Now With Data

If you scale for population size to make a comparison, shouldn't you scale for length of history size? Or do you include in your expert about French history in the US only those who focus on post-French revoluation?

NB. There are only resident faculty members at Harvard's Center for European Studies.

Sorry:

NB. There are only 18 resident faculty members at Harvard's Center for European Studies.

Generally speaking, though, American higher education!!!!

You are joking right? The standard of higher education at the best US universities is indeed world clas, however both the mean & median are widely regarded as a joke.

Timothy,
"Widely regarded" by whom? The stuff I've read on the topic says that the middle ground of average public universities and not-famous private liberal arts colleges is quite good; in fact, most kids would get an education at those places that's not noticeably worse than the one they'd get at an Ivy League school. I certainly know a number of intelligent and successful people who graduated from California's state schools, which are designed for the top 1/3 or so of high school graduates (the University of California campuses being for the top 1/10, or something).

I often suspect that the goal of foreign-language instruction in the US is to convince students that it's impossible to learn a foreign language.

I´m curious...

I know I defended German universities against McMahon. :)
Now I read that follow-on post by David Bell. Unlike McMahon, totally ignoring Germany but concentrating on France.

Let me first start by admitting that I don´t know anything about the French education system. However I´m wondering if the French education system might have a few similarities to the German university system...

Notice that David Bell is only talking about "historians".
In German universities American history is taught
1) by history departments and
2) by "Anglistik" and "Amerikanistik" departments.

Departments covering English language, (English and American) literature, culture and so on. ("Anglistik" covering all English speaking countries, "Amerikanistik" concentrating on the USA.) And if you want to understand the literature and culture obviously you need to know something about American history and politics.

Is it possible that the French system is somewhat similar to the German system here? Meaning that maybe you don´t have that many dedicated tenured professors in American history in a history department? But that you´ve got professors teaching American history inside the "English language" departments?

Matt,

2 points to keep in mind on that subject:

1) French history is quite older and larger than American history.

As a Roman culture, education in French history actually starts with ancient Greece and Rome and carries on with the “Dark Ages”, the Carolingians, the Eastern Roman Empire, the High Middle Ages, etc. Even with a narrower span, French history proper starts earlier than the 9th century, while there is fairly little to teach about American history proper before the early 17th century.

Simply put, France is a freaking old place so there is a lot more matter to study and teach.

2) The structure of the education system differs a lot.

The French primary and secondary education system is fairly strong. Students put long hours at every levels. History and geography (the two matters are taught jointly) are taught from elementary school to senior high and cover much more than France. Even in scientific K10 to K12 sections, students have ~100 hours / year on the subject. Literary sections get much more. The United States are amply covered, especially in modern history. When students enter the university, they have had a rather good opportunity to learn a lot (whether they actually learn is a whole ‘nother story). So history in higher education is mostly centered on bachelor and graduate majors - a rather small crowd - and not taught much as minor.

History and geography education is much lighter in US primary and secondary education so there is a strong need to bring bachelor students up to snuff. If you’re nasty, you can call that remedial education. Hence more professors and TAs in American universities, a lot of them formally specialized and reported as professor in XYZ history while history teachers at secondary level are, by definition, generalists.

Which system is the best? Not sure. I think on the whole the average French tends to be a bit less illiterate on world history (and geography) than its American counterpart but it’s not that pretty either.

This is a joke. I can't refute that exact data point, but I teach at an American Ivy League school and have studied in France, and I can tell you that the average French high school student knows more about American history than the average American Ivy League college student!!!

I'm convinced that the American high school experience is only concerned with literacy, and it's only once you get to college that you become "educated" in the United States. In France, "education" comes before high school graduation. Afterwards, there is great variation in quality, with elites receiving access to stellar resources and everyone else getting...well, what's left.

You also have to factor in the much more intellectual cultural environment over there. People continue learning throughout their time out of school. They read. They listen to the radio, which is far more enriching in terms of subject matter than radio in the US (excluding NPR). They discuss. They have discourse. Frankly, it just doesn't compare.

And honestly, it's not that they're special. As far as I can tell, nearly all other industrial nations value a "smart culture"; we're actually special in how much we value stupidity. Witness the current Republican leadership...

I can tell you that the average French high school student knows more about American history than the average American Ivy League college student!!!

Poéthique -- are you sure you aren't just extrapolating from the people you met while studying in France? That's probably not a representative set. Not that you might not be right -- I'd just like to see some actual data.

"Generally speaking, though, American higher education is widely regarded as the best in the world along a variety of dimensions. . ."

