History Is So Hard

I remember when I first became aware of the decay of the education system, during Reagan’s first term.  “A Nation At Risk” was the seminal report detailing the problems the system faced.

The thing that worried me at the time was the overwhelming push to drive kids into science and math.  Although I was still pretty much a proponent of the system back then, I figured that the only way to deal with this nation’s “shortage of scientists and engineers” was not to try to convince junior high kids that math was cool – but to teach kids to think, and pave the way for the ones that are inclined toward math and science to get into the field.  But with all due respect to my engineer and scientist friends, math and computer science and engineering majors can be among the most provincial, narrowly-focused people around. Which is fine to an extent; I don’t care if my neurosurgeon has read James Joyce, and I’ll forgive some of our engineers’ ignorance on Locke vs. Rousseau if they at least get the next batch of gusset plates right.

But I worried about the tendency to push science and engineering as a panacea for all that ailed education.

And, whaddya know, I was right!

Big Brother. McCarthyism. The patience of Job.

Don’t count on your typical teenager to nod knowingly the next time you drop a reference to any of these. A study out today finds that about half of 17-year-olds can’t identify the books or historical events associated with them.

Twenty-five years after the federal report A Nation at Risk challenged U.S. public schools to raise the quality of education, the study finds high schoolers still lack important historical and cultural underpinnings of “a complete education.” And, its authors fear, the nation’s current focus on improving basic reading and math skills in elementary school might only make matters worse, giving short shrift to the humanities – even if children can read and do math.

Wanna know something scary?  I actually expected these numbers below to be worse than they turned out:

Among 1,200 students surveyed:•43% knew the Civil War was fought between 1850 and 1900.

•52% could identify the theme of 1984.

•51% knew that the controversy surrounding Sen. Joseph McCarthy focused on communism.

In all, students earned a C in history and an F in literature, though the survey suggests students do well on topics schools cover. For instance, 88% knew the bombing of Pearl Harbor led the USA into World War II, and 97% could identify Martin Luther King Jr. as author of the “I Have a Dream” speech.

Fewer (77%) knew Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped end slavery a century earlier.

I’ve commented on this before, here and on the NARN show.  My kids complained that, while in the public system in Saint Paul, they basically learned about…:

  • Slavery
  • The Civil Rights movement.

Worthy and essential topics – but hardly the whole sweep of American contribution to the world, much less history.
Now, certain lesser bloggers phumphered and argled when I made that comment on the air.  But I had a point…:

“School has emphasized Martin Luther King, and everybody teaches it, and people are learning it,” says Chester Finn of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank. “What a better thing it would be if people also had the Civil War part and the civil rights part, and the Harriet Tubman part and the Uncle Tom’s Cabin part.”

I guess in a backhanded way, I should be encouraged.  Indeed, I suspect the alternative media has had a lot to do with the wide knowledge of at least the surface aspects of 1984.

I mean, maybe.

The findings probably won’t sit well with educators, who say record numbers of students are taking college-level Advanced Placement history, literature and other courses in high school.

“Not all is woe in American education,” says Trevor Packer of The College Board, which oversees Advanced Placement.

Maybe there’s a change in the wind for the public system?

The study’s release today in Washington also serves as a sort of coming out for its sponsor, Common Core, a new non-partisan group pushing for the liberal arts in public school curricula.

And…maybe…not…

Its leadership includes a North Carolina fifth-grade teacher, an author of history and science textbooks, a teachers union leader and a former top official in the George H.W. Bush administration.

Stay tuned.

16 thoughts on “History Is So Hard

  1. Here’s how WWII is taught:

    Hitler
    Pearl Harbor
    Tuskegee Airmen
    Atomic Bomb

    And sometimes parts 1,2 & 4 are left out.

  2. It’s amazing how many people are economically illiterate. Take the current gas prices. How many times have you received and email saying that we should boycott gas stations for one day and that will bring down prices? Or better yet, if we take the oil and gas companies at higher rates then all other businesses, that will bring down prices.

  3. Mitch, you missed a crucial point of the survey. The questions you highlighted – Civil War, 1984, McCarthyism, – all have to do with left’s failings and being on the wrong side of history. How can you expect kids to answer these questions if they are not taught in our public socialst indoctrination schools? It is indeed incredible those scores are so high! The last thing we need in our public socialist indoctrination schools is more communist propaganda disguised as Liberal Arts.

