Creating a Middle School American History Program
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Creating a Middle School American History Program Wight Martindale Jr.
Accepted: 22 July 2020 / # The National Association of Scholars 2020
Sounds easy? It’s not. A few months ago I undertook the project of designing an 8th grade American History curriculum for a small, four-year-old private school—the Main Line Classical Academy in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Its motto: “Because children are never too young to learn great things.” It is blatantly traditional. When you walk in the lobby what you first see is a huge wall map of ancient Greece and the Aegean Sea. It is not a school for gifted children, but you have to take this kind of study seriously. Perhaps half of the faculty speak Russian, Hebrew, or French at home. At the moment its highest class is in the 6th grade, so I have a bit over a year to complete the project. The problem is complicated. Why? There is no reliable middle school textbook, and textbooks usually set the agenda for the course. American history has been the key subject for the progressive political movement for the last sixty years, but this school remains unimpressed by the changes it has wrought. There is no reliable high school textbook either. In The American Pageant, Advanced Placement edition, a very popular high school textbook, I could find no topic that was not better covered by Wikipedia. The maps and photographs are helpful but the writing is boring and flat. Every subject is space-constrained—Wikipedia is not. It has no footnotes. The book pays
Wight Martindale, Jr has been an adjunct professor in the Honors Programs of Lehigh and Villanova Universities; [email protected]. A former senior vice president at Lehman Brothers, he is the author of Inside the Cage: A Season at West 4th Street’s Legendary Tournament (Simon and Schuster, 2005) and Don Quixote Goes to College: From the Trading Floor to the Classroom: A Memoir on Education (privately printed, 2013). He last appeared in these pages with “Tom Wolfe and the Rise of Donald Trump: A Review of Wolfe’s Writings,” (Winter, 2018).
Martindale Jr.
homage to most revisionist perspectives while wanting to appear evenhanded—a problem not overcome by its illustrations and color highlighting. I looked next at blatantly conservative texts, but no luck there either. A Patriot’s History of the United States, over 900 pages and a New York Times Best Seller, is quite well-written, but no pictures or maps. It is also completely predictable; its section on Viet Nam is just as unbalanced in its own way as is the conventional, Nixon-hating narrative. And the title is off-putting. Land of Hope by Wilfred M. McClay is well-written and, I sense, fair-minded. Gordon Wood, perhaps the dean of American historians, likes it. So does Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal. But with just a little over 400 pages it is too limited in its coverage. Light to the Nations, Part Two is surprisingly good but it is not well known. The book comes from the Catholic Textbook Project, and it includes great pictures and maps. But the period from 1492 to
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