There is probably little more likelihood of the teachers of American history reaching a consensus on what should be required and taught than there is among the scholars and writers of history agreeing upon what should be written and published. Among both, the doing of history usually involves endless discussion, debate, and controversy. They raise such basic questions as what happened and why, who was responsible and to what degree, what should have been done and how, what should be included and what omitted. The emerging answers do not provide eternal truth, but they often challenge received wisdom and help prevent confusion of history with nostalgia or something flawless and unchanging called "heritage." History is kept alive by change, by challenge, and by reinterpretation.

Few would deny that American history courses for public schools should include the Revolution, the Constitution, and the Civil War. Yet in 1997 Thomas Jefferson was the subject of more controversy among historians than any other figure of his importance; the Constitution has rarely been more changed by reinterpretation in federal courts; and Lincoln and Civil War history have undergone more than the usual flood of revisionary books. This is not to suggest that children should be kept abreast of ongoing revision by scholars.

Indeed that cannot reasonably be expected of more than a few of their teachers in limited fields. But it is important that the teachers and supervisors of public education who decide upon the curriculum and the textbooks should be aware of the continuing revision of history.

Not until the 1890s did American history begin to gain a place in the curriculum of public schools and private academies, and even that proved to be temporary. From the outset a succession of independent advisory committees influenced curriculum decisions and subsequent changes. The first three committees, reporting between 1892 and 1911, recommended a history-centered curriculum that was favorably received and widely required by school administrators. For two decades the prevailing secondary school requirement was four years of history--more than ever before or since.

Reaction set in about 1920 and continued to influence secondary school curricula strongly for more than half a century. Leaders of the reaction called themselves "Progressives" and demanded the replacement of history by social studies with "practical" and "relevant" courses to promote "social control" and prepare children for adjustment to the status quo. The decline of history in schools reflected what was happening in colleges, where teachers are educated. The new social history stressed quantification and narrowly defined and fragmented topics. By 1990 students could graduate from some 78 percent of American colleges without taking a course in the history of Western civilization. High school students could satisfy their social studies requirements by taking courses in current events, drug education, and sex education, and no history course whatever.

Historians and teachers, especially those in American history, were increasingly distressed by these developments. With commissions sponsored by the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and other organizations, they sought to regain for history the place it once had in American schools. Encouraged by the demand for reform of national education in general by both President George Bush and President Bill Clinton, champions of a history revival in the schools established a National History Standards Project with federal support. The project involved the work of hundreds of people and years of study that resulted in a three-volume report on standards and methods of teaching national and world history published in 1994.

The part of the report devoted to American history came under immediate and furious attack for giving short shrift to important figures and crucial events and too much time to sufferings of the unfortunate. In response a revised version in one volume entitled National Standards for History was published in 1996. The revision omitted the most criticized features of the old version and satisfied some but not all the critics. Conceding that curriculum decisions "should remain under local or state control," the report suggested for grades five to twelve a periodization of United States history in ten chronologically arranged "eras" with "breakpoints" such as "the American Revolution, the Constitution, the Civil War, Progressivism, the New Deal, and the Cold War," but including social, economic, and cultural history. The report insisted that "the schools devote no less than three years of instruction to United States history" plus the same to world history during the student's middle and high school years. In 1996 only seventeen states provided as much as three years of U.S. history, and that under a variety of curriculum plans. It remains to be seen how history will fare in schools in the future.

Changes in how history fares in colleges and universities will affect how it fares in the schools (and vice versa), as they have in the past. University history departments suffered their full share of damage from intramural assaults on the humanities and the academic convulsions that resulted from multiculturalism. Those were the years of bashing the Western canon and Dead White Males, a time of group thinking and minority withdrawal (not always voluntary to be sure) into segregated dormitories, dining halls, fraternities, sororities, student unions, and "ethnic theme houses." Curriculums were revised with political purposes, to promote good causes, with courses in some places taught in separate departments by professors of appropriate gender, race, or sexual orientation.

Among American historians could be found both proponents and opponents of this revolution, but whether their reactions had anything to do with it or not, their subject fell into steep decline in terms of student patronage after the academic year 1970-71. That year marked an all-time high in the number of bachelor degrees awarded in history, and this on top of eighteen years of unprecedented advances--the great history boom. The crash began the following year and continued for fifteen years, the number of bachelor degrees plunging from 44,663 in 1971 to 16,413 in 1986, and that while total college enrollments were soaring. History's decline in percentage of degrees awarded was thus far more dramatic: from 5.3 percent to 1.7 percent in the same period.

Some signs of recovery have appeared in the last ten years, especially in universities of high rank in eastern states, in the production of historical works of distinction, and in the recovery of status and influence in the intellectual community that had been lost to the anti-history bias of French intellectuals of the previous generation. But few signs of the old history boom mentality appeared in the academy. The job market for newly minted historians was still discouraging. Professional journals and history courses in the academy continue to give voice occasionally to the use of the guild for political, philanthropic, or therapeutic purposes. Full recovery still seems remote.

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* C. VANN WOODWARD is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and the author of, most recently, The Old World's New World.