Or to be more exact the South wanted to be independent of the North because it felt that the North was blocking the expansion of slavery to the West. The North fought to preserve the integrity of the Union. So while one could say the immediate casus belli was not slavery, it was at the very heart of the conflict between North and South.
Actually, Daniel, there are at least two words missing. “percent” and “a”. What really scares me, however, is that if “a” is supposed to be “the” then a third word, “not”, is missing because the emancipation proclamation did not occur until well after the war was well under way. The major cause of the war was economics, slavery was relatively minor.
I would like to get my hands on the questions used for this so called study.
OK, on preview I have to disagree with gobear. (hmmm, that never happens [sub]heh heh[/sub]). Slavery was relatively minor. The North wanted to impose tarriffs on English textiles and other economic protections for their fledgling textile industry. The South wanted free trade with England to bolster it’s cotton based economy.
The two sides had not been seeing eye to eye in Washington for almost fifty years before the war because of these issues. In 1832, President Jackson managed to slap a huge tariff on imported goods that competed with northern products. South Carolina passed “the Ordinance of Nullification” stating that the tariff did not apply, and Jackson sent federal troops into Charleston. A secesion crisis was narowly averted, or perhaps just delayed, when congress revised the “Tariff of Abominations” in 1833. The division between North and South started long before northern abolitionists had any political power what so ever.
Slavery was evil, but the war wasn’t fought over slavery any more than the Gulf War was fought over “democracy”.
I believe that even those who disagree with me on this issue would agree that the chief causes of the Civil War are highly debateable and therefore unsuitable as a litmus test for fourth graders.
Good point with the Nullification Crisis (Darn that John C. Calhoun!), and I agree that the causes of the war still has PhDs scratching their heads, so having kids regurgitate a spoonfed version of the origins of the war is indeed stupid.
Who says we never agree, Beeblebrox?
Is this supposed to be a debate on the Civil War, the stupidity of American high schoolers, or the way the media is reporting this story?
Which is really my point; we can certainly debate and discuss what advantages the South really had, as well as the real reason for secession, but the true question is this-
Why are we demanding that high schoolers know the answer to these questions, which aren’t necessarily obvious to anyone who hasn’t studied the issue? Especially when the answers we demand they know are glib responses (“The Civil War was about slavery”- yeah, but, it was also about culture and economics, which were tied into slavery, thus making a Moebius strip of the entire question; “The South had better generals” so long as we’re talking about Robert E. Lee vs. McClellan, and not U.S. Grant vs. John Pemberton or W.T. Sherman vs. J.B. Hood or J. Rosecrans vs. Braxton Bragg.) that a serious examination of the issue makes untrue.
My reaction to this article was not, “Gee, our kids are idiots for not knowing that”; it was, “Who was the idiot who decided that there was a correct answer that 17 year-olds needed to know?”
(As for the reasons given- I’ll agree that the South had it easier in fighting a defensive war and with limited war aims, but I again raise the question of how much of von Clausewitz we expect 17 year-olds to comprehend in order to consider them capable. I disagree that Europe was on the Confederate side- while aristocratic opinion leaned towards the Confederacy, popular opinion was heavily with the industrialized North. At the very least, I’d be more inclined to give weight to that as an answer if France or England had done a damned thing for the Confederacy other than send the occasional mash note. And as for being ‘more organized’- the Confederacy was more interested in war and more prepared for it before the actual hostilities began, but following the ‘great victory’ at First Manassas/Bull Run, the Confederacy just sat around expecting victory while the North got its act together. Whatever advantage the South had evaporated before the end of Winter '61.)
LoL. Not unless you drink all of my beer and sleep with my wife first. And why should I start another thread since you closed the case? pfft.
Umm… who’s Lincoln Stephens? You don’t mean Alexander Stephens, do you?
(Lincoln Steffens was the famed commie pinko American journalist who said of Stalinist Russia, “I have been t the future and it works.”)
Dang, you’re right! I was reading a book about Communism that mentioned Steffens’s quote, and the two names got conflated in my head.
<hangs head in shame>
A man of history? History degree?
whew Is it getting warm in here, or is it me?
You can find the questions along with examples of appropriate answers at the NAEP site. The question mentioned in the OP is number 65, and you can see what the testers were looking for.
