Mutterings From Cassandra

[kelly_chambliss]

My LJ friend Alex Voy alexvoy has provided a link to a genuine horror story.

I wish I could say that this article surprised me, but it doesn't.  I see this sort of historical cluelessness among my students all the time.  For extra credit (and what must be personal masochism), I sometimes give them a ten-question quiz on major facts in American history.  Believe me, it's not all that difficult -- stuff like, "In what decade did World War I occur"?, "When did US women receive the right to vote in federal elections?", "Who was Dwight David Eisenhower"?,  "What major event in American history occurred from 1861-65?"  Most of the scores are under 50%.  Students aren't much better with current events or US government basics, either:  Their responses to questions such as "What is the Patriot Act"? and "What is an electoral vote?" say more about kids' imaginative ability to invent answers than to show actual knowledge

 

It's not that these students aren't bright; most of them are.  But somewhere along the line, many of them have never been shown how and why history (and history in the making) matters.  Part of it is just the ego and shortsightedness of youth.  But part of it is a failure of education.  The adults in their world haven't managed to convince them that they should care about the past, probably because many of the adults don't care themselves.

 

In some ways, I can't blame them -- what use has history been to us lately?  I'm a history obsessive, and in the past few years, what good has my knowledge done me?  All it does is make me terrified and pissed off.  It seems as if historians and scientists have become nothing more than modern Cassandras -- doomed to give true prophecies about the future while no one in power listens.  Look at our so-called leaders:  Despite all sorts of historical and scientific evidence, the Bush administration continues to deny the effects of global warming, seems unable to realize that history has shown torture to be a fairly ineffective method of getting accurate information, ignores what history tells us about how natives usually respond to foreign invaders, and on and on. 

 

No wonder I prefer to spend time in Roddenberry land, even with all its sexist and nationalist limitations.

 

Of course, good capitalist consumer that I am, spending money sometimes helps, too.  I spent a fine afternoon last week in IKEA , a Swedish home-furnishings chain.  Their marketers and designers are sheer geniuses.  Somehow, they manage to price and display their wares so that I am simply compelled to buy them.  The only thing I really needed was a desk lamp (black, halogen, modernistic design, $6.99, bulb included.)  But do you think I walked out of that store with a bill for only $6.99 plus tax?  Ha!  I also bought a set three colorful plastic storage boxes (green, purple, turquoise) for which I have no real use.  But they were $1.99!!  And tiny strings of battery-powered rice lights.  Do I need them?  Oh, right.  But . . .they were 99 cents.  And came in three different colors.  Could you have turned down an ultra-designed set of twenty (that's right, twenty) kitchen storage containers plus a cool small plastic pitcher for $5.99?  I certainly couldn't.  And don't even get me started on their bookshelf deals (I own 3500 books and counting.)  The only reason I didn't buy a dozen was that they wouldn't fit in my car.  To top it off, the store cafeteria offers ten Swedish meatballs, red potatoes, and lingonberry sauce for $3.99.  It was as close to heaven as a secular humanist like me can get (at least within driving distance and not involving sex.)

Comments

[seemag.livejournal.com]

Your IKEA story makes me laugh :-) If IKEA wasn't so fearsome in its size and quantity of stuff, I'd totally just go and camp out there every weekend. Plus, IKEA always makes good bloggity :-)

[alex-voy.livejournal.com]

I wish I could say that this article surprised me, but it doesn't.

Most polls of this kind don't surprise me -- we even have a TV quiz programme in which contestants have to guess the percentage of Brits polled who know the answers to simple general knowledge questions, and the results are usually a depressingly low figure. But some things are just too big to miss. This one does surprise me.

I also bought a set three colorful plastic storage boxes (green, purple, turquoise) for which I have no real use.

No real use for storage boxes? They're like cupboards; I'm not sure if it has a name, but there's an immutable law which states you will always have enough stuff to fill them, no matter how many you have.

