I keep hearing my fellow Americans complaining about having to learn history and geography in school. There was a commercial for one of those local electronics training schools or something with the pitch “Sick and tired of having to learn history and geography? Drop out of your school and learn a trade.” I was reminded of this by an article in Salon.com about “Americans’ global cluelessness,” why Americans are so ignorant of foreign countries and never want to hear about them.
I am so not getting this. I really enjoyed history & geography in school. I’ve always been fascinated with world cultures, other countries, other kinds of people, other languages, other worlds, other realities, & everything. These interests have inspired me to find out a lot of alternative points of view, to travel around the world, and meet all kinds of amazing people, vastly enriching my life. Am I just some kind of weirdo misfit? I have never come close to understanding why so many Americans gripe about these subjects. Can anyone explain?
What’s wrong with history and geography? Probably the same thing that’s wrong with math and science.
:shrug:
It has been my observation, as a student and tutor, that some people don’t like to think. If you really wish to understand history, you must think.
On the other hand, some people don’t like to memorize, either. Geography requires a great deal of memorization (at least, as I’ve seen it taught). In my opinion, it is best to combine the two; that way, you don’t simply memorize all the “names and places and dates and things,” but understand the whos and the wheres and the whens.
Then, of course, there’s the eternal problem of utility: many people don’t see a need for such things as algebra, history, or geography. So why go through the effort to learn them, when you can learn something more practical?
It isn’t that difficult actually Mojo. Americans have forgotten that history is the study of Man’s events and where he is going and what can happen to him, and boy is this important. History is everywhere and we are right in major historical developments right now. History teaches us how to deal with various outsiders and situations on a social, militaristic, economic level etc.
Geography is important too. You study about places and where they are, what types of climates, and what crops or staples a country has, and where countries, are located, why a people might invade etc.
I think the U.S. mostly has become so plastic, and rigid with the business world that other disciples suffer, and this actually has affected how we relate to the rest of the world.
Not everyone is cut out to be scholar. Our country, not unlike others, is full of “regular people”. Some regular guy may not be interested at all in other cultures but perhaps he is very interested in electronics. He goes to the electronics school and beomes a successful engineer. He gets married. He gets a job. He goes to work. He goes to the tavern. He comes home. What does it mean? He is a spoke in the big American wheel. Let it roll!
Ferris: I do have a test today, that wasn’t bullsh**. It’s on Afghan fundamentalism. I mean, really, what’s the point? I’m not an Afghan. I don’t plan on being an Afghan. So, who gives a crap if they’re fundamentalists? They could be fascist anarchists, it still wouldn’t change the fact that I don’t own a car.
Nah. Geography’s great. When I took my first college Geography course, I said “this is it!”. I just think geography to most people is “what’s the capital of North Dakota?”. Also, portajon’s right - a guy I went to high school with was very smart and talented and had absolutely no desire to explore the world outside our little NJ area. I was like “don’t you want to travel and see what’s out there?” and he said something like “why should I? I’ve never known any place better.”
I think many people are turned off of the subjects in grade school. It was only in college that History classes were interesting and didn’t lie to you or cover up “uncomfortable” truths. (Seriously, I was getting close to high school before I actually understood what the U.S. government did to the native american population.)
I disagree with you, BlackKnight. To me geography is learning about other countries and about where I am in relation to the rest of the world, which is inherently fascinating. As to why you think it’s boring, you offer not a ghost of a reason. Thereby buttressing my suspicion that there is no reason for thinking thus. Only mental dullness.
It’s a problem of a narrowminded public school curriculum and the textbooks chosen for the courses as well as parents who don’t take an active role in being advocates for their children’s educational experience, and just basically the isolationist society we Americans find ourselves living in. History and geography are taught in vacuums, and students are not given and certainly are not encouraged to seek out on their own any sense of perspective. It makes no sense to act like we live on planet America, rather than the planet Earth, but this is what we do. What happens in one country’s history, in some way, shape, or form will have some bearing on what happens in another country.
The last time I remember formally studying any kind of geography was in the 4th grade. That was a few millenia ago. We learned the names of the states of the USA and that was it. It was interesting to see where things were, but it would have been even better to see how the USA related to the rest of the world.
