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Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Wring hands and repeat

Published: June 20, 2011 1 minute 7 comments

Stevekelley
Steve Kelley on the annual "Boy, Our Kids Are Stupid" scandal, in which we wring our hands over how little our kids know about history and then go back to talking about the important topics of the day. This year, it is Anthony Weiner's weiner, which continues to resonate throughout the media.

(In the news cycle, the spin now is "Why is everyone talking about Anthony Weiner's weiner? We really must stop talking about Anthony Weiner's weiner. Shame on anyone who continues to talk about Anthony Weiner's weiner." And I agree. We need to have a serious discussion about how on earth our children have become so superficial. But first, let me say one more thing about Anthony Weiner's weiner …)

The annual handwringing over history scores is frustrating on a number of levels, beginning with this one: Nobody has the slightest intention of doing a damn thing about it.

Education is not a priority. As soon as the conversation turns from complaining and analyzing and recommending to actually doing something, it's Little Red Hen time, and the Little Red Hen can't do it all the heavy lifting herself.

And as long as we're evoking familiar folk tales, it's also the Blind Men and the Elephant: Everyone picks up a different aspect of the issue and acts as if that's the whole thing.

Example: One of the "OMGs" of this crisis is the revelation that most fourth graders can't explain the economic impact of the canal systems constructed in the early part of the 19th century.

Say what?

Are you honestly claiming that, when you were nine years old, you were prepared to explain the economic impact of the canal systems?

Because my guess is that, when you were nine years old, you weren't prepared to explain where the pee-pee went when you flushed the toilet, unless you'd had a backhoe in your yard dealing with the fact that it didn't. In which case, it may have been the only thing you DID learn that year, since it was so much more relevant to your life than Dewitt Clinton, or Robert Clinton, or Chelsea Clinton or Delbert McClinton, or whoever the hell poured that pitcher of water off the front of the canal boat.

I think fourth graders would do just fine to know the lyrics to "The Erie Canal" and that it's "fifteen years" and not "fifteen miles" that the guy and his mule worked. The macroeconomics can wait until the kids are old enough to understand them.

While we shouldn't be shocked that fourth graders don't know the economic impact of the canal system, we ought to be shocked that anyone expects them to.

Which brings up the old joke: "When I was your age, I knew my history!" "Yes, but when you were my age, there wasn't as much history to know!"

It is true that it can be a little unnerving to pick up a current high school history text and find whole sections on the Vietnam War, which some of us still kind of think of as "Current Events."

But it's also true that it can be a little unnerving to pick up a current history text at all, because the damn things weigh 40 pounds. In the intervening 30 or 40 years, they've added all that intervening history, but they haven't taken anything out.

So now kids have to know the issues in the Vietnam War, but they are still expected to memorize the main trade products of the Hanseatic League. It really is a case of there being more history to learn, which wouldn't be the case if someone had the sense to say "Okay, X is how much kids can expected to learn. If we add that new piece, we need to delete this other less relevant piece so the final total doesn't exceed X."

And it's not just a matter of those additional decades. We've also (properly) moved away from teaching the History of Western Europe and calling it "World History." But, again, we refuse to take anything out. So the kids not only have to learn the Merovingens and Carolingens, but now they have to learn about the king of Dahomey and what was going on in Thailand and the rise of the shogunate.

All worthy. But too much.

And they aren't just expected to memorize names and lineages and products and suchlike. They're expected to explain their significance. These expectations are carefully spelled out in "history standards" that place burdens on kids I wouldn't put on Barbara Tuchman. Go here, scroll down through it all, imagine any kid you've ever known absorbing a quarter of it, and then click on the left rail to see that I didn't purposely choose the most ridiculous example.

And the bottom line is this: When you try to make kids learn everything, they don't end up learning anything.

I was lucky to have gone to high school in New York State, where admittedly we did well to get as far as the causes of World War I in history, but we by-gawd got that far, because my high school teachers had the goad of the NYS Regents Exams, which are content-based and always included a question about the causes of World War I.  And, when you have content-based exams, there's nothing wrong with "teaching to the test" because the test contains the elements you are expected to know.

Here's a PDF of the test all American History and Government students in New York (primarily juniors) took last June. Here's the exam in Global History and Geography (primarily given to sophomores).

Over the past decade, New York has decided that every kid can pass these tests. That's nonsense, but at least they have set up a solid target for the kids to miss.

Until reformers and improvers are willing to do the same thing, I'm not going to join in the annual discussion of how stupid our kids are.

Unless the focus is on genetics.

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Comments 7

  1. Excellent piece with which I am in total agreement. I also, as you might expect, salute your reference to the correct lyric on the “Erie Canal” song – and fully concur that, as it was for me, knowing that and a few dozen more folk songs are excellent entrees to U.S. history for nine-year-olds.

  2. That summary of the era, the “four big stories,” is excellent, but at that age – heck, at my age – the details that all those 7 standards pile on would drown out the big picture. I never studied education or child development but my intuition tells me that giving kids the general shape of history is a big task all by itself and the details need to be sculpted in only after that’s firmly set.
    As for the cartoon, students “stumble on history” confused me. My first thought was that he was reading a story about students serendipitously discovering artifacts or an old story. Maybe my mind works weird.

  3. “…my high school teachers had the goad of the NYS Regents Exams…”
    In California, I have seen the result of two generations’ resistance to statewide exams of any kind for high school standards, and it sucks. Whenever I bring up the NYS Regents Exams as a positive example, my colleagues look at me as though I had just crawled out of a big pot of Surströmming. The nicest words used to describe it are “fascist” (if the colleague leans to the left) or “socialist” (if the colleague is one of the rare ones who tilts starboard.)
    Like you, I’m damn’ glad my teachers and I had those facing us at the end of the term. And that’s an ancillary benefit, isn’t it, the sense of student and teacher being a team against a common challenge?
    I still know what my scores were on every Regents Exam I took, not because I’ve got such a good memory, but because they are all listed on the back of my wallet-sized, laminated high school diploma that we all got in addition to the standard-sized one. The little one with the transcript on the back was easier to carry down the street to the hiring office at the shoe factory.

  4. Not trying to turn this forum into personal plugola, but the coincidence is amazing. Today I launched a new online comic strip called “Clinton’s Ditch.”
    http://www.clintonsditchcomics.com
    And I had more than one person think it was about Bill or Hillary.

  5. Make sure you explain your cartoon’s impact on the overall economy, Frank.
    And, ruth, the idea of kids stumbling on history reminded me of a story I saw in a 1970s copy of the Press-Republican of kids playing in an area that had been fortified for the Battle of Plattsburgh in the War of 1812 who had uncovered what might have been a pistol from the battle. Next day, a follow-up article said that, once the crud was scraped off the long-buried artifact, experts agreed that pistols of the era were not engraved with the words “Hopalong Cassidy.”
    Those with an interest in history and music, by the way, would do very well to click on Jim’s name after his comment, to be taken to an outstanding web sites for unmasking the story behind the song. Jim and I go back about 40 years to some dimly lit coffeehouses where fine acoustic music played. And we sometimes went to class between sessions. He has now combined the two.

  7. Oh, now, “Comparative Video 101” goes straight into the bookmarks file. Thank you!

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