No wonder we keep making the same mistakes over and over, we, Americans, don't know our history. A recent Department of Education report indicated very poor results for sixth, eighth and high school seniors. I do love history and took the 12th grade test and got an 80% even though it has been a year or two since I had classes. Of course, I did not have the privilege of internet, computers and ipods but did have a great history teacher who made us learn more than just dates and events. We learned the connections and reasons for things occurring and how different people interacted with each other. In other words, I had a great background.
This brings me back to the education report. Where have we gone wrong? Is this just another example of the dumbing down of American children? In my opinion, education in the 20th century was not about teaching but entertaining. Making the class exciting, a place where children wanted to be. Now that might be a noble goal, however, to many teachers it meant that they could not really demand hard work from their students but rather had to make it fun. Fun meant that hard work was out and easy was in.
I experienced the difference between college and later in my MBA program. In college, we were expected to know everything that was covered either in class or in the books and reading material. The professors would not tell us what would be on the test. A short five years later in my graduate school, the kids would ask the teachers what would be covered on the test. I was amazed that we were given the material to be covered.
Another difference was one of my college classes, a history class, where the professor would not accept misspelled words even if they were right. For example, if the answer was Lincoln and you wrote Lencoln, it was an incorrect answer. In graduate school, any word, even misspelled was right if it was close.
Not knowing history only leads us to repeat the mistakes of the past. We cannot learn from what others have done. I believe it is as important as knowing math, English, science and foreign languages. However, most teachers dwell on dates and people and do not bring it alive to relate current events with the past. This must be done if we are going to turn around this trend.
Are we going to do it or will we continue to not educate our children in the beauty, in the importance of history. I hope it is the latter.
A story by Jeff Jacoby in Townhall.com is below.
What are your opinions?
Who cares about American history?by: Jeff Jacoby
Townhall.com
WHEN THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION last week released the results of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress -- "the Nation's Report Card" -- the bottom line was depressingly predictable: Not even a quarter of American students is proficient in US history, and the percentage declines as students grow older. Only 20 percent of 6th graders, 17 percent of 8th graders, and 12 percent of high school seniors demonstrate a solid grasp on their nation's history. In fact, American kids are weaker in history than in any of the other subjects tested by the NAEP -- math, reading, science, writing, civics, geography, and economics.
How weak are they? The test for 4th-graders asked why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure in US history and a majority of the students didn't know. Among 8th-graders, not even one-third could correctly identify an advantage that American patriots had over the British during the Revolutionary War. And when asked which of four countries -- the Soviet Union, Japan, China, and Vietnam -- was North Korea's ally in fighting US troops during the Korean War, nearly 80 percent of 12th-graders selected the wrong answer.
Historically illiterate American kids typically grow up to be historically illiterate American adults. And Americans' ignorance of history is a familiar tale.
When it administered the official US citizenship test to 1,000 Americans earlier this year, Newsweek discovered that 33 percent of respondents didn't know when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, 65 percent couldn't say what happened at the Constitutional Convention, and 80 percent had no idea who was president during World War I. In a survey of 14,000 college students in 2006, more than half couldn't identify the century when the first American colony was founded at Jamestown, the reason NATO was organized, or the document that says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Numerous other surveys and studies confirm the gloomy truth: Americans don't know much about history.
Somewhere in heaven, it must all make Harry Truman weep.
He never attended college and had no formal intellectual credentials, but Truman was an avid, lifelong student of history. As a boy he had devoured Plutarch's Lives and Charles Horne's four-volume Great Men and Famous Women, developing an intimacy with history that would later become one of his greatest strengths. "When Truman talked of presidents past -- Jackson, Polk, Lincoln -- it was as if he had known them personally," the historian David McCullough wrote in his landmark biography of the 33rd president.
Truman may have been exaggerating in 1947 when he told Clark Clifford and other White House aides that he would rather have been a history teacher than president. Yet imagine how different the NAEP history scores would be if more teachers and schools in America today routinely imparted to their students a Trumanesque love and enthusiasm for learning about the past.
Alas, when it comes to history, as Massachusetts educator Will Fitzhugh observes, the American educational system imparts a very different message.
Fitzhugh is the publisher of The Concord Review, a journal he began in 1987 to showcase the writing of just such exceptional student scholars. The review has printed 924 high-caliber research papers by teenagers from 44 states and 39 nations, The New York Times reported in January, winning a few "influential admirers" along the way.
But this celebration of what Fitzhugh calls "varsity academics" amounts to just drops of excellence in the vast sea of mediocrity that is American history education. Another kind of excellence is represented by the National History Club that Fitzhugh launched in 2002 in order to encourage middle and high school students to "read, write, discuss, and enjoy history" outside the classroom. Beginning with a single chapter in Memphis, the club has grown into an independent national organization, with chapters in 43 states and more than 12,000 student members involved in a rich array of history-related activities.
