So, I happen to cruise by CNN and Wolf Blitzer utters the magical word “Watergate,” so I stop and see what the deal is. Turns out in a new poll of Americans 18-54 37% have little or no idea what Watergate was or it’s historical importance
Ray Walston voice "WHAT ARE YOU PEOPLE, ON DOPE???!!!:smack: :smack: :smack: :smack:
Of course, maybe I shouldn’t be that upset seeing as the majority of Americans have NO PROBLEM with the governemtn taking away their Constitutional rights, in fact they seem to eerily happy about it.
Oh, and I hear the popular theory now is that Pat Buchanan was Deep Throat. He may be a whacko, but he gets my vote next election, as opposed to my normal write-in choice(Mr. T).
Mr. T voice "I pity the fool who isn’t in favor if a woman’s right to choose!! And I pity the fool who criticizes a man’s decision to wear 100 pounds in gold necklaces around his neck!!!
The 18 year olds I can see, I just found out last night when watching an ad for the program that my 15-1/2 year old has never heard of Watergate. According to her, they “never got that far in American History” :rolleyes:
But 54? Where the hell were they? I’m 40 and I remember it. It was everywhere! You couldn’t get away from it. My grandmother watched every minute of the hearings and cursed Nixon everytime his picture was on TV from that day forward. It’s mentioned in the media on a fairly regular basis still. How can you just not know?!
Whenever I see one of those Americans-know-nothing-about-history polls, I always wish I could get a look at the questionnaire, just so I could see how I stack up against the average American.
Do they ever get past World War II in American History? I mean, after the standard three-month unit on the Revolutionary War and the standard three-month unit on the Civil War, there’s just not much time for anything else!
This is geography, not history, but still this thread reminded me of an incident at work.
There’s a German collegue of mine who has, as his Windows wallpaper, the map of Europe CNN shown with the misplaced Switzerland (see it on last half of this Snopes page). I said it was pretty funny when when I noticed it, and he said something like “Ha ha! You Americans sure are stupid with geography!”
I wanted to say “Yeah, it’s probably a lot easier to learn the geography of the world when you try and fail to take it over a few times…” but I was new to the group at the time. Now that I know the sonofabitch better, I’d love to shove that back in his face.
As someone who holds a BA in history, I’m consistently amazed at the utter lack of what I consider pretty common historical knowledge in the general population. I’ve just had to learn to accept it. History educators at the high school level are hamstrung by crummy textbooks that oversimplify every issue in American history from Columbus to the Civil War to the Depression to WW2. History educators at the college level are so driven by their own research agenda, and often its accompanying political bent, that they taint courses with their choice of what to study in class. The few quality educators at university level still have to contend with the fact that their tenure will depend on their research.
Why is history any different in that last respect? Well, you can learn any course in chemistry and physics from a single well-written text book, I did just that as a former Engineering major. You can’t learn a subject in history from any single text. You need an educator who understands the subject matter and a good selection of single-topic monographs written by other educators. History education is pathetic in this country, and that poll bears it out.
The oversimplification inherent in said crummy textbooks, in this student’s opinion, partially results from the sheer size of the subject matter. High school history tends to be taught in survey courses which hit the highlights.
I do agree with you, RexDart, that history can’t be learned from a single textbook.
Years ago, when I was still a high school history teacher, I went to a wonderful seminar on a Connections style of teaching history. Connections was a great TV show that started with something like nylons and traced a connection all the way back to a Greek philospher or Dutch tulips (I seem to remember tulips showing up somehow in every episode, but that might just be me). Anyway, this curriculum did that with history, it would take something like Watergate, and then, in the course of teaching about it, go into a bunch of other historical events that set up the situation (like war protestors, that went back to why we were in Vietnam, which takes us to colonialism or the cold war, etc.) it could be done either for a short period of time–events going back 10-20 years, or a more survey style that might touch on ideas from several centuries. I always wanted to try it, but went to law school instead.
True. I never, and I mean never, got past WWII in a highschool history class. Which worked out well, because most of the textbooks stopped in the early seventies. There was a line from the textbook for my Sophmore history class, which I took sometime in '92, that I used to have memorized. Something along the lines of, “What does America have to look forward to in the bold new decade of the 1980s?” And this was at one of the best public highschools in the state. Okay, so this was in California, so that’s not saying much. (Motto of the Calfornia Department of Education: Making Alabama look good since 1970)
I lived in the part of Maryland that was much closer to Northern Virginia, which is scarier in its own way, then being close to WV. I got my bachelors in history, so I can say with all certainty that I KNOW history. Not all of it, but a good bit of it.
In my one high school American History class, we got as far as the Civil War only by substituting the Ken Burns documentary on it for actual teaching, and completely skipping over the War of 1812. And this was a fairly decent high school, although that particular teacher was a complete idiot.
In the one year of US history that I had, we barely reached the 1970’s and 1980’s…too sad, because I expected to learn or at least know a bit about the Reagan administration and my teacher’s opinion of it.