how economics can strengthen the teaching of u.s. history
TRANSCRIPT
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How Economics Can Strengthen the Teaching of U.S. History
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Overview
Problems teaching history
How economic thinking might help
Features of Focus: Understanding Economics in U.S. History
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Problems Teaching U.S. History
Schools rely on U.S. history to teachOur national identifyAn academic understanding of our past.
But, history teaching is criticized as beingBoring in content and pedagogySuperficialTrivialRemote
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Problems Teaching U.S. History
Students usually take 6 semesters of U.S. history:Grade 5: 2 semestersGrade 8: 2 semestersGrade 11: 2 semesters
Yet, national tests show that achievement in history is low.
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U.S. History Achievement Levels: 1994, 2001, NAEP
Level GRADE 4
1994 2001
GRADE 8
1994 2001
GRADE 12
1994 2001
Advanced 2% 2% 1% 2% 1% 1%
Proficient 15% 16% 13% 15% 10% 10%
Basic 47% 49% 48% 48% 32% 32%
Below Basic 36% 33%* 39% 36%* 57% 57%
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What Can Economics Contribute?
Economics stresses the idea that all people make choices.
But, they don’t know at the time what the consequences of their choices will be.
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Individual Choices
All social phenomena emerge from the choices that individuals make in response to expected costs and benefits to themselves. Paul Heyne
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John Maynard Keynes
The inevitable never happens. It is always the unexpected.
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Who Would Have Predicted in 1980?
The collapse of the Soviet Union.
The reunification of Germany.
Nelson Mandela becoming president of South Africa.
Economic stagnation in Japan in the 1990s.
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Who Would Have Predicted in 1980?
Record U.S. economic expansion in the 1990s.
An attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11.
All-out war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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They Didn’t Know How It Would All Turn Out
In writing history or biography, you must remember that nothing was on track. Things could have gone any way at any point. As soon as you say “was” it seems to fix an event in the past. But nobody ever lived in the past, only the present.
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They Didn’t Know How It Would Turn Out
The difference is that it was their present. They were just as alive and full of ambition, fear, hope and all the emotions of life. And, just like us, they didn’t know how it would all turn out.
The challenge is to get the reader [student] beyond the thinking that things had to be the way they turned out and to see the range of possibilities of how it could have been otherwise.David McCullough
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The Economic Way of Thinking
Focus: Understanding Economics in U.S. History introduces students to the economic way of thinking. It stresses how people at the time were
making choices in response to anticipated benefits and costs.
This approach allows students to be “present-minded” about the past.
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History Matters: Douglass North
History matters not only because we can learn from the past but because the present and the past are connected by the continuity of a society’s institutions.
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Fostering Cooperation
Human cooperation allows for gains from trade.
Economic growth depends upon the institutions that create a hospitable environment for cooperative solutions to problems associated with trade. What institutions induce economic
stagnation and decline?What institutions induce prosperity and
growth?
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What Explains Different Outcomes?
Sustained economic growth in the United States and western Europe?
The spectacular rise and fall of the Soviet Union?
The growth of Taiwan and South Korea?The dismal record of sub-Saharan
Africa?The contrasts between North America
and Latin America?
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Institutions Matter
Choices made by our ancestors have fundamentally shaped the institutions with which we live today.Young people can learn to see events as
outcomes produced by the choices people make every day.
They can also understand how people’s choices are shaped by institutions.
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Teaching Matters, Too
“With its explicit emphasis on choices, costs, incentives, rules of the game and voluntary trade, the curriculum presented here will provide educators with a valuable source of focus and direction.”
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Citation
Authors Jean CaldwellTawni Hunt FerrariniMark Schug
Published by the NCEE
Generous support from the Calvin K. Kazanjian Economics Foundation
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Features
Linked to NCEE Standards
Essay by Professor Douglass North
Introductory essay on the economic way of thinking: Why Did the Colonists
Fight When They Were Safe, Prosperous and Free?
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The Guide to Economic Reasoning
People choose. People’s choices involve costs. People respond to incentives in
predictable ways. People create economic systems that
influence individual choices and incentives.
People gain when they trade voluntarily. People’s choices have consequences
that lie in the future.
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Table of Contents
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Table of Contents
Unit 1 Three World Meet
1. The New World Was an Old World
2. Property Rights Among North American Indians
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Table of Contents
Unit Two: Colonization and Settlement
3. Why Do Economies Grow?
4. Understanding the Colonial Economy in a Global Context
5. Indentured Servitude: Why Sell Yourself into Bondage?
6. Specialization and Trade in the Thirteen Colonies
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Table of Contents
Unit 3: Revolution and the New Nation
7. The Costs and Benefits of American Independence
8. Problems under the Articles of Confederation
9. The U.S. Constitution: Rules of the Game
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Table of Contents
Unit Four: Expansion and Reform
10. Rising Living Standards in the New Nation
11. How Did Cotton Become King?
12. Francis Cabot Lowell and the New England Textile Industry
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13. Improving Transportation
14. Investing in American Growth
15. Why Did the Indians of the Great Plains Invite White Americans into Their Land?
16. Andrew Jackson and the Second Bank of the United States
17. Free the Enslaved and Avoid the War
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Table of Contents
Unit Five: Civil War and Reconstruction
18. Why Did the South Secede?
19. Economic Analysis of the Civil War
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Unit Six: The Development of the Industrial United States
20. Was Free Land a Good Deal?
21. The Changing U.S. Economy
22. The Demand for Immigrants
23. Bigger Is Better: The Economics of Mass Production
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24. Industrial Entrepreneurs or Robber Barons?
25. The Economic Effects of the 19th Century Monopoly
26. Could the U.S. Economy Have Grown Without the Railroads?
27. Free Silver or a Cross of Gold
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Table of Contents
Unit Seven: The Emergence of Modern America
28. Money Panics and the Establishment of the Federal Reserve System
29. Who Should Make the Food Safe?
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Unit Eight: The Great Depression and World War II
30. Whatdunit? The Great Depression Mystery
31. Did the New Deal Help or Harm Recovery?
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32. We Shall Not Be Moved
33. When the Boys Came Marching Home
34. Women in the US Workforce
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Unit Nine: Postwar United States
35. The Economics of Racial Discrimination
36. The No-Good Seventies
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Unit Ten: Contemporary United States
37. The Hispanic Americans
38. The Knowledge- and Technology-Based Economy of Today
39. World Trade after World War II: The EU, NAFTA and the WTO