Just to get to Timothy Bassett's point, I assume Matt is talking only about those dimensions that ognore the high education that's received by, oh, say, the bottom 80% of American college students.

Is there a course of studies where you learn to put things in perspective?

Our story to date: McMahon claims you can go to any small school and find a French or German historian. O pulleeze. Aside from Biblical history, or Lee's Generals, you'd be lucky to find any history at all.

The question is not professors as a percentage of the population, the question is professors as a percentage of the educational establishment. As with alcohol, the shape or size of the container is less important than the nature and proof of the contents.

As for the quality, well, didn't George Bush 'earn' a history degree from Yale? This, I agree, is no more important than the fact that a certain number of women who use birth control pills will suffer a stroke and become vegetables for the rest of their lives- and no less important, considering that George Bush is our vegetable.

Or, you could do the short form- on the Paris Metro is a station called 'FDR'. Hopefully, between NYC and WaDC, we can muster up two or more 'LaFayettes'. Demented or demotic, the choice is yours.

One thing is that American universities, generally, have a lot of resources at their command that no other university system can boast. They receive less support from the government than in other countries (although American universities are still publicly supported), but they charge far more in terms of tuition, and receive a lot of donations from alumni and the like to boot.

I'm not sure why everyone is getting so worked up about this. The original claim was a bit overdrawn, but it seems pretty clear that American higher education is more concerned with Europe than vice versa. If I had to say why, I suppose I would guess that its a result of the American university sytem's European roots. For a long time, American academics tended to be pretty eurocentric. Eventually, American history gained more prominence, but the institutional interest in European history remained

As far as the American university system only working at the top levels, the French system is far worse in that regard. If you get good test scores and can go to one of the elite schools, you will get a great education, but the regional universities are apparently underfunded disasters. The times had a story about this a few months ago.

As an American college grad, I'd say that the language instruction on offer in the US isn't that bad. The trouble is that five years after graduation, an American has usually forgotten his foreign languages due to lack of practice. That isn't the schools' fault.

Jay

Let's see, the NYC subway hss:

TWO Lafayette stations
Van Cortlandt, two Dyckman, Bleecker
Kosciuszko

And, frighteningly enough, an Alabama Avenue.
This has more to do with the polyglot nature of New York (and its Dutch origins as New Amsterdam) than anything else, but the street namers of New York did not forget our French benefactors. Now I really I want to see the DeGaulle Parkway...

A country like France has a longer and more "interesting" history

I come from an old New Orleans family on my mother's side. Someone in her family made up a geneology about a century ago, with brief notes explaining where folks came from before they entered our lineage. The Creole community in the city didn't intermarry much with les Americains, at least not until the 20th Century, and, in the resulting insularity, they tended to "place" each other by when and why they or their forebears had left France. The "why" recorded over and over again in this geneology is depressing in its common element. There was the referendaire who had the foresight to liquidate his holdings in France just before 1789, but the misfortune to reinvest in a sugar plantation in Haiti on the eve of Toussaint. His second refuge in New Orleans proved less disastrous a relocation. Then there were the Girondists and Jacobins who, in rapid succession, felt the pressing need for a rapid change of forwarding address. They were followed by the Bonapartists and republicans after 1814. That pretty much accounts for the original decision to emigrate, but we had at least one ancestor forced later on to a sort of secondary emigration. He made a hasty decision to complete his medical studies some place outside of Paris, where he had started, when he picked the losing side of the events of 1852.

We in the US of A only have two centuries of history independent of the great powers of Europe, and only one event, the Revolution, "interesting" enough to make large numbers of us decide that moving to another country was the better part of valor (Canada was the lucky recipient of most of these folks, which accounts for their jaundiced view of us.). But, if our relative deficit of interesting history makes you jealous of la belle France, cheer up. When I contemplate my geneology these days, I can't help but think that my family's place of refuge from interesting history is on the brink of its own era of adventure-packed chills and spills, such that folks who take a tad too much interest in politics, and guess wrong, as my family tended to, will find themselves with a pressing need to relocate internationally.

I just want to add a few notes to a topic that seems to be thought out in a suprisingly shallow way.