[aabbey.livejournal.com]

This kid would like to speak up. *g*

I'm a senior at a public high school in northern Baltimore County. The population is about 1,400, with any incredibly small, but growing, minority group. I don't know what grade levels you teach, or where, but Ike, Women's Rights, and Death Camps were all covered very thoroughly in our history classes. I took "Facing History and Ourselves" in 10th grade, which was a ten week elective that studied racism and hate crimes, culminating in a visit to the Holocaust Museum. I found it very interesting that kids from all social groups had registered for this class, and that everyone paid attention and seemed to learn something.

In Military History, which a lot of goths and punks are taking, we recently watched part of The Civil War, and are learning a lot about MacArthur, Nimitz and Eisenhower. I may think the teacher is a sexist pig--but he's only one of two that I don't love unrestrainedly.

So, in short, history is important here. And it seems that a student has to try pretty darned hard to avoid learning of the events you mentioned. Which, well, they can always find a way to do. I'm not saying that my school is typical. I'm incredibly lucky to be where I am. But, if it makes you feel any better, not all educational institutions are failing in their history teaching duties, and some students are actually *gasp* learning about it.

[kellychambliss.livejournal.com]

Oops -- I did get a little high on my "testy old geezer whines about kids today" hobbyhorse, didn't I? *g* Sorry! I didn't mean to criticize just the young, and certainly not *all* the young. I have many students who are thoughtful and who know a lot; I also know many people in my own age group (40s) who know little and care less. My cousin, for instance, once saw me grading my ten-point history quizzes and said, "I can't even answer one of these questions. But most of it was a long time ago, anyway, so I guess I won't worry about it."

The willfully-ignorant come in all ages and backgrounds and IQs. So I'm willing to be an equal-age judgmental griper *g*. I especially worry about the young, though, because they are the people who are going to have to carry on after my generation is long gone.

I'm glad your school sounds like a good one, Abbey, and that necessary stuff is getting taught and that your classmates are interested in learning it. You're typical of a lot of the students I get in my college classes: they are well-prepared, interested and interesting, and hardworking. (I've even had a few who wrote fanfic; they gave me their web URLs.) But unfortunately, I also get students who, to judge from their lack of factual knowledge on all sorts of fronts, either went to unimaginably bad high schools or paid little attention to what they *were* taught. I've had students disavow all exposure to basic facts. "But we were never taught that," some insist, when I suggest that they really do need to be able to identify the subject and main verb of a sentence. Now, I know there are some sad schools out there, but I have a hard time believing that, in 12 years of schooling, students were never exposed to the concepts of "subject" and "verb." For whatever reasons, they just didn't learn it, and they won't be convinced that they ought to learn it now.

Now mind you, I'm talking about only a small percentage of people who go *this* far. You probably know students like this, Abbey, and they probably annoy you and your peers as much as they did me when I was in high school. I used to get irritated, too, if adults acted as if these know-nothings were typical of *all* teenagers. I knew they weren't typical then, and I know it now.

But there are also a lot of people who fall in the middle, who know the basics, maybe, but who drift through college and through life in general with the philosophy that a student once told me he lived by: "half-assed is good enough." And again, these ideas aren't limited to the young. I hear them from my peers and colleagues, too. (One woman told me recently that she decided on her presidential vote based on which candidate's wife's appearance she preferred. "This time, all the guys were just really ugly," she said, "so the wives were the only things left." I wish I could say she was joking, but she wasn't.)

These are the kind of people who send me off into my periodic rants about how history no longer matters. In the first post, I talked about students in particular because I have so much exposure to them and because, cheesy as it sounds, they are the future. I'm glad to be reminded that many people your age are interested in learning history and are having it taught them. But I still fear that you are in the minority, that we're stuck with huge numbers of people of all ages for whom "half-assed is good enough," or people who don't even *know* they are being half-assed, which is worse.

I'd very much like to be proven wrong, though!