Teaching Amnesia To British Youth

"Our face is our autobiography", historian Will Durant remarked in one of his 1,000-page volumes on the Story of Civilization. This observation compliments one made by another Will -- William Shakespeare, in As You Like It:
"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts..."

As we make our own individual entrances we are arriving at a mid-way point in an ongoing story. The players we see looking out at us when we face ourselves in the mirror can delude themselves into believing that the play began with the rise of their own individual curtain, but a more humble, and honest, recounting would reveal that the clock started ticking long before our arrival into the scene.

What story are we joining? What role is missing in the play, that we can fulfill? What are the hopes, and regrets, of those already having passed through the drama before us, from which we may take our cues?

Looking into their own mirrors, I wonder what the youth of Great Britain are seeing written into their autobiographies, now that they are no longer being taught about the story they are joining:

History Vanishes From One In 20 Schools

[Michael Gove, the Conservative shadow schools secretary] said: “History is effectively disappearing from some secondary schools. Giving children a proper knowledge of our island story so they can take pride in our historic achievements is the best way to build a modern, inclusive future for our country.
“But after a decade of decline under Labour less than a third of children now take the subject, and yet again we see that it is poorest pupils that are disproportionately missing out.”

Given how history's being taught when it is being taught, maybe it's disappearance is becoming the lesser of evils..?

[T]here is no doubt that something has gone badly wrong when seven out of 10 schoolchildren are no longer studying history at the age of 16, when two out of 10 think Britain was once occupied by the Spanish, and when some identify Sir Winston Churchill as the first man on the moon. And the blame lies at the very top, shared by politicians of both parties, who have been systematically cheating and betraying our children since the 1980s.

During the Thatcher years, it was meddling from the top that downgraded history from a compulsory to an optional subject at the age of 16 – which, because it was seen as "difficult", made it easy pickings for Mickey Mouse subjects such as Beauty Therapy. It was supposedly "progressive" interference, meanwhile, that did away with old-fashioned essay questions and replaced them with empathy exercises and multiple-choice quizzes that sacrificed any sense of intellectual depth or discipline.

And perhaps above all, it was in Westminster and Whitehall that officials designed our absurd Yo! Sushi approach to history, in which schools randomly pick unrelated historical topics like saucers from a conveyor belt, instead of studying our national story as a continuous narrative, which is how any sensible person sees it.

One student survived his youthful education with his curiosity intact, and pursued history as a more serious subject in university, but now admits he seems to spend more time defending his favorite topic than studying it:

Whenever I tell someone outside university that I'm taking history, they look puzzled, suppress a giggle, and ask "Why?"
...
People assume I'm deranged (or just a bit simple) when I mumble my reason for studying history: I enjoy it. I like reading and writing about history.
Basically, I'm doing a hobby degree. "But what will you do with a history degree when you graduate?" is often the next question.

Here's how you answer them: we study history as a precursor to greater understanding of other subjects, not just for its own sake; it helps us recognize the existence of cause-and-effect relationships, the fallibility of Man, the possibility of unintended consequences, and most especially, it teaches us how to learn, so long as history is approached as the study of stories... as learning from experience.

Sadly, in the UK such wisdom is fast becoming history.

How could you see a future, when you don't see a past?

Keeping Faith In Music

With many schools eliminating the funding for all their art programs, especially music, this latest study linking reading skills to musical literacy may strike just the right note for keeping faith in the value of music to the life of a child:

