Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Historication
The brand-R commentators are all weeweed up this morning over a finding that American schoolkids failed a standard history test miserably. Only 12% knew the required stuff.
Doesn't bother me at all. I'd rather have kids uninformed than disinformed by educrats. Uninformed people will be able to pick up bits of history later on, when they're mature enough to understand why it's important and interesting. Their minds won't be full of shit, so they'll be able to use their own emotions and experiences to process the knowledge.
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School coverage of history has always been crappy, for a very good reason.
1. Curricula are designed by committees consisting of Democrats and Republicans.
2. Lists of raw facts won't stick in the mind. The only way to make history learnable is to tie the facts together into a narrative that makes a point.
3. Where the Ds and Rs disagree on the point of the narrative, they skip that part of the narrative entirely.**
4. Where the Ds and Rs agree on the point, they're both wrong.
Ideally the kids should be learning how to turn facts into history, not the half-trivial/half-wrong products of curriculum committees.
Perhaps the best solution would be to read (or watch as movies) and analyze some modern historical romance novels. Semi-fictional adventure stories that contain lots of bloody battles for the boys and lots of juicy complex family relationships for the girls.
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** Example: When I took American History in high school in 1965, the course ended at 1945. WW2 was the last event in the curriculum. Nothing about the Korean War, the Cold War, or Vietnam; nothing about the history that had occurred during our lives. The two sides couldn't agree on how to handle those events, so the students didn't hear about them.
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Few days later: A nice NPR feature reaches the same conclusion, and adds a larger point that Polistra has been grinding forever. American schools have always been at the bottom of the list, during times when America was successful and during the more recent decades of failure. Conclusion from this is simple and inescapable: Education is weakly and negatively correlated with national success. Our best innovators have usually been short on formal education, and our worst tyrants have usually been Yale grads.
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And a related thought: Instead of teaching kids the utterly irrelevant details of the 1787 Constitution and the alleged structure of the "American" government, all of which is total fiction, it would be vastly more useful to teach them Parkinson's Laws of bureaucracy, along with similar observations by CP Snow and others. These are universal truths about all corporate and governmental organizations, equally true for a small city council or the North Korean Politburo. Once you understand Parkinson, you'll know how and why things happen, and you can then figure out how to change specific laws and regulations. Knowing the 1787 Constitution tells you less than nothing about any aspect of civics, because the "government" of this unfortunate land has been reading the old document inversely for at least 50 years.
Doesn't bother me at all. I'd rather have kids uninformed than disinformed by educrats. Uninformed people will be able to pick up bits of history later on, when they're mature enough to understand why it's important and interesting. Their minds won't be full of shit, so they'll be able to use their own emotions and experiences to process the knowledge.
= = = = =
School coverage of history has always been crappy, for a very good reason.
1. Curricula are designed by committees consisting of Democrats and Republicans.
2. Lists of raw facts won't stick in the mind. The only way to make history learnable is to tie the facts together into a narrative that makes a point.
3. Where the Ds and Rs disagree on the point of the narrative, they skip that part of the narrative entirely.**
4. Where the Ds and Rs agree on the point, they're both wrong.
Ideally the kids should be learning how to turn facts into history, not the half-trivial/half-wrong products of curriculum committees.
Perhaps the best solution would be to read (or watch as movies) and analyze some modern historical romance novels. Semi-fictional adventure stories that contain lots of bloody battles for the boys and lots of juicy complex family relationships for the girls.
= = = = =
** Example: When I took American History in high school in 1965, the course ended at 1945. WW2 was the last event in the curriculum. Nothing about the Korean War, the Cold War, or Vietnam; nothing about the history that had occurred during our lives. The two sides couldn't agree on how to handle those events, so the students didn't hear about them.
= = = = =
Few days later: A nice NPR feature reaches the same conclusion, and adds a larger point that Polistra has been grinding forever. American schools have always been at the bottom of the list, during times when America was successful and during the more recent decades of failure. Conclusion from this is simple and inescapable: Education is weakly and negatively correlated with national success. Our best innovators have usually been short on formal education, and our worst tyrants have usually been Yale grads.
= = = = =
And a related thought: Instead of teaching kids the utterly irrelevant details of the 1787 Constitution and the alleged structure of the "American" government, all of which is total fiction, it would be vastly more useful to teach them Parkinson's Laws of bureaucracy, along with similar observations by CP Snow and others. These are universal truths about all corporate and governmental organizations, equally true for a small city council or the North Korean Politburo. Once you understand Parkinson, you'll know how and why things happen, and you can then figure out how to change specific laws and regulations. Knowing the 1787 Constitution tells you less than nothing about any aspect of civics, because the "government" of this unfortunate land has been reading the old document inversely for at least 50 years.
Labels: Experiential education, Shared Lie
¶ 8:32 AM
