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 They know how to evaluate historical documents, how to look at conflicting sources and come to a reasoned judgment—in other words, how to be a citizen in a cacophonous democracy.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.
Mr Maher on 21 Jan 21Almost every US History teacher tells students about Manifest Destiny, boiling down an explanation of the term to about eight words in a bullet point of a 18 slides presentation that students dutifully copy and recognize out of four other distractors in a multiple choice question. This is the article the phrase comes from - teachers should be forced to read it and explain why they think their teaching of the phrase does any justice to history at all
