Summary Of Sam Wineburg's Picturing The Past

Taking a peak at a current history lesson taught in a classroom, the common outsider will likely find nothing wrong with its content or presentation. They hear many famous names and key dates regarding events of the past and do not bat an eye because they learned history in the same way. On the other hand, if a historian walked into the same classroom, he or she would be incredibly disappointed because students are not learning how to practice history. Granted, the same historian likely learned about history in a similar way at one point or another during his or her educational career, but that was in the past and this is the current day. As science, technology, and other subjects advance, why does the general public decide to allow history
These notions are most commonly derived from what they hear at home, in the media, and from society in general. Sam Wineburg presents this idea in a number of his works. In “Picturing the Past,” Wineburg describes a study conducted with children where they were asked to draw different historical figures. In these drawings, men were usually the main subjects. When girls created the drawings, they were slightly more likely to portray or at least include women. With boys, on the other hand, the women were almost completely left out. In looking at the study’s results, Wineburg states that “alarming and dysfunctional attitudes” were perpetuated (“Picturing the Past” 133). In other words, in their daily lives, these children are subconsciously learning that women do not play a strong role in history. Unfortunately, such ideas are still perpetuated at school. Bruce VanSledright discusses a similar problem in his book, In Search of America’s Past, when he describes a young girl’s struggles to understand what really happened in an integral battle of the Revolutionary War. As she read documents from multiple perspectives, she was baffled that no real answer existed in regard to what really happened or which side was in the right (VanSledright, “In Search of America’s Past” 1-3). Young Alexandra’s experience shows that children are under the impression that history is always black or white. In reality,
Robert Bain discusses some of the problems with current historical education in “Into the Breach.” According to Bain, in classrooms today, history is an endless cycle of reading, memorization, and testing (Bain 159). This type of history implementation not only takes the teacher out of the subject, it takes the actual practice of history out of history. Bain goes on to point out how common it is for teachers to think of history as a process of either “transmitting historical facts or engaging students in history projects” (Bain 160). Such practices are all too common in the classroom; whereas, the actual analysis of history is completely lacking. History’s oversimplification is not always purposeful on the teachers’ part, one of the main reasons that history looks this way in the classroom is because teachers are not prepared well enough to competently teach the subject. In Teaching History for the Common Good, Levstik and Barton make the claim that teachers are unprepared and do not acquire the historical knowledge to accurately teach and “typically have little acquaintance with such disciplinary concerns as the context, authorship, and perspective of historical documents” (245). Since teachers are not prepared well enough, they lack the appreciation for and understanding of the importance of the integral aspects of history and