Children tutored in music involving progressively complex rhythmic, tonal and practical skills display superior reading skills than their peers, according to a new study.
...
[Joseph M. Piro and Camilo Ortiz from Long Island University] investigated the hypothesis that children (in two elementary schools) who have received keyboard instruction as part of a music curriculum that becomes progressively difficult over the years, would demonstrate significantly better performance on vocabulary and verbal sequencing than students who did not receive keyboard instruction.
Several studies have reported positive associations between music education and increased abilities in non-musical (linguistic, mathematical, and spatial) domains in children.
The authors said there are similarities in the way individuals interpret music and language and “because neural response to music is a widely distributed system within the brain…. It would not be unreasonable to expect that some processing networks for music and language behaviours, namely reading, located in both hemispheres of the brain would overlap.”
Using a quasi-experimental design, the investigators selected second-grade children from two school sites located in the same geographic vicinity and with similar demographic characteristics, to ensure the two groups of children were as similar as possible apart from their music experience.
Children in the intervention school studied piano formally for a period of three consecutive years as part of a comprehensive instructional intervention program.
Children attending control school received no formal musical training on any musical instrument and had never taken music lessons as part of their general school curriculum or in private study.
Both schools followed comprehensive balanced literacy programmes that integrate skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening.
All participants were individually tested to assess their reading skills at the start and close of a standard 10-month school year using the Structure of Intellect (SOI) measure, said a Long Island University release.
Results analysed at the end of the year showed that the music-learning group had significantly better vocabulary and verbal sequencing scores than did the non-music-learning control group.

There comes an age when children listen to their childish efforts at music and suddenly hear it all with new ears, causing many of them to declare, "Hey, I'm not really a good musician"; this fresh insight leads them to abandon their flutes and pianos for other things, as it might with their singing, with their painting, with their writing... with most of their acts of creation.

It seems a rite of passage into adulthood, to assess one's abilities as "amateurish", and therefore so second-rate that their very existence is a threat against our adult pose as "professional" experts at living. Who will take us seriously, if they hear our amateurish attempts at music, if they see our amateurish approach to creativity itself?

Once upon a time, the word "amateur" was not the sour note it tends to be thought of today. In its original, literal definition, to be an "amateur" means simply to be "a lover of something"... in French, it still retains this old-fashioned sense of the term, as we would say that I'm an "amateur de baseball", a lover of baseball. My skill has no relation to my passion.

I think one of the reasons that adolescents tend to be so cynical, so nihilistic in their point of view, is that there is not enough effort placed on convincing them to stay in love with life. They've left so much behind, all they can see is the hole that such abandonment brings; no wonder they wear black, I'd be in mourning too if I felt I had left so much of my previous life behind me.

The amateur's passion they once may have felt when devoting themselves for hours to their various acts of creation, especially playing music, is a romance worth remembering, and renewing. The courage needed to create new things comes partially from the childlike faith that our personal accomplishments can actually make a genuine difference in the world around us. As adults, our supposedly heightened powers of observation often end up obscuring that which is most important to perceive: it pays to have faith, to stretch our perspective so that it sees the single note of the present in the context of an overall melody of moments, especially those to come. That which we are today, is not necessarily all that we ever will be: we are creations forever in the process of becoming.

It's a lesson renewed by the experience of parenthood, probably the ultimate example of amateurism. That first time where a parent cradles their new-born baby, and takes inventory of their creation: what is there to see, except the fog of a far-off future? The little, tiny hands, inexpert at the simplest of tasks. The closed eyes, not yet able to register much of anything in their orbit. The probing mind, not yet aware of even what questions there are to ask about the world it's entered into. And yet from parental love springs the faith to perceive the hoped-for symphony, that the hand, the eyes and the mind that orchestrates this harmonious duet will someday truly make a difference.

It takes a lifetime to practice this art, so why not start as early and as often as possible, especially by keeping faith in the blessing that making music may bring to the life of a child.

Those who forget the past…

... are condemning us all to repeat it.

Back in May we reported on the results of a recent poll of Swedish teenagers, whose high school education caused 40% of them to conclude that communism had somehow increased prosperity in the world. 90% of the teens didn't even know what the soviet concentration camps, the gulags, were.

You would think, that if anyone in the world would understand the evil of communism as it is actually practiced, compared to the fantasies promised in speeches, books and classrooms, it would be the people who had directly suffered, generation after generation, under its grinding yoke: the Russians.

You would think that, and yet according to a new poll released by the Yuri Levada Centre, you would be wrong.

