LITTLE ROCK
Many historians, upset with what they expected Saturday
would be a watering down of the teaching of Arkansas history in the public
schools, will seek a one-year moratorium on new teaching guidelines that are to
go into effect this fall.
Tom Dillard, president of the Arkansas History Education
Coalition, suggested the new guidelines for social studies, approved by the
state Education Board this year, violate a 1997 state law on teaching Arkansas
history and effectively reverse the group’s effort of at least the last 20
years to incorporate the subject into school curricula.
“We now face the prospect of Arkansas
history being removed from the curriculum in the schools of our state at least
effectively removed, if not completely so,” Dillard said at a news
conference at the main library in Little Rock.
Last year, the Arkansas Education Department led a committee
of educators to study revising the guidelines, as the agency routinely does for
the various subjects. The board then approved the guidelines, combining social
studies and Arkansas history into
one subject for kindergartners through sixth graders and requiring the teaching
of world history in seventh and eight grades, typically when Arkansas
history is taught.
Dillard noted that the 10-year-old state law, adopted he
said after the state Education Department failed to follow through on a promise
to beef up Arkansas history instruction in the schools, requires that schools
teach a unit of Arkansas history as a social studies subject at each elementary
grade “with greater emphasis at the fourth and fifth grade levels.”
In addition, he said, the schools must teach a full semester
of Arkansas history to students
between the seventh and 12th grades.
