Sunday, May 23, 2010
Fear Can Make You Lie
Education has long been one of the major power bases for liberals. What students are taught in high school and college has a major effect on how they vote in their first elections. The thought that social studies curricula might be changed is frightening to the liberal power centers like the Washington Post.
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Do you know what is either hilarious or sad, depending on your point of view? I don't remember any of my history classes in elementary school or high school ever getting up the timeline much beyond the Civil War in any case. So most of what they are talking about in that article is stuff in a time period that we never covered in class. It was as if the entire 20th century, and part of the 19th, never actually happened. Practically everything I know about history, I picked up myself since then. And since I doubt the situation has changed much since the 1970s, what we have is a huge hooraw about changing from one set of standards that the kids are never going to learn, to another set of standards that they are never going to learn.
I think that, first, they need to address the structural problem that keeps grade-school history classes from ever getting up to the present day. American History classes start at Columbus in the fall and run out of time about the time they hit the Civil War, and then the next year, instead of taking up at the Civil War, they start over again at Columbus. World History classes have the same problem, they start at about the invention of agriculture and run out of steam sometime around mid-Roman Empire.
Maybe other schools do it differently, and maybe they actually learn enough in school to know that the Napoleonic Wars were distinct from World War I, but I think that most people never learn this in school and end up picking it up in the gutter, so to speak.
Tim, I had the same experiences, at least for those years I was in public school. Our teachers never managed to make it to the modern era or if they did, they blasted through it in no time at all. Meanwhile, my friends and I were researching history like mad for our wargames and to build scale-model ironclads from the civil war out of cardboard and cut up beer cans so we could shoot them up with BB guns.
I don't recall anything that my public high school or junior high taught about social studies.
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