This Is The Future

The sad thing is there's not really an easy way to solve these sorts of problems -- it would require a significant revamping of the entire system. There are so many problems it's difficult to know where to start. Administrators and parents want everyone to pass and graduate. There's little accountability for teachers/professors who don't push their students (I worked with a prof who gave A's to more than 90 percent of his students, and it wasn't because of their brilliant work). And you're put into situations where you can't do too much pushing -- a typical high school class has both students who are brilliant and students who can barely read; guess which one the curriculum has to be geared toward.

 

The two most interesting classes I took outside of my major when I was in college in the late 80s were "Europe Between the Wars" and "Eastern Europe since 1945". I'd like to take both of those again, especially the latter now that the Cold War is over.

 

My dad was a longtime teacher and even taught me twice while I was in high school and he was one of the most effective educators I'd had. He tried to buck the "standardization" of public schools for as long as he could but failed, so he moved into a role as a librarian.

Now? The local school district is discussing naming rights for its campuses. WTF? This or the extra money will teach students algebra more effectively how?

 

They'll get books that aren't a decade old.

Edit: Maybe that doesn't change algebra class, but it does make a difference in history class. Don't know about you people, but I'd go to the back on the history book first to see what they said about recent history with which I was familiar.

 

Unfortunately for kids in elementary and high school, this is really the only effective way of teaching a subject like history. There are 400 years worth of lessons in America alone, never mind anything that has happened in Europe or elsewhere in the world.

You'd almost have to have a national program in which students will learn certain history lessons in each grade, all the way up the ladder.

Of course, there's absolutely no excuse for any student to not have a reasonably good grasp on spelling and proper grammar by the time they enter high school, at the very latest.

 

The average high school textbook for any subject is shoddily written and constructed. Never mind that subtle biases are evident.

 

Beyond the books themselves, the districts (and the states) have so much interference set up you might not ever actually finish teaching the course. It's like that episode of The Simpsons...

Last day of school, kids are running out of the building and the teacher yells,
"Wait a minute! You didn't find out how World War II ended.....We won!"

 

I think the only proper way to teach a history course anymore is to handle major themes comparatively and cross-sectionally. There's more than one way to create a synthesis of knowledge, which is the end objective. Who would keep watching a running, continuous movie of American history that starts out with Vasco Fucking Da Gama and De Soto? It grates early and you lose them in a heartbeat. Teaching is always going to be a sales pitch more than anything, and these kids live in a world where they're already bored very quickly. Time to go to a different well.

 

When I was in high school (mid-1970s), history classes stopped on Aug. 3, 1945.

We had "current events" which tried to catch up a bit, but not much. My parents had been around for all of it, and I remembered everything from 1963 on by myself, so I filled in the gaps for myself.

The problem is, most school districts are scared out of their wits by political controversy, so you can't really talk about anything in the last 30 years or so without pissing somebody off.

There are school districts who want teachers to talk about Watergate without implying that Nixon did anything wrong, or talk about Vietnam without mentioning that LBJ was an idiot.

 

Damn, I thought this was a thread on Kelley "The Future" Washington.

 

College-level history survey classes are nothing more than Iconoclasm I and II. The task is as much disabusing students of the leaky crap they have ingested in high school as it is giving them anything new or real to eat. In no other fucking field does this happen. Math profs know that geometry has been taught or at least introduced into the bloodstream, but they don't assume it has been mistaught. Lit professors are not led to presume that Romeo and Juliet was mangled or misunderstood. History is the only discipline in which the more courses average high school students take, the stupider they become.

Textbooks never use the present to illuminate the past, and seldom use the past to illuminate the present. The past is depicted as one of Lynne Cheney's simple-minded morality plays. "B is for Be all you can be. Y is for You have a proud heritage." While there's nothing wrong with that optimism, it's burdensome for students of color, children of working-class parents, girls who'll very quickly notice a total absence of female historical figures or children coming from groups who have not achieved some level of socioeconomic success.

None of the shit is remembered, because it is packaged and presented as one damned thing after another. Illustrated are most of the big trees, all too many insignificant twigs, but omitting that which is truly memorable -- the forests.

 

College degrees are more worthless by the day.