Don't Know Much About History

Wall Street Journal ^ | 6-18-2011 | Brian Bolduc

[Scotsman will be Free]

There is a difference between a kid asking why(and getting a cogent response)and teaching them to ask qustions. That sounds like the typical liberal attitude towards teaching. That attitude is “Let’s teach them how to think, never mind all of that boring, not fun multiplication tables, historic dates and history”.
Kids can learn how to think at home, at work and at college. K through 12 needs to impart knowledge like math, geography, english language skills, writing, why there was a war between the states and when, etc.

[ml/nj]

I don't know about you, but I mostly taught myself the stuff I was interested in long before they got to it in school. So I had an Algebra book in fifth grade and a Calculus book when I was in ninth grade. I used to get up for "Sunrise Semester," so my mom bought me a Probability Book (Mossteller, Rourke, and Thomas! - Name spelling might be off a bit.) when I was in sixth grade or so. I had Chemistry sets and telescopes from when I was quite young. I didn't read Moby Dick or Tale of Two Cities until I was in my mid 30s but I learned how fake my way through it.

We all tend to remember our school days nostalgically, but realistically they were at best a huge waste of time. (Read John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education, available free at the link or check out the reviews and buy it at Amazon as I did.)

ML/NJ

[ml/nj]

why there was a war between the states and when, etc.

And BTW, they teach a BS reason for the WBTS. No one, in the North at least where I've lived all my life, learns anything but the victor's version of that difficult time until they get OUT OF SCHOOL, and start reading and inquiring about it themselves. A primary source like Fremantle's Three Months in the Southern States essentially doesn't exist because the picture Fremantle paints doesn't fit in so nicely with the victor's version. Neither does Baltimore Mayor William Brown's Baltimore And The Nineteenth Of April 1861. The only book I remember them assigning in school about that time was a novel.

ML/NJ

[BelegStrongbow]

“Andersonville”, perhaps? That was assigned to me in eighth grade. I don’t believe I have ever recovered the innocence that book cost me.

[ml/nj]

And more BS! I remember looking at my daughter's American History text to see what they said about the Pilgrims and the Mayflower. (My daughter graduated HS in 1997.) They said they came over seeking religious freedom, which is exactly wrong. They came over wanting their brand of Christianity to be the exclusive religion of their colony. The Mayflower Compact wasn't about "democracy." It was about making sure that the minority had no rights whatsoever. Even I learned this in HS, but now it is just too un-PC to teach.

ML/NJ

[ml/nj]

“Andersonville”, perhaps?

I was thinking of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

ML/NJ

[BelegStrongbow]

That’s about the pre-Civil War era. Things were only tense then, not apocalyptic.

[ml/nj]

Uncle Tom's Cabin is THE justification for the war. (Funny how they never had us read Aristotle's The Politics or even mention that it existed.)

ML/NJ

[BelegStrongbow]

No argument there, just pointing out that teachers in CA were so interested in objectifying the South they were willing to foist adult horror on an eighth grader, lest he ever form an opinion at all variant from the Northern rule: every Southerner was a slave-holder or would easily torture prisoners without a thought. The parallel with Nazi Germany wasn’t lost on me then.

[Scotsman will be Free]

You are or were(LOL) a lot smarter than me. I sucked at Algebra and Geometry. I loved History, Geography, Anthropology, Biology. I did, and still do, read voraciously on virtually every subject(except math). If only I could remember 1/10th of what I’ve read I’d be the most learned man in history.
School used to end at the 8th grade for most folks.

[SunkenCiv]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2735636/posts

[SunkenCiv]

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