What do we want from our history surveys? First, we want students to learn essential knowledge about a subject or period. Second, we want students, most of whom will never take another history course again, to understand something of what it means to think historically. Finally, we want to raise students’ appreciation for the past and for how the analytic study of the past can help us navigate our way through a difficult world.

These are ambitious goals. Can traditional coverage surveys achieve them? Some might say that generic coverage surveys are the worst way to teach history, except for all the other ways. For example, Daniel Trifan has faulted alternate pedagogies for what he sees as “logical incoherence, methodological sloppiness, and meretricious claims. . . .” “There are plenty of new ideas,” wrote Trifan, “but most of them are either intellectually deficient, overtly destructive to standards and quality, or irrelevant to the discipline of history.” (Daniel D. Trifan, “Active Learning: A Critical Examination,” in Susan W. Gillespie, ed., Perspectives on Teaching Innovations: Teaching to Think Historically, 1999, p. 72.) How persuasive one finds such defenses of coverage will depend on one’s awareness of its damaging harms.

A more positive defense of coverage is imaginable. Here and there in higher education are the Big Rock Candy Mountain Universities where traditional coverage surveys achieve the goals of an introductory course to a reasonable perfection. The professors are gifted lecturers who have worthwhile things to say for three hours of class time per week. The students are highly motivated learners capable of turning lectures into active learning experiences. When the professor cautions students against thinking the textbook is “the” story about the past, they understand what she means and—bango!—become critical readers of textbook narratives. Over the course of a term, the students watch the professor model how historians construct knowledge, and somehow it sticks. When the course is over, they leave class ready to make sense of the world from historical perspectives. My best guess is that there might be ten to half-a-hundred such classrooms in the world.

The question is: Is your survey one of them? And how do you know?

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