  4. I walked in to a Subway restaurant last year, & spied one of the sandwich artists working on her history report. I asked her about it.

    She told me that there were these people called Anti-Federalists, like Alexander Hamilton, who didn’t want Americans to have any rights at all, and she was to write a paper from the position of an Anti-Federalist…

    I took an extended lunch break that day.

  5. Hamilton was pretty strong on government powers and government control of the economy. He was pretty extreme on many of his formulations of the central government’s policies (advocating for a lifetime appointment for President and senators and for the President to appoint state governors, for example) and boy did he get roasted over those positions when he wrote about them under his own name, pre-Federalist Papers. There were reasons he had to publish under Publius to help promote the ratification of the Constitution. Fascinating guy, really, but his policies on national ownership and regulation of industry would make Obama or Hillary look positively moderate.

  6. There’s nothing I find more distressing than the way in which our educational system keeps failing us.

    The easiest way to destroy a nation is to unmoor it from its own history, and when we have history textbooks that make Molly Pitcher as big a character as George Washington we do ourselves a great service. The Holy Trinity of the Left–race, gender and class–makes up the sole frame of reference for just about every history textbook I’ve ever seen.

    If I had a few million laying around, I’d consider it a great service to the nation to give every high-school senior a copy of Paul Johnson’s “History of the American People” in the hopes that at least a few would read it and perhaps learn something of their own country.

  7. Hamilton was pretty strong on government powers and government control of the economy.

    How so? From what I can recall, Hamilton supported tariffs and taxpayer funding of a hydropower project but I don’t recall him ever being a proponent of extensive regulation over the economy.

    Also his views of government powers were basically that government had some “implied powers” in order to exercise its “enumerated powers.” The example being that while the federal government had the enumerated power to make war, it also has the implied powers to manage any occupied territories. That’s a far cry from today whereby the Commerce Clause and Spending Power are seen as virtually unlimited and independent powers respectively.

  8. To clear up my post, which was how Hamilton entered into this…

    Hamilton was a Federalist. In fact, his name is one of three who wrote “The Federalist Papers”; John Jay & James Madison were the other two. They supported ratification of the US Constitution, which contemporaries viewed as supporting a strong federal government. Now Strong in those days is not what we see as strong today. Hamilton might be impressed by our Federal Reserve System, but I think he’d wretch at the fiscal & regulatory legacy given to us by The New Deal, Great Society & others that have come in more modern times.

    In my anecdote above, I was paraphrasing the student who wrongly proclaimed Hamilton to be an Anti-Federalist. The other error she made was that the Anti-Feds were against protecting peoples rights, when in actuality protecting rights was the whole basis of their objection to ratification of the Constitution. The Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution largely to comfort the people with Anti-Fed concerns.

  9. Thorley, Hamilton also promoted US Gov’t ownership of military supply manufacturers, promoted a National Bank to control the monetary supply directly, promoted import/export controls of critical materials, direct subsidies, etc. For the time he was far more statist than was the norm and he arguably undermined the Federalists. He was unpopular and mistrusted enough that he had to write as Publius to get his arguments considered.

  10. Mr. Shirt-
    That matches what I learned in PoliSci 101.
    I imagine the student got the part about “the Anti-Feds were against protecting peoples rights” from the weakness of the fed gov’t under the old Articles of Confederation. The federal government can do no wrong, you know, but the states that make up the US aren’t to be trusted.

  11. Terry,
    I’m sure she heard that the Anti-Feds were against ratification, & assumed that that meant they were against “Constitutional Rights”. An assumption that leads to all sorts of poor interpretations.

    Nerdbert,

    All the Federalist papers were signed “Publius” Whether written by Hamilton, Jay or Madison. It had nothing to do with Hamilton’s reputation.The Anti-Federalist Papers were also written under nom de plumes, like Cincinnatus, Deliberator, & Cato. The latter is where the Cato Institute gets it’s name.

  12. Mr. Shirt… you are to be commended for taking the time to help someone out where civics and government is concerned.

    Bravo.

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