Today, John’s excellent column on North Carolina’s world history curriculum highlights why the Fordham Foundation believes it to be so bad and why it needs to be better. I want to look at why Virginia’s world history curriculum is so good.
It has little to do with the fact that my wife taught world history in a small, rural high school in Virginia for three years – with a pass rate of around 95 percent I am proud to say. (Side note: In my wife’s experience, most of the students who got perfect scores on their world history test played a video game called Civilization. She found it disturbing that these students knew the names of obscure Germanic tribes.)
The Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) provide teachers with a coherent and comprehensive world history curriculum that leaves little time to spare. For World History I, students are expected to learn the religious, social, economic, and political history of ancient civilizations from Africa, Asia, and Europe. World History II does an incredible job of introducing students to the Reformation and Enlightenment thought. They actually learn who John Locke is and why he is important. Go figure.
