{"id":686,"date":"2011-07-08T16:40:57","date_gmt":"2011-07-08T20:40:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thequicksliver.wordpress.com\/?p=686"},"modified":"2011-07-08T16:40:57","modified_gmt":"2011-07-08T20:40:57","slug":"7-8-11-history-is-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/7-8-11-history-is-history\/","title":{"rendered":"7.8.11 History is History"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Don’t know much about History!\u00a0 OMG!!<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/a>A lot of people were concerned when the “National Report Card” was released last week by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.\u00a0 It revealed that, across the country, our worst subject by far is History.\u00a0 Just 20 percent of fourth-graders, 17 percent of eighth-graders and a depressing 12 percent of 12th-graders performed at a “proficient” or “advanced” level.\u00a0 Less than half of all 12-graders know the answer to basic questions about things like the Constitution’s 3\/5 rule, who our enemy was in Korea, and the effects of Brown vs. Board of Education.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/a>That led to a justifiable round of hand-wringing among educators and pundits alike.\u00a0 And many of them pointed to some recent embarrassing history gaffes made by our leaders to illustrate what happens when we don’t know our own History.\u00a0 Michele Bachmann mistakenly put Lexington and Concord in New Hampshire. Sarah Palin claimed that Paul Revere rode to tell the British, “they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms,” an interesting way to misrepresent History to suit her own gun-rights agenda.\u00a0 Joe Biden claimed that when the stock market crashed, FDR went on the TV to explain why it happened.\u00a0 Which is interesting considering Hoover was the President at the time, and nobody had any televisions.\u00a0 Even the President, in perhaps the most highly-vetted speech imaginable, the State of the Union, wrongly claimed that the automobile was invented in Detroit.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/a>But the pundits got it backwards.\u00a0 Our leaders’ historical mistakes are not the EFFECT of bad history schooling, they are one of the primary CAUSES.\u00a0 And our students aren’t stupid, they are brilliant.\u00a0 Kids don’t study History precisely because we’ve clearly signaled to them there’s no downside to getting it wrong.\u00a0 After Bachmann’s gaffe, she doubled down and claimed that all the Founding Fathers were against slavery, and that one of them was John Quincy Adams.\u00a0 And her approval ratings just kept going up.\u00a0 Following Palin’s mistake, her supporters simply went on Wikipedia and revised the Paul Revere page!\u00a0 Nobody called Obama on his error. And Biden, well he’s just a loveable dope, who cares about all the mistakes he makes?\u00a0 It’s not like he’s a heartbeat away from THE MOST POWERFUL OFFICE IN THE WORLD or anything…<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/a>When kids get signals like this, who can blame them for ignoring the topic? And here’s the biggest signal of all: as a country, we fundamentally, functionally treat History as a second-class topic.\u00a0 The National Report Card is given every 2 years for Math, Reading, and Sciences.\u00a0 But only every 4 years for History.\u00a0 And, unlike the other topics, the History test isn’t standardized in a way to allow easy diagnosis of the results.\u00a0\u00a0 So not only do we not know our History, we don’t even know how badly we don’t know our History.\u00a0 And, honestly, nobody cares to know.\u00a0 Y’know?<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/a>So here’s what we’re telling our kids:\u00a0 Okay guys, time to study History…um…seriously…if we don’t learn History we’ll be doomed to repeat it…ahem…you need to honor those who went before you…ah…do was we say, not as we do…hello?…oh, never mind.<\/p>\n

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<\/a><\/a>History, it’s really, really important!\u00a0 LOL.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Don’t know much about History!\u00a0 OMG!! A lot of people were concerned when the “National Report Card” was released last week by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.\u00a0 It revealed that, across the country, our worst subject by far is History.\u00a0 Just 20 percent of fourth-graders, 17 percent of eighth-graders…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[105,574,654,816,1082,1220],"class_list":["post-686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-6","tag-barack-obama","tag-history","tag-joe-biden","tag-michelle-bachmann","tag-sarah-palin","tag-test-scores"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}