A new college semester in Texas is almost upon us. At our faculty meeting tomorrow, someone will read the latest Beloit College Mindset List to us. You know, the one that will tell us that to the class of 2014, Czechoslovakia has never existed and Beethoven has always been a dog. Older colleagues will look to the younger ones, wondering what THEIR reality looks like. We middle-aged ones ponder the ever-growing gap between us and our students, as we still vividly remember the days when we were barely older than they.
However, obliviousness to history is not limited to the young. Even twenty years ago, when I was teaching community college and was the same age or younger than most of my students, I recall wondering why it was that these people knew so little. Not only that, they seemed to be proud of it.
Follow me below the fold for a few examples.
Mind-boggling encounters with ignorance concerning history go far back. I remember a class in 1992 when a student asked me (I was then in my 20s) whether Hitler "was still president" when I lived in Germany. Yes, I looked kind of tired that day, but whoa... I asked the young man if he knew what year Hitler died. The answer:
Sometime in the 1970s.
Dude... Of course I had to remember that to them, everything "back in the day" (as they put it) supposedly happened in the 1970s.
Another student in another class wrote an essay about Othello and operated under the assumption that Venice at the time was ruled by the communist party, which had a leader named "Duke."
Speaking of communists, a 35-year-old student in a World Literature class wrote in her essay on "The Cow of the Barricades":
The story is set at the time when Ghandi [sic] fought against the occupation by the British communists.
WTF??? Well, she thought that the red uniforms the British soldiers in the story are wearing is a dead giveaway. I was so tempted to say that they could also be Redstaters, but that would have been cruel.
In a World Civilization class, an education major, soon to be let loose upon elementary school students, wrote in a final exam that Martin Luther was an Englishman. Then she wondered why she did not get an A in the class, even though she had no absences. What makes matters worse is the fact that she goes to a Lutheran church.
Speaking of confusion among my fellow Lutherans, the next example happened in Bible class among mostly senior citizens. One of the ladies went on about the Bible in the original, and our pastor asked her which version of the Bible Luther translated. Her answer:
The King James Bible of course! Pastor Tom, you must think we're stupid.
Pastor Tom couldn't answer for a few minutes as he was busy gathering his jaw off the floor.
A colleague of mine, someone with an MA in humanities, claimed that women in Germany were not allowed to practice medicine until 1975. I told him that I went to a female ophthalmologist in 1970, and she was nearing retirement. It never occurred to my colleague that he might be mistaken. Instead he told me that I got the year mixed up since I was a little kid, or that it was in another country, or maybe she was transgendered. None of the above. He was dead wrong.
This is just a random sampling of history impairment. I'm sure everyone here can contribute a few more.
So how did it get that bad? Americans are no less intelligent than anyone else, yet in other countries one is less likely to find this degree of ignorance among the college-educated. What happened here? The way I see it, there is a number of factors coming together.
One big factor is the prevalence of anti-intellectualism. Educated people are suspect to a large percentage of the population. It is no coincidence that George W. Bush, who went Harvard AND Yale, had to impersonate a country bumpkin in order to be elected. People value "common sense" (deluding themselves that they have it) over "book smarts."
Another aspect is the fact that many Americans simply aren't very mature. Anything that happens outside of their range of experience simply isn't relevant to them. That's how a child thinks, and a lot of people don't grow beyond that phase. That's why "Heartland" wingnuts get upset about the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" -- in their perception, New York is only a symbol, not a place where actual people live, work, and worship. For the same reason, cultural references of other cultures don't count.
Many Americans resist learning foreign languages (which exposes learners to other cultures and their history) because they equate speaking another language with surrendering to another country. I always cringe when people talk about turning points in WWII (which, next to the Civil War, seems to be the only historical event that matters) and say:
If such and such hadn't happened, we'd all be speaking German.
If only. The Nazis did not conquer other countries to assimilate people (kind of like the Borg) but to gain land ("Lebensraum") for themselves. Had the Nazis won, worse things than a cultural makeover would have happened to most Americans. In the same way, when Silesia and East Prussia became Poland, the people weren't transformed into Polish people; they were expelled.
Another sentence I always hear is:
Over there, everybody speaks English anyway.
Well... Yes, in many foreign countries students have English as a subject in school, but not everyone is good at it. A number of my American friends got offended when foreigners wouldn't speak English with them, even though they came from countries that the USA has either rescued or defeated in WWII. Aside from the fact that not everyone feels they owe America deference, some people simply suck at English. It happens.
It all goes with back to the "We're Number One" attitude though -- everybody else simply isn't as important.
"No Child Left Behind" and the resulting standardized testing craze certainly doesn't help matters. By the way, did you know that the wingnuts in Texas are as upset with the school board as we are? It's that "war on Christmas" thingy again. What it all comes down to is that the overemphasis of standardized testing leads to a reduction of "knowledge" to morsels that can be easily regurgitated. The number of morsels is of course limited, and each group wants to get its own morsels in.
When you reduce Thomas Jefferson's significance to one sentence, what should it focus on? Louisiana Purchase? University of Virginia? Sally Hemings? If you're a wingnut, what you won't pick is separation of church and state.
What about the Christmas issue? Under social studies, students taking the TAKS were supposed to know the names of the world religions and each religion's most important holiday. For Christians, that's Easter. Outrage ensued. To appease the "persecuted Christians," students now have to know how to bubble Easter AND Christmas on their standardized tests. The problem, of course, isn't Christmas but the reduction of a religion to the name of its most important holiday. Who cares what the holiday actually celebrates? Or what the religion is about, for that matter?
NCLB reduces knowledge about the world to an association game: Constitution -- no gun control, Islam -- terrorism, France -- surrender monkeys.
Next Monday, I will start another frustrating round in my fight against the "ignorant and proud of it" virus that is sweeping the nation. Hopefully, in the next sixteen weeks I will encounter at least a few students whose minds can be pried open. And hopefully, I won't have to hear the sentence that makes my blood run cold:
Why do I need to know all that stuff? I'm only gonna teach elementary school.