"Our goal," says Robert Nasson, the club's young executive director, "is to create kids who are life-long students of history." He and Fitzhugh have exactly the right idea. But as the latest NAEP results make dismally clear, they are swimming against the tide.
- Original Article: http://bit.ly/lzVzNw
This brings me back to the education report. Where have we gone wrong? Is this just another example of the dumbing down of American children? In my opinion, education in the 20th century was not about teaching but entertaining. Making the class exciting, a place where children wanted to be. Now that might be a noble goal, however, to many teachers it meant that they could not really demand hard work from their students but rather had to make it fun. Fun meant that hard work was out and easy was in.
I experienced the difference between college and later in my MBA program. In college, we were expected to know everything that was covered either in class or in the books and reading material. The professors would not tell us what would be on the test. A short five years later in my graduate school, the kids would ask the teachers what would be covered on the test. I was amazed that we were given the material to be covered.
Another difference was one of my college classes, a history class, where the professor would not accept misspelled words even if they were right. For example, if the answer was Lincoln and you wrote Lencoln, it was an incorrect answer. In graduate school, any word, even misspelled was right if it was close.
Not knowing history only leads us to repeat the mistakes of the past. We cannot learn from what others have done. I believe it is as important as knowing math, English, science and foreign languages. However, most teachers dwell on dates and people and do not bring it alive to relate current events with the past. This must be done if we are going to turn around this trend.
Are we going to do it or will we continue to not educate our children in the beauty, in the importance of history. I hope it is the latter.
A story by Jeff Jacoby in Townhall.com is below.
What are your opinions?
Who cares about American history?by: Jeff Jacoby
Townhall.com
WHEN THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION last week released the results of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress -- "the Nation's Report Card" -- the bottom line was depressingly predictable: Not even a quarter of American students is proficient in US history, and the percentage declines as students grow older. Only 20 percent of 6th graders, 17 percent of 8th graders, and 12 percent of high school seniors demonstrate a solid grasp on their nation's history. In fact, American kids are weaker in history than in any of the other subjects tested by the NAEP -- math, reading, science, writing, civics, geography, and economics.
How weak are they? The test for 4th-graders asked why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure in US history and a majority of the students didn't know. Among 8th-graders, not even one-third could correctly identify an advantage that American patriots had over the British during the Revolutionary War. And when asked which of four countries -- the Soviet Union, Japan, China, and Vietnam -- was North Korea's ally in fighting US troops during the Korean War, nearly 80 percent of 12th-graders selected the wrong answer.
Historically illiterate American kids typically grow up to be historically illiterate American adults. And Americans' ignorance of history is a familiar tale.
When it administered the official US citizenship test to 1,000 Americans earlier this year, Newsweek discovered that 33 percent of respondents didn't know when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, 65 percent couldn't say what happened at the Constitutional Convention, and 80 percent had no idea who was president during World War I. In a survey of 14,000 college students in 2006, more than half couldn't identify the century when the first American colony was founded at Jamestown, the reason NATO was organized, or the document that says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Numerous other surveys and studies confirm the gloomy truth: Americans don't know much about history.
Somewhere in heaven, it must all make Harry Truman weep.
He never attended college and had no formal intellectual credentials, but Truman was an avid, lifelong student of history. As a boy he had devoured Plutarch's Lives and Charles Horne's four-volume Great Men and Famous Women, developing an intimacy with history that would later become one of his greatest strengths. "When Truman talked of presidents past -- Jackson, Polk, Lincoln -- it was as if he had known them personally," the historian David McCullough wrote in his landmark biography of the 33rd president.
Truman may have been exaggerating in 1947 when he told Clark Clifford and other White House aides that he would rather have been a history teacher than president. Yet imagine how different the NAEP history scores would be if more teachers and schools in America today routinely imparted to their students a Trumanesque love and enthusiasm for learning about the past.
Alas, when it comes to history, as Massachusetts educator Will Fitzhugh observes, the American educational system imparts a very different message.
Fitzhugh is the publisher of The Concord Review, a journal he began in 1987 to showcase the writing of just such exceptional student scholars. The review has printed 924 high-caliber research papers by teenagers from 44 states and 39 nations, The New York Times reported in January, winning a few "influential admirers" along the way.
But this celebration of what Fitzhugh calls "varsity academics" amounts to just drops of excellence in the vast sea of mediocrity that is American history education. Another kind of excellence is represented by the National History Club that Fitzhugh launched in 2002 in order to encourage middle and high school students to "read, write, discuss, and enjoy history" outside the classroom. Beginning with a single chapter in Memphis, the club has grown into an independent national organization, with chapters in 43 states and more than 12,000 student members involved in a rich array of history-related activities.
"Our goal," says Robert Nasson, the club's young executive director, "is to create kids who are life-long students of history." He and Fitzhugh have exactly the right idea. But as the latest NAEP results make dismally clear, they are swimming against the tide.
- Original Article: http://bit.ly/lzVzNw
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