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ut the problem of doing history this way in an age of information-surplus is that students spend much of their time as passive audience members, ingesting information, rather than grappling with it to find their own voices. Let’s be clear – it is inconceivable that students won’t have access to lecture information in the future: Wikipedia has every fact that I’ll cover in my AP U.S. History course this year, and if students want to hear an expert lecture they can always find one on iTunes University from Berkeley or MIT. So instead of coverage-style lecturing we need to use the very valuable classroom time to engage in deep inquiry about historical and current problems. Teachers should create powerful essential questions that require students to master information literacy skills they’ll need in a digital age, and to master historical inquiry. From these questions, students will behave as historians, researching, analyzing, evaluating, and creating DAILY. Isn’t that more valuable critical thinking than the odd essay question every few weeks between lectures? Liz Becker and Laufenberg and correct. The 20th century history classroom has to change. In a world of information surplus, we must recognize that good history education must transform students into power information critics, able to evaluate claims and build their own truths from myriad facts.

The concepts of “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings,” hotly debated on college campuses for years, are now reaching high schools too

the question of what high school students should be exposed to, and protected from, feels murkier in 2018. Today’s high school students are more precocious, more politically engaged, more tuned in to their gender identities and nascent sexuality. They are already flooded with uncensored, unedited information, 24 hours a day: What would a safe space even look like for a 16-year-old with an iPhone?

At exclusive private schools like Friends, the question is further complicated by the involvement of wealthy parents. As these schools have grown more expensive — Friends costs nearly $50,000 a year — administrators have found themselves trying to balance their own institutional values with the demands of parents who are in a sense high-paying customers. Teachers are increasingly caught between the two.

This raises the question: If historians can’t remember these things, why do we require 18- year-olds to know them? These tests stress small bits of information that are impossible to remember in the long term. Historians know something deeper. They know how to evaluate historical documents, how to look at conflicting sources and come to a reasoned judgment—in other words, how to be a citizen in a cacophonous democracy. That is the value-added of studying history and that is what we give short shrift to in our high school history classes.

The knowledge-based economy doesn’t require students to be walking encyclopedias who can recall a piece of information. It requires the ability to sort through conflicting information and come to a reasoned conclusion. We need tests that help us do that.