I have a B.A. in history, and to get beyond the obvious answer of “generals” I, too, had to think for a while. However, to be fair to the test, this is listed on the site as a Grade 12 Hard question. Perhaps the fault is not with the test, which as administered may have included a couple of hard questions to differentiate the students at the right of the bell curve, but rather with the press coverage, which focused on one of these hard questions rather than an easier one that students still got wrong.
For example, a Grade 12 Medium question that only 41% of students got right was:
- The Monroe Doctrine was intended to
A) promote United States trade with China
B) help keep the peace in Europe
C) discourage European involvement in the Americas
D) protect United States business in Japan and Korea
Wow. Good work, JohnM. […tip o’ the hat…]
It’s funny you mention this, John Corrado. I read that same article today and wrecked on that paragraph, too.
For the record, I’ve been spending the past few weekends roaring through the Shennandoah Valley, in preparation for a days-long tour I plan to take in order to study Jackson’s Valley campaign. I ain’t no Civil War slouch, neither, and that question brought me up short.
(My own answers were “the strategic defensive” and “the Appalachian Mountains,” which is really just a subset of my first answer, and not very satisfactory to me.)
Incidentally, the second example of an “appropriate” response relies upon the tired old argument of “better generals” of the South and the “lack of experienced generals” of the North. That really pissed me off. The first point is subjective and highly arguable (the South lost that war, remember?) and the second is flat-out wrong (see bottom of page).
If you really want to know what a crock the “kids today got no learnin’” rant is, get yourself an ordinary globe, with full notations, and a pin with a tag that says, “You are here.”
Ask adults to put the pin in the right place.
When I did it, one in six came within a thousand miles, and we were standing in the Capital city of the United States! (where the business of running the country is the major industry)
It had a star marking it, and the second largest type of any notation on the darned globe!
The problem is real, but it has nothing to do with children today, because when I did my study, no one who is a kid now had even been born, and I only asked adults.
Tris
PS Three out of four Chicago residents I asked did not know the name of the Chicago river when I asked people walking across it, “What is the name of this river?” That was last year, and they were all adults. There was a sign, by the way.
Stories like Trisk’s are unfathomable to me – if I accept them, it’s totally on a matter of faith. I’d expect someone, by the age of ten, to be able to locate themselves within, say, 400 miles on globe that had no writing or political boundaries on it.
Maybe I should try some experiments. And then go home and drink myself to sleep.
Daniel
Well, I’ve gone ahead and spawned a new, tangental thread to this one.
I’ll go ahead and be simpleminded about it. The South might have had a material advantage, but they had a moral disadvantage. Although it is contentious to say that the Civil War was all about slavery; it was in no little doubt fought between a Confederation perceived as pro-land owners and a Union perceived as pro everyman. Now, an army is usually and certainly in the case of the Civil War made up by the common men of the world. It is fairly easy to look into one’s own soul and answer the q.: “would you rather fight for someone else’s good or your own?”.
I propose that the Confederates lost the war on a moral bankruptcy that led to a collapse of morale and hence to the failure of military strategy. I think most 12 year olds in the US know that. Just ask the right way.
If you ask “The Civil war was fought between two sides that stood for; [fill in the explanation] why did the South lose?” A 12 year olds answer: “They lost because they weren’t for the fact that all people are the same, and because they were real mean guys”. Ask on the other hand; “Why did the South lose the Civil War?” and most 12 year olds will say; “They did?”
I agree with the OP, that is too high demands, but not for knowledge; for format.
You shall be answered as you ask.
Sparc
My first reaction was moral support. From what I understand, many Northerners were less than thrilled to fight, a draft had to be instated, and many richer yankees paid someone else to fight for them. As opposed to the South who were all united in their goal to fend off the “northern aggressors.”
That’s what I remember learning in H.S. anyway.
If a kid in my class turned in a paper that said 1.) Robert E. Lee and 2.) South African mercenaries, hell, I’d give him an A.
I’m having a hard time seeing how this is supposed to be difficult. I would think that any person with a grade 5, or possibly grade 6 education can answer that. Sure, it might take a little while, but it’s very basic arithmetic. If 96% of American students don’t know long division (after they’ve been taught it, I’m not talking kindergarten), then I’d say there is a problem.
IIRC a French monk in the 18th spent his whole life calculating Pi and then at the very last moment realized that he made a mistake somewhere in the 200 first digits. What is so simple about calculating pi??? I’m no good at long division at all even if my IQ tests always went off the charts…further, you would have to know that it is ‘only’ long division.
We might be a bunch of eggheads here…but let’s not get ahead of ourselves shall we?
Sparc