An Interview with Will Fitzhugh: The Concord Review, and Excellence in Research and Writing

Michael F. Shaughnessy

Eastern New Mexico University

Portales, New Mexico

1. Will, you recently published an article in Gifted Education Press Quarterly ( Spring 2010, Vol. 24, no. 2 )   What was the article about?

                   Maurice Fisher, Editor of the Gifted Education Press Quarterly and a long-time supporter of my efforts, asked me to write about The Concord Review and to say something about the problems of academic writing in our schools.

2. I concur with you that teaching reading, writing and library skills are all important components of a rich, robust high school curriculum. Why is it that some schools do not share these views?

          Academic writing, as in student book reports and research papers, is not easy to do at any age, but in some ways it gets harder the longer schools put off having students learn how to do it. Many teachers who went to schools of education never did much serious academic writing themselves and have little idea how to coach students through it. In addition, writing is under the control of the English departments in our schools, and they have almost all dedicated themselves to personal and creative writing, and the five-paragraph essay. When it comes to reading, English teachers thing students can read complete books, but only if they are fiction.

3. Let’s focus on reading non-fiction as well as fiction. As students go from freshman to senior year, what books SHOULD they be reading in terms of mandatory reading, and what books should they possibly be enjoying?

          There will always be lots of controversy over which books students should read in school, even when it is fiction. When it comes to non-fiction, the battles, if possible, are even more destructive. If the books are history books, some people want to make sure that students take due pride in their country, and some want to make sure that students are properly ashamed of the United States, but I have my own prescription for four books: All HS freshmen should read David McCullough’s Mornings on Horeseback, All sophomores should read David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing, all juniors should read James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, and all seniors should, in my opinion, read David McCullough’s Path Between the Seas. But they should all read other history books as well, as they go through school, and write reports on them, too. Boys love history, when they are allowed to read it, and girls do, too, but they have to be given a chance to find that out.

4.  Tell us about your Page Per Year Plan©. Seems reasonable enough to me.

          Some years ago, I suggested that students should start writing about something other than themselves from first grade. Each year they would add a page to the length of their papers, so that fifth graders would write a five-page paper, with five sources, a ninth grader a nine-page paper with nine sources, and a twelfth grader a twelve-page paper with at least twelve sources, and these should be minimums for all students. I now believe it might be a good idea to put in place a nonfiction-book-per-year plan, as well.

5. Do you think all this texting on cell phones has changed student’s approach to writing?

          The Kaiser Foundation just reported on a ten-year study of students’ (ages 8-18) use of electronic entertainment media, including cell phones, computers, video games, etc. They found that the average youngster spends nearly 7 hours a day (53 hours a week) on such media, none of which is used for homework. This prevents our students from doing any non-fiction reading or academic writing, and, in some cases, from thinking much, as well.

 6.  Will, you get an extensive amount of feedback from students who have published in The Concord Review. Give us a few examples.

          One of my most cherished examples of that came from a young lady who wrote a long research paper on Anne Hutchinson, as a junior in a public high school. She then graduated summa cum laude from Yale, and when she was interviewed for the Rhodes Scholarship which she won, she was asked about the paper she had published in The Concord Review. She wrote me that: “I come from a family with a long and firm commitment to the value of public education, and I hope to continue this commitment when I have children of my own. But I likewise hope that the range of academic opportunities and challenges I discovered beyond my school, that contributed to make my experience in secondary school so rewarding and paved the way for a happy and successful career as an undergraduate and (I hope) as a graduate student, will still be available for them.  Among those opportunities, of course, is The Concord Review. Twenty or twenty-five years from now, I will be looking for it.”

7. Let’s talk about certain important personality traits—initiative, consistency, motivation—what do these traits have to do with library research, writing and success in life?

          Most of us have to be pushed into non-fiction reading and academic expository writing, because they are hard work at first, but by reading good history books and writing serious term papers, we find that our motivation comes more and more from within, as we learn more about the achievements of others who have made a lot out of their opportunities in life. Writing is always hard, but as we get better at, it provides rewards of its own, in knowledge and in a growing ability to share what we have learned with others.

8. Having a paper that one can be proud of, can certainly impact a student. What have you found?

          Several of my authors from The Concord Review have told me of the particular pride they have felt, in seeing the issue in which their work was published, sitting right there among the other books on their bookshelves. Some feel that they have received both a reward for good academic hard work and an encouragement to do more in the future. Some feel that being published has helped them get into a more selective college, but most of all, they express to me the satisfaction that came to them in doing the reading and the writing as they did it, especially when they were ready to send it off to be considered for publication in a unique and very competitive journal.

 9. Now, tell us a bit about The Concord Review and what teachers, and parents, and organizations dealing with gifted students should know….

          The Concord Review has been, since 1987, the only journal in the world for the academic work of high school students writing in any field of study. We have published 890 research papers by students from 44 states and 36 other countries around the world. The papers now average almost 6,000 words, with endnotes and bibliography, and they may be on any historical topic, ancient or modern, domestic or foreign. There are a good number of examples of papers we have published, along with a submission form, on our website at www.tcr.org, and we now have a blog, as well, at www.tcr.org/blog. One of our authors from a school in Georgia, who went from high school to Christ Church College, Oxford, wrote me that: “FYI, most of the ‘get into college’ publications I read referred to The Concord Review as the ‘Intel Science Competition’ of the humanities and the only serious way to get academic work noticed.”