When asked if Stalin was a wise leader, half of the 1,802 respondents, aged from 16 to 19, agreed he was. "Fifty-four percent agreed that Stalin did more good than bad," said Theodore Gerber, a sociologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "Forty-six percent disagreed with the statement that Stalin was a cruel tyrant."
...
"What we find troubling is that there is a substantial proportion of young people in Russia today who hold positive or ambivalent views on Stalin and his legacy," Gerber said. "We think it would probably be more appropriate if there was more condemnation of the Stalin era."
The poll showed 17 percent of the young people disagreed that Stalin was responsible for the imprisonment, torture and execution of millions of innocent people, while 40 percent thought his role in the repression had been exaggerated.

It shames me to admit it, but I used to be a proto-communist myself, many years ago. Thank God, I escaped its seductive charm, through a blessed combination of personal life experiences involving working closely with other people, and a lifelong fascination for studying history. There is such a stark disconnect between the glories that are promised under communism, and the awful nightmares that history reveal to be the inevitable realities of actually living under a communist system. Surely only a dishonest, or lazy, mind would fail to see this colossal disconnect, and continue to place faith in its promised utopias.

It's not "cool" to be stupid... is it?

In the case of Russia, the evils of communism unleashed nightmares statistically close to that of the two large-scale wars that ravaged the nation twice in the first half of the 20th century.
World War I: the carnage of trench warfare, the sinful arrogance of officers wasting untold lives by relying on outdated battlefield tactics in ignorance of modern military technology.
3,311,000 russians, soldiers as well as civilians, were killed in World War I; yet approx 8-9 million russians were killed during Lenin's rule following the war.
World War II: the nazis viewed the slavs as sub-human opponents, and their approach to warfare on the eastern front reflected that philosophy, causing the "great patriotic war" to become "generally accepted as being the most costly conflict in human history".
23,600,000 russians, soldiers as well as civilians, were killed in World War II; yet approx 20,000,000 russians were killed under Stalin's rule, up to and then after the war. (that number is averaged from several sources; totals are all over the map for deaths under Stalin. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, as one example, claims a total of 60,000,000 killed!)

Maybe one of these days this kind of information can be taught in schools...

I wish it had been taught to me in my school.

American academia in retreat on military history

Military history was one of the first subjects I can consciously remember studying, even before I ever went to school.

My interest began from the afternoon that a favorite uncle had handed down to me his old, old collection of Civil War News bubble gum cards, with gory images on one side and an accompanying newspaper-style account of the illustrated battle on the back.

These graphic cards taught this youngster about valor and ingenuity and perseverance, as well as the horror of war. From there it was a natural progression to reading about World War I and II, Napoleonic and American Revolutionary history, Roman and Greek history and so much else. (Sadly, the military historian is not lacking for subject matter...)

There's been much to learn, offering many inspiring stories of courage and duty that have dramatically improved my adult life, especially due to having read so much American military history.

Rich Lowry offers an article today at Town Hall, suggesting that such knowledge and the life lessons one can learn therefrom, may be becoming a thing of the past. Read his sad assessment on the current state of military history as a subject in today's college and university curriculums, here:

Battles are so important to history that their names alone -- Vienna, Waterloo, Stalingrad -- can evoke the beginning or end of epochs and empires. Violent conflict is one of the most persistent characteristics of human history, and warfare features the interplay of strategy, weaponry, chance, logistics, emotion and leadership. It is the occasion for folly and brutality, and -- as we remember on Memorial Day -- heroism and sacrifice.
...
Nonetheless, military history has been all but banished from college campuses. In an article on this strange deficit in National Review, John J. Miller chalks it up to "an ossified tenure system, scholarly navel-gazing and ideological hostility to all things military."

History departments are dominated by a post-Vietnam generation of professors for whom bottom-up "social history" is paramount, and the only areas of interest are race, sex and class. History focusing on great events and the "great men" central to them is retrograde -- let alone military history that ipso facto smacks of militarism. Hence, the rout of military history from the academy that Miller catalogs.