1) So, american has roughly 4x as many french history scholars per capita as france has american history scholars. it seems to me that there would be two major factors driving the per-capita numbers here beyond any bias of either two countries: total investment in scholarship (or historical scholarship in particular) and richness of the topic in question. If we are just counting the university scholars in a humanity, it is probably the case that the level of support is comparable within a factor of order unity (after all, about the same fraction of US and French students go to university). the richness of the topic, however, varies quite substantially. North American History in the sense of Anglo/US History consistutes only some 350 interesting years, with a relatively small population for 200 of those years. The French association CENA lumps Native American studies and anthropology as well as an emphasis on Franco-Canadian studies in with the Anglo-US studies, but in honesty that does not extend the study space so very much. On the other hand, French history, extending back to the Roman occupation days encompases 2000 years of history, with a population much higher for most of those years than the areas of the modern US until just pre-civil war. There are certainly fractions of that 2000 year history which do not present much rich topic for historical study (eg, the very darkest years 400-500), but there is still quite alot of archaeology to be done in those years, and that is often done in conjuction with History depts, not the classical archaeology depts (in the US). I would assume just from the above argument that, if they were equally weighted by the two cultures, that the number of American scholars of French history should be an order of magnitude larger (even per-captia!) than the number of French scholars of American history. To see this from a thermodynamics point of view, the available phase-space for French study of American history is much smaller than the available phase-space for American study of French history.

2) you have to be a bit careful about apples and oranges. I believe CENA is a distributed center: they have members from the universities in Paris, but also Lyons and other places. You have to realize that scholars in France often will list their association with their funding agency (eg, CNRS) not necessarily the place at which they sit to do work. CENA seems to be both a funding institution and a physical site. For a more accurate comparison with the NASFHS, you should get the membership numbers for L'Association française d'études américaines (AFEA) (http://etudes.americaines.free.fr).

3) We are always more likely to study things which are relevant to ourselves. The US has had a substantial contribution (in many ways including law, culture, government, etc) from France, while France has only had significant contribution from the US this century. Is it surprising that CENA concentrates on the 20th century US, while the US historians of France concentrate on things pre-dating the American Revolution? for that matter, it is not surprising most European countries did not have a significant american history effort until the 60s. Do we yet have a significant Russian or Chinese history effort in the US? How about Brazil and India?

Europeans, like Americans, can tend to have a tunnel vision which amplifies the importance of things in Europe, just as Americans do the same for America. But, my impression is that Europe is now well-aware that they are not the center of the world, and are learning quickly about other cultures, America as well as other places. I hope Americans will someday re-vitalize their interest in the world outside of immediate American interests as well...

It's true that the U.S. was occupied, in part or in whole, by European imperialists from around the 1620s to 1783, but that doesn't mean we don't have any history before that. Of course, finding all of the records and getting all of the stories straight is kinda hard.

foobar: Wha? France has only had significant contribution from this US this century? What about, you know, the founding event of modern French history, the French Revolution?

Detlef of course refuted Macmahon on Germany, but the arguments for France are so weak that I'm wondering if it's really true in that case.

Those damn French bastards. We should level some sanctions on their ass until their universities demonstrate a statistically relative reciproprocity of history professionals. Who's with me on this?

Re: and only one event, the Revolution, "interesting" enough to make large numbers of us decide that moving to another country was the better part of valor

when people felt the need for a change of venue in the US, they packed up and moved west, where their reputations would not follow and where the government's writ (for long) barely ran.
There was also a small migration of slave-owning Southerners to Brazil (still a slave state then) after the Civil War. Their descendants still live there, celebrating annual Confederate Day in Portuguese.

"If you scale for population size to make a comparison, shouldn't you scale for length of history size? Or do you include in your expert about French history in the US only those who focus on post-French revoluation?"

American history didn't begin on Plymouth Rock.

That said, and I don't know precisely how strongly this holds for France, but European history departments tend to take a much longer view of history than American ones. At Oxford and Cambridge, for example, "modern history" covers everything after the Dark Ages.

If one made the same comparison with the UK, I suspect that the disparity wouldn't be that much smaller. Yes, British universities offer American Studies courses and literature courses tend to have an American-lit component. But the number of British experts on American history who don't teach in the US (where the pay and benefits is much better) is really quite small. I suspect the same applies in France.

As for the quality of American universities: well, it only really kicks in at the postgraduate and research level, in part because of the ubiquity of the undergraduate degree, the broad-based nature of degree courses, and the level of high-school education. One example: Americans with an A.B. from a decent school are generally allowed to skip the first year of an Oxford undergraduate degree.

When thinking about French history, let's not forget that there's A SHYTELOAD MORE OF IT.

A quick check pulls up the info that the Treaty of Verdun, which formally recognized France as its own nation, was signed in the year 843.

1163 years ago.

By that standard, there isn't much U.S. history TO study, is there?

Speaking as a historian, the relative length of US history is counterbalanced by the fact that we know far more about the period it encompasses than we do about most of French history. This is because the number of sources plummet as you go back in time due to lower literacy; the result is that even with 2000 years of French history, the disparity is not as much as you would think.

US History thus divides into about as many subspecialties with as much knowledge to be known as French history.

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