As far as history goes, it was boring because when I was in secondary school–and I imagine this has not changed all that much–the teachers just presented it to us as a set of facts. X happened on Y date. It’s not taught so that you actually get to make connections with people. I learned more about 19th Century frontier life by reading Laura Ingalls Wilder books than from any history class. We learned that the Civil War happened in the 1860s, but we didn’t learn what were the motivating factors for the war or the complex interpersonal/racial complications of the war. When I got to college and could choose which history classes to take and I took African American history classes and could learn about what was going on with Native Americans, THEN things got REALLY interesting. I was saddened, though, wondering why I had to wait until I got to college to learn about the other non-white parts of history that were lacking from my secondary school textbooks and classes. Same thing for other countries’ histories too.
It’s just a shame. There’s plenty of time for students to learn about geography and different countries’ histories and cultures AS WELL AS the various aspects of American history throughout secondary school if schools would start when students are in like third or fourth grade. We shouldn’t have to wait until we get to college to learn what we were missing out on. I think that one of the reasons students are bored with geography and history is that teachers aren’t making them think about these subjects in the right way. Model the history lessons around the question: How has what happened a few centuries ago or even a decade ago shaped the society we live in presently?
Well, James W. Loewen’s book Lies My Teacher Told Me argues something along the lines that school boards simply won’t accept history textbooks with troubling issues in them. Students, either aware that they’re being lied to or disinterested in the boring cardboard cutouts presented, lose interest.
Admittedly, Loewen is a crazed liberal with an axe to grind, but he entertainingly makes a few good points. I’m inclined to agree with him; I’ve always been interested in history, but I never learned much from textbooks until I got to college. I found at an early age that the good dirt was in the local library – especially hostile biographies.
Actually, you’re right. (Except about the mental dullness bit. ) I looked up the term geography. Apparantly, it includes the culture of other places, not just countries’ boundaries. (At least according to http://www.m-w.com, the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. My handy, and old, Webster’s II New Riverside Dictionary simply describes geography as the natural features of an area. I’m willing to accept that M-W.com’s definition is more mainstream and up-to-date.) Which honestly surprised the hell out of me. I always thought that fell under the heading of “cultural studies” or something, not “geography”.
Geography, when I had it in school, consisted of memorizing state capitals, the names of as many foreign nations as were expected to still be around in a couple of years, and being able to find said nations on a map. Also, being able to find things like the Rocky Mountains on a map.
Maybe you disagree, but such activities are quite boring. Actually learning about the culture and political structure of other places is interesting.
When I was in school, I mentally put my classes in 3 categories:
Math and Science - This is the good stuff. It makes sense, it’s interesting, it has correct answers, and you can figure it out from principles.
History, Geography, etc - This is just memorization. Not particularaly interesting, but at least it has correct answers.
English, Fine Arts, etc - Subjective, arbitrary, make stuff up as you go along, there are no correct answers, your grade is based on how well the teacher likes you. That is why I didn’t really like History or Geography (much less English).
I tend to agree with some of the other posters that geography, as taught at the K-12 level, isn’t taught as well as it could be. In many places, it’s done as rote memorization of place names and the like. I can sympathyze with students who feel that it’s a boring subject.
However, geography is NOT just about knowing the names of countries, their capitals, where they are located on a map, etc. It’s much more - one easy definition (granted, somewhat oversimplified) is that geography is the study of distributions (both of the physical environment and of the human world) and the forces/phenomena responsible for those distributions found throughout the world.
I think one of the reasons that geography isn’t taught as it should be at the K-12 level is because it has been de-emphasized as an important discipline/way of knowing throughout the United States over the last 30-40 years. One tends to encounter geography (and history in some respects, too) in the social studies courses taught at the K-12 level. Of course, one consequence of this may have been the de-emphasis of the discipline at many major universities around the country (Harvard and several other prominent universities getting rid of their geography departments come to mind).
However, things are changing somewhat. Professional geographers have made an effort to promote the importance of geography. One example is the National Geographic’s annual Geography Bee. I do know that many K-12 teachers today at least have a better awareness of the importance of geography and understand that to teach it effectively they need more/better training. Hopefully more K-12 schools will push cirriculum that emphasize the importance of geography and have better trained teachers that can make classes interesting and infomative.
One of the interesting results I found in this thread is that there is a serious amount of dissonance between what people seek from education (in particular higher education) and what it has historically provided. Many people attend college with their eventual entrance into the job market being the primary concern. Learning is seen as a process a person must go through to get to that job.
