach of the general run of students. But surely we are increasingly aware that those able to profit by rigorous academic training need special attention just as much as slow and “exceptional” children. There are many high school teachers, too, who believe that the essay test can be used with great benefit for all students within the normal range of ability. In a number of high schools, essay tests are graded by the English department as well as the social studies department.

Practical objection to the use of essay tests may come from those who point out that essay testing will impose further duties on already burdened teachers. It cannot be done, at least not well, by a teacher with a pupil load of 180 to 200, meeting twenty-five classes each week and patrolling study periods, a home room, and the school cafeteria between times. The answer is to lighten the burden, even if it costs money. In The American High School Today, James B. Conant recommends that the pupil load of English teachers be limited to 100 pupils in order to allow for the correcting of weekly themes. If the social studies teacher should also require constant writing, his teaching load should also be limited.

The essay test is a major means, and a far too neglected one, of teaching a pupil “to learn to argue a case and weigh evidence, to seize the point at issue, to arrange his thoughts and marshal facts to support a theory, to discover when a statement is proved and when it is not, to reason logically and express himself clearly — in fact, to play the great game of the intellect.”