Yes, actually, I know they did the last year she went to public school because she took a bunch of my Nasa and assorted space stuff to school for the week they were studying the space program. That’s right, a whole week devoted to the entire history of Nasa and the space program. I distinctly remember learning that stuff in elementary school but she didn’t get it until Jr. High at school. Fortunately I don’t wait around for the school to use those last few chapters in their textbooks.
The had textbooks new enough to have President Clinton in his first term in office.
I know they got at least through the 1980 election because she asked me who I had voted for and why as part of a report for school. She knew who Nixon was in that vague “President before I was born” kinda way. Yet they seemed to have completely skipped the section on Watergate.
And people wonder why I’m so much happier to be homeschooling her.
Kallessa, Connections! was a fabulous show! We have several of them on tape.
LOL! If it was high school, there’s not much doubt about any teacher’s opinion of the Reagan administration, if the teacher was an NEA member. The labor incident between Reagan and the aviation industry galvanized opposition to Reagan within all unions. I say this not as a political barb or an attack on teachers, just as an observance that I think many people would concur with. Teachers at my high school were VERY politicized, always in support of the left-wing politicians at state-level and in support of whoever was indicriminately throwing money at schools on the local-level. It’s rational self-interest (in a short-sighted sense, I’m not betraying Ayn Rand by saying this) for the teachers to advocate those positions.
The collegiate level would illustrate a more general problem with history education. Professors will pick and choose which post-WW2 topics they want to cover in survey courses (i.e. basic American History 1865-present), generally due to time constraints. Their own personal research interests and political agendas will dictate what they discuss. Generally, you can count on JFK, Great Society, and they’ll try VERY hard to get to Watergate as it is a great study tool in learning why the hippie generation (of which many of our college professors were a part) developed the harsh mistrust of government they bore throughout the 70’s and 80’s. What’s more interesting, that they never really get to, is why these same professors began to warm to government later in their careers.
I wonder what they thought was going on when “-gate” gets added to every single scandal there is. (I was shocked to see the British starting to do this too.) Sigh they probably don’t watch news either.
In 10th grade the History teacher gave us a short extra credit quiz every morning on modern events. She’d ask 10 questions and if you knew the question you raised your hand. I swear, out of a class of 30 only myself and one other guy knew every answer.
There was a war betwen the northern half of the country and the southern half. Lots of people died.
Canada and Mexico are not part of the US.
New Mexico is a state and not part of Mexico.
JFK was the youngest president.
That’s it. At least I read alot on my own. Most of my classes in HS were geared towards keeping the students in class and out of trouble. All we had to do was sit down and be quiet and do a minimal ammount of work. Most of what I was taught wasn’t even correct.
Damn kids today! I blame television. Why if Eli Whitney knew this would happen he never would have invented the goddam thing!
Get off my lawn!!
I recall the Simpsons episode wherein the children are excited on the last day of school for the year. The bell rings and they burst screaming out of the doors to their summer of freedom. Suddenly, this history teacher comes out of the school (with his loose tie and rolled up sleeves - I love it!) and says, “Wait! I never told you how World War II ended.” Suddenly there was a hush. He continued, “We won!!!” The kids run away chanting, “USA! USA!”
A friend of mine is a US History teacher. He was so fed up with getting as far as Veitnam every year when he decided to throw convention out the second floor window and taught the entire year backward. Yep, the first day of class he sat there with that day’s Washington Post, read the headlines and said, “Now, just why are Israel and Palestine so upset with each other?” That started the entire year.
We’re coming up on the 30th anniversary of Watergate. Assuming you’d probably have to have been about 10 to appreciate the event, probably only those 40 and older would be privy to remembering the actual event. If the sample pool was evenly distributed, about 3/5 of the respondants would have had to have read about it as opposed to having lived through it.
Frankly, I’m surprised the number unfamiliar with the details is only 37%, especially after seeing some of Leno’s man on the street polls.
Sigh I taught travel agent school part time a number of years ago and was amazed at the general ignorance I encountered. My personal fav? The bright young student that asked me who had won WII and why it got started. This girl did all her course work and made great grades by the way-she was just a product of a Texas Rio Grande Valley education.
This is one of my favorite all-time rants. I went to what was supposed to be one of the best public, non-magnet high schools in the country; we never got past WWII (because the school year ended). I remember feeling like we were learning the same damn thing every year. Not a damn thing even about Korea or Vietnam, and anything east of Germany might as well not have existed, except for one sentence about Hiroshima.
I had no idea that the Soviet Union even fought in WWII, or that there was an Eastern Front at all, until I studied in Russia. I also didn’t know until my junior year of H.S. that the U.S. had interned Japanese-Americans, and then only because I took Advanced Placement history. And this from someone who got pretty much straight A’s in honors and advanced placement classes. It sure was an eye-opener later on, studying in Spain and then in Russia, to hear about it form the other side. I think it’s a symptom of low expectations from U.S. public education; they tend to be self-fulfilling.