Edward Coffman, a former military historian at the University of Wisconsin, studied the 25 best history departments according to U.S. News & World Report rankings and found that a mere 21 professors out of more than 1,000 listed war as their specialty. A Notre Dame student complained recently: "We have more than 30 full-time history faculty members, but not one is a military historian. Even in their self-described interests, not a single professor lists 'war' of any era, although half list religious, gender and race relations."

Even professors who supposedly specialize in military history do it through the prism of trendy academic obsessions. Miller notes a professor at West Virginia University who lists World War I as one of his "teaching fields," but his latest work is on "the French hairdressing professions" and the "evolving practices and sensibilities of cleanliness in 20th century France."
...
That military history has been chased from the academic field is especially perverse given that, when the classes are offered, they are popular with students.
...
Brave men always will be necessary to defend freedom, and what they have done deserves to be remembered, and studied.

Swedish teens: "What's so bad about communism?"

It seems that North American schools aren't the only ones turning out reprehensively ignorant students. This report from Yahoo News suggests that Swedish kids are, if at all possible, even more dangerously stupid:

A majority of Swedish teenagers don't know what communism is and don't know which countries neighbour their own, a poll published Wednesday showed, raising questions about Sweden's education system.

Ninety percent of teens aged 15 to 20 don't know which foreign capital is closest to Stockholm, 90 percent don't know what the Gulag is, and 40 percent think communism has increased prosperity in the world.
"They have a lack of understanding for basic concepts such as dictatorships and democracy, and that is unsettling. There must be a major change in their level of knowledge, and schools in particular must take responsibility," Camilla Andersson, the head of the Information About Communism organisation that commissioned the study, told Swedish news agency TT.
...
[Schools Minister Jan Bjoerklund] said he planned to propose more history lessons for students, and would recommend that the Holocaust and crimes committed in the name of communism in the Soviet Union be mandatory elements of the history curriculum.
The results of the study, published in daily Dagens Nyheter on Wednesday, also showed that 50 percent of the 1,004 teens questioned didn't know that Berlin was the capital of a country bordering the Baltic Sea, 82 percent didn't think Belarus was a dictatorship and 43 percent said they thought communism had claimed fewer than a million victims in the 20th century.
Fifty-six percent said they didn't know if Western market economies were democratic societies, and 22 percent said communism was a democratic social structure.

Maybe my initial sense of outrage is misplaced; for all I know, these are "good" students, who might well be successfully parroting the information fed to them by their professors, eager to brainwash a new generation in the left's latest attempt to "practice communism correctly", unlike those misguided and mis-informed 20th century marxists like Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Fidel Castro, Lenin, Krushnev, and Every Single Other One Of Them.

Public schools do a great job... at teaching kids to be Stupid

This is a 2006 news piece by John Stossel, from ABC's 20/20.
From the description posted at Youtube:

20-20 investigation by John Stossel entitled "Stupid in America" highlighting some of the flaws with the education system in the United States. The story started out when identical tests were given to high school students in New Jersey and in Belgium. The Belgian kids cleaned the American kids' clocks. The Belgian kids called the American students "stupid", which gave the piece its name.

Here are some lines that stuck with me as the program went on:

Stossel: "The longer American kids spend in schools, the worse they do."
Grandmother: "The children are not stupid; the system is stupid."
Mother: "My son is now 18, and he is not reading. He is on a fourth grade level."
[Stossel takes her kid and puts him in the hands of a private learning center: "After only 72 hours of instruction he is raised two grade levels."]
Belgian mother: "I wouldn't send my child to an American public school, not even for a million dollars."
American Student: "One of my teachers tells me he does this for the health benefits."
Stossel: "In the last two years, only two teachers [who are members of the New York state teachers union] have been fired for incompetence."





It's a long piece (40+ minutes) but well worth watching if you can spare the time. Just make sure you watch it early enough in the day, so that you can use the anger and sense of outrage it provokes to good purpose, and take action. If you watch it in the evening, you'll only toss and turn and get no sleep [he says, bleary-eyed from experience].
God help our children who have fallen prey to the povertarian ideals of the teachers unions and their governmental enablers. (and, to be fair, the indifference of those parents who shrug their shoulders in the face of evidence such as this program provides)