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How Our History Education Failed Us
Ask a High School student if they enjoy reading and the vast majority will say no. I used to be one of them.
Ask a High School student what is the meaning and significance of the Declaration of Independence and they will hopefully at least be able to tell you about some details of the war, the basic purpose of the document, and they will probably mention freedom.
But ask them what is the difference in the nature of tyranny versus liberty and you will get blank stares from most. Our educational bureaucracy has failed to meet the needs of freedom and the human student in many ways over the generations but perhaps none more than this.
How can a nation remain free if students and citizens do not understand the nature of freedom? How can students grow up to be virtuous, independent, creative, brave, and resilient without the appreciation of those principles in our Founding history and by seeing them through the history of our nation and our people?
Our history and civics education has been rote memorization that has gone in one ear and out the other for decades. Sure, students can circle “C” for the Stamp Act on a multiple-choice test. Students can tell you about the Boston Tea Party, but students can not articulate the type of liberty America was founded on. They cannot tell you the power that the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God should have in a society and a Government. They cannot tell you how tyranny destroys the spirit and the soul of man, it distinguishes virtue, and it makes once-great minds feeble and little.
They cannot tell you that there is a natural and intrinsic relationship between our Rights and our Duties, that we cannot and should not have one without the other, and when you ignore the latter you violate the former.
An education steeped in virtuous Liberty is active and assertive. It is knowledge, wisdom, prudence, and an application of these principles in your life to a good end. It is about reasoning to the root and thinking deeply and freely on timeless principles that keep us free, ground us in wisdom, and inspire us to be great.
College and career readiness is about compliance to a corporate order. It makes us less human, not more.
I read a Twitter thread recently written by a University of Chicago student talking about what he noticed about his peers and he explained that the vast majority are submissive, compliant, and robotic and all I could think to myself is what an absolute shame that THAT is the final result of 12 years of K-12 education here in these United States.
Our education system has been so focused on being “neutral” (which they haven’t) that it has forgotten how to be inspiring, grand, and profound.
And what do we have to show for it?
Not enough “manly virtue,” not enough prudence, and not enough wisdom that transcends the talking points of the day.
Our civics/historical educational results are unsustainable. A nation cannot be both ignorant and free, we will either become all one thing, or all the other.
Hi all! Excited to be here. My name is Gary Vesper and I am a former High School history and home school academy government teacher turned educational entrepreneur. I built my own course and virtual classroom to teach High School students a better, more human story of our Founding Principles. If you have a High School student I’d love to teach them! You can check it out at www.PreservingFreedomUSA.com
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That’s awesome about teaching local history as that has also been lost of the decades. Everything is a national issue that needs a national response which isn’t healthy or true to our founding. Another question to ask your son, and that is a great answer! especially for an 8th grader, is if he has ever heard of the term federalism? If so, how was America founded on it?
Dunno about the last bit, as there’s a lot of ‘we ain’t gonna take that offa nobody’ in Texas history and that is an underrated quality in a people.
On this one, I know my son is not a good test subject for public education. We had a discussion on federalism at the end of the school year. He has, unfortunately, been quite plugged into politics (as much as an 8th grader could be) at his school. While his surroundings have been largely conservative, I’ve had to make sure he has some underlying history, religion, and philosophy to fill in his foundation.
I was a lousy student in high school. Didn’t read, do homework etc. A coach taught history my junior year. He didn’t have a clue either. But I can’t remember not understanding our system, primitively, but it was there and part of the culture. My kids grew up with it as well, but they were with us abroad and in good private American schools and came to understand why the US was different. My grandkids know as well and they get it at home, my daughter’s five must have gotten it from her and my son’s three, from him. I think it all has to come from the home and it doesn’t take much, just recognition that it matters. If kids are plugged into their phones all day long everyday, I don’t think they learn much of anything that matters.
I learned this recently from my son. He was talking about some group of comic book characters, when explained that the origin story is critical in defining the group’s trajectory and providing the glue binds the group. It is therefore critical that our schools teach an origin story for America that provides an optimal trajectory and a glue that can bind us together. Be wary of anyone that diminishes or subverts that idea.
Like the 1619 Project.
Good stuff and I agree. The way I thought of it was that we must speak the same language – hence why I call my course and class that I built the Language of Freedom – there is a common thread, even though we disagreed then as well, that binded us together. Even the understanding that we didn’t have to agree on everything, which is why we are a federal system, was still a form of unity.
I teach history. I try to teach history well. After years of teaching history, however, I have learned that I do not have enough time to do anything other than give a general survey.
For example, I am currently teaching a summer semester, which is 5.5 weeks long. We meet four days a week. In that amount of time, I am supposed to cover US History from after the Civil War to now. This is not possible really except in the broadest of strokes, so I try to plant seeds like Teacher Appleseed that will be in the soil of a student’s mind and start to sprout later.
Even though I don’t have enough time, I do take some time to talk about the Declaration and Constitution as I then pepper the class with ideas that make the US foundation unique. Many of these kids will not have to take any more history than what they take with me. I want them to want to learn more on their own, as they can surely do. That is my main goal.
I think every state has a class for kids in middle school that teaches that state’s history. At least, I have lived in many states, and each of these states did this. Every state has its own origin story, so I think this is a useful exercise, especially if you want a student to understand federalism.
Holy Toledo.
Sadly, this should have been covered by high school so that you can cover themes and reasons behind what happened in the US. By the time one is at a college level, the basics should have been learned and it’s time for deeper understanding. Why did reconstruction happen and why did it succeed and fail. Why did the US expand westward and what needed to be in place in the American psyche to enable such expansion?
That may be true, but kids really know very little when they get to me. I certainly do go into deeper themes, but the reality is that if you asked a lot of kids from the current school generation something super basic like which countries made up the Axis Powers and who were the main leaders, most can say absolutely nothing at all about Japan. I mean… basic knowledge isn’t there. And if you don’t have the people/places/dates, which are the most basic of facts, it’s harder to move to the whys/hows/so whats of history: the elements of the discipline that can truly teach us something.
I will say I teach at a community college, but these kids represent something a lot more real–a better representation of most of America–than those students you see in protests at Yale.
You are entirely correct. My wife taught at ITT for a couple of years and she was supposed to teach college level English, but few of her students were capable of High School English level writing. She and her fellow English teacher were in a quandary, teach the curriculum and fail almost all of the students, or teach them how to write.
The fact that kids are graduating High School lacking basic skills like writing, math, and knowledge of simple facts of history and civics is an indictment of how terrible our educational system has become.
Wow, that’s a lot of ground to cover. When I taught public school U.S. History One I was supposed to cover Jamestown and then at the causes of WW1. The last 3-4 units had like 1-2 multiple choice question on the final exam – that’s it – but I “had to cover it.” It was so annoying and stupid.