Institutional structures make the differences between K-12 education and higher education seem bigger—and less surmountable—than they ought to be. Granted, institutional obstacles exist; at most universities, there is a distinct separation of teacher-education from practicing historians housed in departments. Moreover, the distance between the historical questions pursued by professional historians and typical curriculum or state standards is increasing.
However, if historians want to stay relevant in national dialogues (beyond what Stephen Ambrose and Niall Ferguson have to say) we should care passionately about building bridges across these gaps and having conversations with multiple partners: classroom teachers, school boards, state and national departments of education, parents, and our future students. Increasingly mandated standardized testing is leaving less room in the K-12 curriculum for specific history instruction. Practically, historians should be making the case that history is a useful venue for teaching a range of basic and higher order skills such as reading, learning in context, expository writing, critical thinking, and rhetorical argumentation. Thus history (like writing and numeracy) is relevant across the curriculum.
This paper will elaborate on these arguments, drawing specifically on elements in the