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What is the Future of the Survey Course?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2017

James L. Gelvin
James L. Gelvin*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

I want to kick off this discussion with three quotes and a statistic. The first quote is as follows: “The chief purpose [of historical education] is not to fill [someone's] head with a mass of material which he may perhaps put forward again when a college examiner demands its production.” The second—a line from a front page story in The New York Times—reads, “College freshmen throughout the nation reveal a striking ignorance of even the most elementary aspects of United States history.” And the third:

We have descended into what some consider the dark age of declining enrollments, professional unemployment, and a growing rejection of history by many students who seem to agree with Henry Ford that history is “bunk.” If we are going to have any real impact on individuals or society, we must do something besides just cover the material.

Finally, the statistic: in eight years alone, the number of students majoring in history dropped 40 percent.

Type
Round Table
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , February 2017 , pp. 22 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America, Inc. 2017 

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Footnotes

*

The idea for a roundtable on teaching the Middle East history survey course originated with James Gelvin of UCLA, and took place at the annual meeting of MESA in November, 2015. Other articles on this topic have been added to the special section in this issue (editor).

References

Works Cited

Fine, Benjamin. 1943. “Ignorance of U.S. History Shown by College Freshmen.” The New York Times, 4 April. Accessed 15 August 2016, http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1943/04/04/85093387.html?pageNumber=1.Google Scholar
Shapiro, Edward S. 1986. “The American History Survey and the Comparative Approach.” The Journal of General Education 38:1. Accessed 15 August 2016, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27797052.Google Scholar
Sipress, Joel M., and Voelker, David J.. 2011. “The End of the History Survey Course: The Rise and Fall of the Coverage Model,” The Journal of American History (March). Accessed 15 August 2016, http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/content/97/4/1050.full.CrossRefGoogle Scholar