What to Teach: An Overview and the Bradley Commission

The web site StudentsFriend.com features a highly recommended and superbly detailed article with citations on the teaching history and geography. What to Teach: An Overview that presents information of chronological narratives, the use of conceptual frameworks and thinking strategies can be accessed at the hyperlinks.

Readers will find substantive information on the findings and recommendations of the Bradley Commission on History in the Schools:

The Bradley Commission is cited frequently in the education literature and on this website because its work was seminal, and its report is a model of clear thinking and reasonableness. Sam Wineburg said it "launched the current reform movement in history education." He described it as, "a considerable effort by historians, professors of education, and high school teachers to sit down and ask tough questions about the school curriculum."33

Released in 1988, the Bradley Commission's report is titled Building a History Curriculum: Guidelines for Teaching History in Schools. It begins by sounding a note of alarm about "the inadequacy, both in quantity and quality, of the history taught in American classrooms." It goes on to make "recommendations" (as in one colleague to another) that historical knowledge be used to support the development of student "judgment and perspective," that facts and narrative "be selected and taught to illuminate the most significant questions and developments,"that historical study focus on "broad, significant themes and questions," and that students develop historical "habits of mind,"34

The Commission recommended a minimum two-year sequence of study that includes both world history and Western civilization because "world history is inadequate when it consists only of European history plus imperialism, just as it is inadequate when it slights European history itself."35