History and Geography don’t fit into this idea of higher education, so to a certain extent I can see how someone only looking to become a mechanical engineer may be inclined to say “WTF? Why do I care about the feminist perspective on world war II?”
I realize I’m making some generalizations here that certainly aren’t absolute rules in any way. But still I think that History and Geography (and many other subjects of their ilk) are derided because they are seen as dead end sidesteps that one must “get through” instead of gain from.
One factor that contributes to the problem is the fact that most history classes begin with the colonies at Jamestown and Plymouth, keep going strong through the Revolution, occasionally struggle along to the Civil War and the Reconstruction … and then school’s out for the summer. And a couple of years later, when the students have forgotten everything, they begin again with the colonies.
This sort of curriculum leaves students with little more than the vague impression that slavery was a bad thing, that England is a bad place, and that history is a collection of mildly edifying stories about long ago, when the country was young and had God on its side.
They don’t hear about recent times, partly because there just isn’t time when you have one history class every three or four years, but mostly because recent history raises questions that most teachers are only too willing to avoid. (Also, there’s no money to buy new textbooks every year. When I was in high school our books still ended with the 1980 presidential election, ten years earlier.) This means most students miss out on the most vital pieces of their history, the parts that shape their world and are still the focus of angry debate.
Lexington and Concord are nice; heck, the Parthenon and the Pyramids are nice – but knowing about them is no substitute for knowing about the Cold War, Watergate, the civil rights movement, or (especially) the Holocaust – events that have a profound impact on how we think and look at the world today. I submit that we should teach history backwards. If this challenges the story we’ve grown used to telling our kids – the story of American progress and victory – so much the better. It’s time they learned that history is not a linear narrative with a clear-cut moral, that we can’t always know the consequences of our actions, and that even professional historians don’t agree on how to read the past.
And no, Jomo Mojo, you’re not some kind of weirdo misfit – history was the only subject I really liked throughout my school career (obviously, I warmed up to English eventually, but not until high school). We never had any formal geography lessons when I was in school, but I’ve always been fascinated by maps and stories of faraway places, so I picked up a good bit of it on my own.
I’m gonna chime in with perhaps a slightly more cynical point of view… The fact is, I honestly think a majority of people in the US just don’t care about history or geography because it doesn’t pertain (at least in their view) to their day-to-day existence. Almost all of my high-school friends have never had the desire to leave the States, do not understand why in the world I would want to live abroad, nor do they care. Many still live at home, at 23-26 years of age. They’re comfortable, they pay their taxes, do their jobs, have fun, etc. Geography and history is not a concern to most of them.
From my experience, I think most people would fall into this category. I’d be happy to be proven wrong. Now, I’m not faulting them for it, nor do I necessarily think there isn’t an upside to that attitude. However, I think that the educational system is mostly to fault. We don’t care because we never were given reason to care. I didn’t become interested in geography until I actually saw a National Geographic magazine; until I watched the PBS shows. Then those faraway places became less and less abstract. It was then about fantastic places with people and cultures much different than mine. Not about “What’s the capital of Wyoming?” Who cares? Why is that important? At that age you have to strike the imagination of kids, not try to stuff “A is the B of C” stuff down their throats. For some, this may work; for most, forget it.
As for history, same sort of thing. I personally have always had a difficult time really getting into history. I’ve always gotten high marks in high school in the subject, but it never really captivated me. I think it’s also a matter of how it is taught and the fact that as a 16-year-old student in Chicago, IL, in 1991, the happenings of June 28, 1914, seem to have very little relevance in my life.
I think you two are hitting the nail right on the head in asking “where’s the relevance to the student?” Every high school should teach a full-year Current Events class as a required History/Social Science course – preferably in junior or senior year. It should include local, national, and international events – and have no set textbook. Current Events curricula should change every year.
Classes like traditional “Civics” and “American History: Jonestown - Civil War” can be pushed earlier into middle- and even elementary-school curricula. 6th- and 7th-graders can handle much of these concepts.
A common and devastatingly incorrect view. History and geography sure as hell mattered to the grunts drafted to fight in Viet Nam, to those buying gas for their car, a VCR, a television. And, sadly, to the people in WTC.
That’s the real problem with history and geography as it is taught in the US, at least through high school. The connection with the present, and present events, is not made clear, if addressed at all.
) I looked up the term geography. Apparantly, it includes the culture of other places, not just countries’ boundaries. (At least according to 