I wonder…every year they teach the same thing? I would think one year study era, the other year another era, and then when all the eras have ended, go back to review the other era…at least it seems less repetitive…
Example: One year you get until WWII, the next year you take US History from WWII to present…then back to before WWII…I mean, it seems a better way to teach history than what they have now, repeating the same thing year after year after year…
I had a cool teacher for US History in high school. He knew there was no way in hell we could get too far if we followed the guidelines for American history courses, so we basically only hit the high points of every thing. My history started with Christopher Columbus, and ended with Poppa Bush being elected.
It still doesn’t suprise me that kids aren’t getting the information they need. To learn everything you really need to learn, you would have to take 2 year-long courses. How hard would it be for them to implement a plan like this? I mean, where I went to school, you had to take 3 years of math, 3 years of science, and 4 of English. Why not two years of history? The only history requirement we had in high school was 1 year of US history, and a semester each of government and economics. I ended up taking World Geography and Western Civilization because I had spaces left in my schedule. Besides, wouldn’t it make it easier on teachers to know they only had to teach up to say, World War I, and then up to current events?
It would be very difficult, due to the mobility of American society and the decentralized nature of curriculum development…what if a kid moved to another school district between grades? He could miss the entire American Revolution!
In college I took a Geography course because I’m terrible with world geography and wanted to learn, especially to help with my Western Civ classes.
First day of class, the prof tells us “The best way to learn about geography is to learn about the people that live ON the land!” and turned it into basically an Anthropology class. The first week we studied a map of Africa and then pretty much never saw another map again. Really ticked me off.
Back on topic:
I am always amazed at polls like this. Which people are they asking? Do they specifically seek out people with no t.v. or who’ve been living in a cave in the desert or something? And Jay Leno’s man on the street things just SLAY me! It’s appalling.
This can be an extremely good way of teaching, as it allows you to ‘unravel’ history like a ball of twine, and can be far more interesting than the standard ‘lists of names and dates’ method.
I attended a school that really gave a rat’s ass about history, and we had all kinds of intersting excercises and apporaches that kept us in glued to the subject, everything from ‘what if’ to world-wide diplomacy (reseach a nation, and convert it’s strengths and weaknesses into “Diplomacy”-style rules, then try and take over the class. I made a small mistake late in the game, and was the last player eliminated, clobbered by my good friend, whom didn’t goof any at all). We even had a ‘sneak’ attack by another teacher during the Depression/WWII sections. Wonderful fun!
I took AP (Advanced Placement) US History in high school, and there’s a very good reason we barely passed WWII: we learned more than just who fought what war and who won. The textbook we used (Bailey’s The American Pageant) was very good at going into underlying causes and effects.
The teacher was excellent and I learned a lot, but there just wasn’t any time to get to the modern day. To do that we would’ve had to brush past a lot of the economic crises, smaller battles, and social changes. I did, however, learn about Watergate and such from my parents before I even reached middle school.
It does give me pause, though, to think that someday someone’ll go out and poll the populace and find out that the average American youth knows nothing about the election of 2000, September 11, or the Persian Gulf War. It’s so much harder to imagine not knowing about something when you’ve lived through it and been affected by it.
What pisses me off is when they show these “Look how stupid kids/Americans/old people/[insert group here] are these days” surveys on TV. You know they’re only showing you the one clueless person who didn’t know who fought in the American Civil War, and not the fifty other people who said “Who are you trying to kid? It was the Union and the Confederacy”
– Dragonblink, product of a Californian public high school with 3500 students, a community college, and a public university
The scene: crowded movie theatre restroom just after the end of Saving Private Ryan
The cast: two middle-aged, middle-class women*, obviously friends, talking while washing hands; and me, in a stall within earshot.
The dialog:
[Idle chit-chat about it being a good movie even if a tad violent, and then, during further discussion of the opening scene of the D-Day landing…]
MAMCW#1: The sign** said “Omaha”, but I think that was Europe.
MAMCW#2: Yeah, I think so.
Me: :eek:
It was all I could do not to lunge out of my stall and ask “Are you kidding?”, but then I recognized the futility of such an act (not to mention the possible discomfort). No one else seemed to think anything of it.
** Meaning subtitle/scene-title, which really said “Omaha Beach”
Meaning they appear to have had certain “advantages” (or at least not significant dis-advantages) and therefore could be considered reasonably educated, reasonably aware, and while they may not have been alive during WWII ? heck, neither was I - but did they never see a WWII war movie? Did they miss the whole 50-year D-Day anniversary thing a few years back?
Everything seems like it must be in a “cliff note version” in order to keep anybody’s attention. It seems like people just do what they have to do to get by–get the grade, the degree, the job, etc. So stuff that isn’t directly related to potentially earning a living someday gets swept under the rug. I imagine in 10 years, there will be all kind of bastardized versions of the current mid east crises, etc. Keep everyone confused and it makes it harder to fight and stand for something.
I am no expert but I think I know more the a lot of my peers. I would be interested to hear how some of you more well- versed historians suggest these “18-54 yr olds” bone- up, if they want to?
