Mission Statement

All who teach history, anywhere along the line from grade one to graduate seminars, have a friend: the National Council for History Education, founded in 1990 as the successor organization to the Bradley Commission on History in Schools. Until then, we had no equivalent to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the National Council for Geographic Education, or the other discipline-based advocacy groups that bring school and university people together to tackle all the issues that concern them--from curricular design, K to Ph.D., through state, local, and university standards and requirements, teacher education, certification, and professional development, to the implications of the assessment movement, of new technologies, and of school re-structuring.

Each of these issues was directly addressed in 1988 by the 32-page Bradley Commission report, Building a History Curriculum: Guidelines for Teaching History in Schools (revised 2nd Edition, 2000). Each has become more urgent, carrying all kinds of chances for good or bad outcomes, with the emergence of GOALS 2000, the governors' National Educational Goals Panel, the National Council on Standards and Testing, and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Add to these the recurrent American love affair with math, science, technology, and "job-training" as quick fixes for the country's problems. And add on top the needless quarrels among ourselves over diversity vs. commonality, social vs. political, chronology vs. post-holing, "active" vs. "passive" learning, and we historians have, as they say, a full plate before us.

The special prescience of the Bradley Commission on all of these questions was largely due to its diverse membership: historians and classroom teachers of so many different backgrounds, persuasions, and professional experiences. Its special, overriding message, repeated by the National Commission on the Social Studies in its 1989 report, Charting a Course, was the need for much more time in the social studies curriculum, to liberate teachers to offer a better kind of history.

More time, of course, cures nothing by itself, though our opponents love to pretend we think so and that all we want is to force helpless students to "memorize more facts." What, in fact, we do think is what every teacher already knows: that more time is plainly indispensable to learning better history. So what exactly is the "new" and better history that justifies fundamental changes in the conventional social studies curriculum, and probably even bigger changes in the graduate and undergraduate education of those who teach history at any level?
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Researchers interested in the report, book, and other papers of the Bradley Commission on History in Schools will find them at the Rare Books and Manuscript Division of the Libraries at Columbia University in New York City.