ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, March 12, 1997 TAG: 9703120051
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: THE WASHINGTON POST
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee once made history. Now Gov. George Allen and other modern-day Virginians are beginning to have a major impact on how it is taught, through a 23-page Virginia guide for social science teachers that has become a national hit.
The traditional, fact-based guide demanded by Allen, drafted with the help of hundreds of educators and parents and adopted by the Virginia Board of Education two years ago, has proved both popular and controversial across the country.
It has influenced the work of several other state school boards, won the endorsement of the American Federation of Teachers and incited an educational brawl in Massachusetts, where the state board is trying to incorporate the Virginia approach despite complaints that it reduces history to a game of Trivial Pursuit.
Virginia's guide appeals to educators and parents who fear that children no longer are learning the names of presidents or the dates of wars as they once did and who worry that students can't think clearly about history without first knowing the facts.
``We wanted standards that were content-rich, not pedagogy-rich,'' said Massachusetts school board member Abigail Thernstrom. ``Many of the standards in other states don't suggest for a minute that students might want to know what half-century the Civil War was in.''
Virginia's grade-by-grade guidelines, which took effect last fall, list the names and events that students should master, a device popularized by University of Virginia Professor E.D. Hirsch Jr. Most other states provide general guides and ask local districts to fill in the gaps.
The state-history section of the Virginia standards says fourth-graders should learn, among other things, ``the backgrounds, motivations and contributions of George Washington, George Wythe, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Patrick Henry, and other prominent Virginians in the Revolutionary era; and the significance of the Charters of the Virginia Company of London, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom and the Declaration of Independence.''
The spread of the Virginia guidelines illustrates one of the hottest arguments in education today - between those who think teachers should emphasize memorizing facts at least as much as developing thinking skills and those who believe that if thinking and learning skills are learned, students can find the facts for themselves.
Besides the Massachusetts board, educators in Texas, California, North Carolina, Kentucky, Maine, Vermont, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Louisiana have sought information about the Virginia approach, officials say.
But some teachers and parents have said the Virginia guide demands too much memorization and leaves too little class time to learn how to analyze history.
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