The Education Wonks
You have a riveting web log
and undoubtedly must have
atypical & quiescent potential
for your intended readership.
May I suggest that you do
everything in your power to
honor your encyclopedic/omniscient
Designer/Architect as well
as your revering audience.
As soon as we acknowledge
this Supreme Designer/Architect,
Who has erected the beauteous
fabric of the universe, our minds
must necessarily be ravished with
wonder at this infinite goodness,
wisdom and power.
Please remember to never
restrict anyone's opportunities
for ascertaining uninterrupted
existence for their quintessence.
Merry Christmas,
Dr. Howdy
'Thought & Humor'
That is interesting- ask them how many of them have a family member in Iraq. With my students (whose demographics seem similar to yours), about 50% do. So they are slightly more aware of the situation.
"Beauteous". Okay. Say Ed, maybe they could invent a video game about it, that way the message would somehow slip past their likely apathetic parents and agenda-driven school administrations. That said, it looks as if you gotta be the one to clue them in. teach on, non-wayward son. (to sort of quote a song)
But it is simple - we were ALWAYS in a war with Oceania, or was it Eastasia? What else is there to know?
Since you did not give us any demographic data on your class, ask them a couple of other questions:
1. Does you family subscribe to a daily newspaper?
2. Does you family subscribe to any news magazines?
3. Does anyone in your family watch television news programs?
My guess is that the kids who know nothing have parents who know nothing.
WW II? Yeah, that was my folks' war. My mom graduated from high school in 1945. She would have been in the 8th grade when Pearl Harbor was attacked. She lived on Long Island NY then and vividly remembers the radio announcement and the rest of the day as the news came through.
For what it's worth, she said that Nine-Eleven was far worse than Pearl Harbor in its impact and horror.
My 9-year-old daughters (twins) are currently enamoured with the "American Girl" series, and are reading about Molly's world in 1944. The authors describe how children helped collect scrap metal and rubber for the war effort, how toys had war themes and how each family sacrificed.
What have ordinary citizens been asked to do for this war? The only message seems to be to continue to travel and shop so that our ecomony will stay strong. Forget sacrifice- keep those consumer spending numbers up. It's no wonder kids don't know what's going on.
Yea, I think back then the kids would have known who their country was at war with and against whom. I do find kind of scary that the students you describe would not have an idea of why the country is at war or with who. Some of the commenters have made interesting observations. For instance, asking how many have a relative in Iraq, which begs the question, yes, they have a relative, but why is mommy/daddy/aunt/cousin,etc. over there? And where is this Iraq place anyways? Maybe it does boil down to an Orwellian vision. Either way, one has to wonder.
Being nitpicky, perhaps because I live here, but the Pentagon isn't in Washington, DC, "the nation's capital", it's in Arlington, VA. Though I know people my age (23) from elsewhere who didn't know there was an attack down here either. *shrug*
I would have known about Pearl Harbor when I was 13, and that was only ten years ago. I'm not positive we ever covered it in a class though -- I don't specifically remember any 20th century history in any of my classes. Maybe we got to WWI once.
An apple for the teacher.
Good for you.
This reminds me of the time my son's cub scout troop was taken to the library to learn the Dewey decimal system. The librarian, wanting to hook the boys' attention, said "who wants to look up Michael Jackson?" To which my son replied quizzically, "Michael who"? and was hooted down by the other boys. Totally not cool. Of course, he'd already been to the same library to check out the World War I poets...and I have no idea where that impulse came from...
I agree with your respondent who asks what the parents read or watch on TV. You can't get history out of thin air.
OTOH, the lacuna of 9/11 speaks volumes to what these kids do NOT hear on TV.
I was in second grade when we collected scrap metal. Posters were common featuring Uncle Sam. Civil defense blackouts made us all aware that we could be vulnerable. We had ration cooupons and tokens so there was no way we could not know about the war. Newsreels in theatres always showed footage of the war. We are not serving our young very well.
I watched the planes hit the towers and the Pentagon with my students (9th graders) and can remember trying to makes some sense of it with them. In those days, we saw images of the tragedy too often. Now, we seldom see the images on television at all -- I have heard that the network bigwigs require permission from the highest levels in their organizations to show footage of 9/11. I have also heard speculation that this is done so that support for Bush and the war continues to wane. People have, for the most part, forgotten about 9/11 because we're missing the repetition to which the visual media has conditioned us.
I was in second grade when the 1980 election took place and can vividly remember the Iran hostage crisis. Thank God that the modern media and amusement-based educational system has freed todays students from the tyranny of memory. What I wouldn't give to replace the image of the hostages arriving back in the U.S. with that really cool level in "Grand Theft Auto."
Your students probably just need to have their meds adjusted. . .no big deal.
It's hard to say exactly why kids have little historical knowledge of recent events such as 9/11 and the origins and evolution of bush's war. What I can say is that kids don't have an adequate understanding of history in general. When I teach To Kill A Mockinbird, my students have virtually no knowledge of the Great Depression. They understand racism and intolerance in their current lives, but they don't have much of a grip on the history of intolerance in the U.S., the Civil Rights movement, and so on.
I think many teens are absorbed by the social situations in their own lives, and have a hard time relating to historical events and adding them to a permanent schema in their minds. My grade school-aged daughters are also very into the American Girl dolls and really enjoy the historical piece that goes with the each doll in the collection. But what they really seem to relate to is the social situation that each doll was part of, not necessarily the political and historic events of the time period. Most of the dolls' stories do have informational historic content, but they choose to focus on what that doll was going through, not the bigger picture. To me this is a mirror of many young people's lives. Relationships are crucial, understanding yourself is important, but comprehending history, the larger world, and each person's place in it is often very secondary.
Jay
I would call this a modern phenomenon. Cicero once wrote that "To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child." What, then, is it to remain ignorant of major events that occured during one's lifetime?
I do not accept the "kids are kids" excuse. I was aware of the Great Depression when I was in junior high school as were most of my classmates, and this was only twenty years ago. I wasn't a news junkie, but it seemed that most of my contemporaries were aware of current events and events in recent history. Heck, I was even aware of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Although I know that similar things have been said about schoolkids since Socrates' day, kids are different nowadays.
We seem to have a focus on keeping the kids amused and entertained AND passing standardized tests in this country. We don't emphasize the subtleties of context or any form of critical thinking. We have seen the dividends of this in the current political climate, where sloganeering and political warfare has replaced reason and common sense. Hence, your "bush's[sic] war" comment.
I agree with the commenter who pointed out that the parents of these children are probably equally ignorant. When I was a child, my family took four newspapers and three weekly newsmagazines. My parents watched the evening news and listened to news radio in the morning. This was before 24/7 news channels. With even more news available now, people seem to know less and less about anything of significance.
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