The "New" National Standards

Abstract

The opportunity to comment on the new National Standards for high school history classes has provided me with the impetus to reflect on my professional past. Rightly or wrongly, I have concluded that my three-plus decades in higher education have been filled with academic schizophrenia. On one hand, my mentors in boarding school, college, and university taught me the traditions of my discipline and instilled in me a reverence for the earliest historians and their poetic, literary, and well-researched narratives. The latter, incidentally, were articles and books that wove the threads of our American heritage from the top of the loom down.