It is not all the fault of this “spoiled” generation. Who educated or raised them? Folks from our generation did. Garbage in....garbage out.
I just took an American History course and was stunned at the garbage that is presented in course books. There was hardly any fact. It seemed to be all editorial. All I read was how bad Americans were (of course all through our history), how we treated those poor minorities and immigrants badly, how we raped the environment, and how we were hated throughout the world because of our involvement.
On the tests and quizzes...if I wanted to get a right answer, all I had to do was to select the worst answer with regards to our behavior and I could get it right.
The authors who are proliferating these text books need to be kicked out and sent to a country where what they write would be considered true so they can get some perspective.
I had all I could do not to throw a tantrum every week....it was so hard to be subjected to that much agenda with no truth.
“It is not all the fault of this “spoiled” generation. Who educated or
raised them?
Folks from our generation did. Garbage in....garbage out.”
In the main I agree.
And to buttress our case, I now call my first “witness”, historian/writer David McCullough
if the forum will indulge me in a repost from a previous thread...
in the form of an exerpt from “Imprimis” of April 2005 from his speech titled
“Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are”.
URL for the article:
http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2005&month=04
(begin excerpt from Imprimis)
Our Failure, Our Duty
We are raising a generation of young Americans who are by-and-large
historically illiterate. And it’s not their fault. There have been
innumerable studies, and there’s no denying it. I’ve experienced it
myself again and again. I had a young woman come up to me after a
talk one morning at the University of Missouri to tell me that she
was glad she came to hear me speak, and I said I was pleased
she had shown up.
She said, ”Yes, I’m very pleased, because until now I never understood that
all of the 13 colonies —the original 13 colonies—were on the east coast.“
Now you hear that and you think: What in the world have we done?
How could this young lady, this wonderful young American, become a
student at a fine university and not know that?
I taught a seminar at Dartmouth of seniors majoring in history,
honor students, 25 of them. The first morning we sat down and I said,
”How many of you know who George Marshall was?“
Not one.
There was a long silence and finally one young man asked,
”Did he have, maybe, something to do with the Marshall Plan?“
And I said yes, he certainly did, and that’s a good place to begin
talking about George Marshall.
(end excerpt from “Imprimis”)