Another are the National Standards, which are only meant to be guidelines, but have raised quite a brouhaha led by Lynne Cheney, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Bob Bain, who served on the Council of Basic Education panel that reviewed the National Standards, a review that played a significant role in their final version that has recently been released. He examines some of the controversy surrounding the Standards, but does more than that as he offers his thoughts as to how we can move beyond the Standards controversy, and look at issues of cognition in history, assessments, and group categorization. Ken Masugi presents ten points in favor of affirmative action and then balances that with ten points of challenge. In the second section of the Review we look at how several teachers deal with controversy in classroom.
Heated debates can make both students and the teacher uncomfortable.
The popularity of her course, though, indicates that we can enrich our students when we tackle controversy in the classroom. Dianne Smith, Lee Makela, and Heidi Makela present a thoughtful framework for teaching controversy and a case study on the bombing of Hiroshima that explains a sample lesson. They suggest starting with what is already known and move to drawing conclusions and expressing them effectively. We hope that is not all. The wonders of the Internet mean that we can discuss among ourselves the issues raised here.