To some students, the Declaration of Independence feels a lot like a breakup letter
Lessons on the events leading up to the birth of the nation have been evolving over the generations as classroom instruction has expanded from emphasizing the teaching of battles, heroes, and the principles of democracy to including more discussion about the role of public activism and the experiences of
Teachers also are lecturing less. Instead, they are turning their students into sleuthing historians with assignments that have them digging through historic documents, biographies, and a host of other texts.
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Getting students engaged can be a challenge.
'They kind of roll their eyes when we say we are going to talk about the American Revolution,' said Gorman Lee, social studies director for Braintree Public Schools and education committee chair of
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At Lynn Classical, the class ultimately decided to write two different versions of the Declaration of Independence. One was about a couple breaking up and the other was about an individual choosing independence from another.
'What happened then and how the Founding Fathers came to be is very inspiring,' Ny said. 'It's important to learn and know the history behind where we are now.'
Concerns about whether schools are
National data indicate the teaching of US history and the principles of democracy are in deep trouble:
US history exam. Those scores, which were not broken down by state, represented a decline from the 2018 exam.
F. Anderson Morse, executive director the American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati, said the state of teaching of the American Revolution is a mixed bag.
'The bad news is they spend a lot less time talking about the Revolution in most schools today … than any of us growing up,' he said. 'There are some textbooks where you will see no more pages devoted to the American Revolution than to the story of Marilyn Monroe.'
He added, 'The good news is at least today people are starting to understand more — those who study it — that the American Revolution wasn't just an elitist war. … It's really a citizen's war.'
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Kaylin Gangi, a third grade teacher at Drewicz Elementary School in Lynn, peppered her students with questions about Phillis Wheatley, an African American poet who wrote about the American Revolution.
Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff
Robert Allison, a history professor at Suffolk University in Boston, said he has seen Boston Public Schools pull back on the American Revolution and other history.
In the years following the bicentennial celebration in the 1970s, Allison said, BPS and the city's historical organizations started a partnership that enabled students to see famous landmarks from the American Revolution and other historic sites, but the program faded due to busing costs.
'It became this scramble every year and it essentially killed the program,' said Allison, who is chair of
Sujata Wycoff, a BPS spokesperson, said the district provides robust instruction on the American Revolution in Grades 5 and 8 and in high school, with an emphasis on having students learn about historical figures from marginalized communities. BPS also is expanding partnerships with historic sites and museums to create more field trips, especially ones focused on the 250th anniversary.
'The BPS History/Social Studies department has worked greatly since the COVID pandemic to bring back place-based learning opportunities ... ones focused on the American Revolution and various other topics in history,' she said in a statement.
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Massachusetts standards for social studies instruction call for the teaching of the American Revolution in the third, fifth, and eighth grades and in high school.
In third grade, lessons on the American Revolution often dovetail with broader units on local communities, which in Massachusetts often have deep roots in the American Revolution, and also emphasize the teaching about people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, including enslaved and formerly enslaved people, and Native Americans.
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Eighth grade is where the American Revolution is taught more deeply, when students study key ideas about equality, representative government, limited government, rule of law, and natural rights. The pressure on students to grasp those concepts is even more critical now with the arrival of a long anticipated MCAS civics exam for that grade level.
Students then receive another dose of the Revolution in high school in US History 1, although teachers say this often is a review since students take the course so soon after the eighth grade.
Third-graders Daniel Alvarado Amaya, Carolina De Faria Almeida Ferreira, and Jimena Perez Esteban at Drewicz Elementary School in Lynn worked on a poster about the American Revolution.
Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff
Beth Greenwood, a third grade teacher at Brookline's Lincoln School, said early lessons on the American Revolution and the plight of Colonists often resonate with young students.
'Third-graders are so aware of issues of fairness that is where they connect emotionally,' such as when laws were imposed on the Colonists, Greenwood said. 'They just get so engaged in the American Revolution as a story and the suspense of what will happen next.'
At Drewicz Elementary School in Lynn one recent morning, teacher Kaylin Gangi circulated around her third grade classroom as her students created posters about historic figures. Leaning over the shoulders of one group of students sitting at a cluster of desks as they tried to figure out what to write, she attempted to prod them along: 'Tell me a little bit about Phillis Wheatley.'
'She wrote poems,' one student replied.
When Gangi eventually asked them about what her poems were about and why she was famous, they struggled with their responses. So she suggested they do a little more research. Eventually, they learned that Wheatley wrote about the American Revolution (siding with the Colonists) and the plight of enslaved people, and was the first African American author to have a book of poetry published.
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'She's brave,' Olivia Sanh Tarantini, 8, said later on in an interview. 'It would be very scary for me.'
The assignment was part of a new 'inquiry-based' curriculum,
'They always groan when I say we are studying social studies and then they get into it,' she said.
James Vaznis can be reached at
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