DATE: Wednesday, March 12, 1997             TAG: 9703120483

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B12  EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST 

                                            LENGTH:   71 lines

VIRGINIA HISTORY TEACHING BECOMING NATIONAL MODEL THE GRADE-BY-GRADE GUIDE LISTS NAMES AND EVENTS CHILDREN SHOULD MASTER.

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee once made history. Now, Gov. George F. Allen and other modern-day Virginians are beginning to have a major impact on how it is taught, through a 23-page Virginia guide for social-science teachers that has become a national hit.

The traditional, fact-based guide demanded by Allen, a Republican, drafted with the help of hundreds of educators and parents and adopted by the Virginia Board of Education two years ago, has proved both popular and controversial across the country.

It has influenced the work of several other state school boards, won the endorsement of the American Federation of Teachers and incited an educational brawl in Massachusetts, where the state board is trying to incorporate the Virginia approach despite complaints that it reduces history to a game of ``Trivial Pursuit.''

Virginia's guide appeals to educators and parents who fear that children are no longer learning the names of presidents or the dates of wars as they once did and who worry that students can't think clearly about history without first knowing the facts.

``We wanted standards that were content-rich, not pedagogy-rich,'' said Massachusetts school board member Abigail Thernstrom.

Virginia's grade-by-grade guidelines, which took effect last fall, list the names and events that students should master, a device popularized by University of Virginia Professor E.D. Hirsch Jr. Most other states provide general guides and ask local districts to fill in the gaps.

The standards for Colorado, released three months after Virginia's, ask that ``students understand the chronological organization of history and know how to organize events and people into major areas to identify and explain historical relationships.'' Its guide for kindergarten through fourth grade calls for ``chronologically organizing significant events, groups, and people in the history of Colorado.''

In contrast, the state-history section of the Virginia standards says fourth-graders should learn, among other things, ``the backgrounds, motivations, and contributions of George Washington, George Wythe, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Patrick Henry, and other prominent Virginians in the Revolutionary era; and the significance of the Charters of the Virginia Company of London, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, and the Declaration of Independence.''

The spread of the Virginia guidelines illustrates one of the hottest arguments in education today - between those who think that teachers should emphasize memorizing facts at least as much as developing thinking skills and those who believe that if thinking and learning skills are learned, students can find the facts for themselves.

Besides the Massachusetts board, educators in Texas, California, North Carolina, Kentucky, Maine, Vermont, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Louisiana have sought information about the Virginia approach, officials say.

But in many of those same states, some teachers and parents have said the Virginia guide demands too much memorization and leaves too little class time to learn how to analyze history and apply its lessons to the present day.

Diana Hasuly-Ackman, social-studies supervisor for Arlington County, Va., schools, said she appreciates the continuity and consistency the new standards have given her teachers but feels the guide fails to help children figure out why history developed the way it did.

``There is nothing that brings together particular concepts to be taught,'' she said. ``It is a very limited approach, and there are huge gaps.''

That Allen's history guide might become a national standard is ironic, because the Republican governor has resisted the idea of national standards in education. Until recently, he refused to accept federal money under the Clinton administration's Goals 2000 program, which is designed to encourage a nationwide approach to learning.

Allen said he is gratified by the favorable response to the history standards in Virginia.

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