ABOUT ME § INFORMATION LITERACY § DISTINCTION § PHILOSOPHY§ WHY I BECAME A TEACHER
"Josh is among the most intelligent, articulate, and dynamic undergraduates I have known in thirty seven years of teaching at the university level...Josh had one of the best and broadest records of leadership that I have seen over the twenty years that I have been the campus representative for the Truman Foundation...He stands out in a crowd in the best sense...I know that my grandsons need to be educated, and I would have more trust in a school because Josh taught there."
—Duncan Harris, UW Honors Program Director & Truman Foundation Representative
A disquieting fact...
Secondary students consider social studies “boring,” consistently ranking it as the least liked of their subjects (Goodlad 1984, Adler 1991).
Social studies achievement/competency of Americans
The 2001 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Geography Report Card found that only 25% of American high school seniors can be considered proficient (truly competent). The 2006 NAEP Civics Report Card found only that 27% of seniors are proficient. The 2006 NAEP U.S. History Report Card revealed that only 13% of seniors are proficient while the 2006 NAEP Economics Report Card revealed 42% of seniors are proficient. That not even half of American high school seniors are proficient in economics and hardly a quarter are proficient in all other social studies areas is a profoundly embarrassing fact, especially considering that the United States of America has long been described as the mother of modern democracies and leader of the free world...
Voter apathy, civic disengagement, and alienation
Harvard's Vanishing Voter Project found that nearly 100 million eligible adults would not vote in the 2000 Presidential Election, with more than half of all eligible American voters not having voting in the 1996 election. It found that four in ten of those nonvoters would not vote because they care little about politics and public affairs (where, contrary to conventional wisdom, only one in four was angry at politics or politicians and only one in four was disenchanted with- and alienated by- politics). It also found that, in general, nonvoters are younger Americans with the average voting age being forty-nine. Precipitous declines in voter turnout and voter apathy likewise capture the apathy, alienation and disaffection a significant and growing percentage of the population feels toward matters affecting their public interest.
Street surveys
Streets surveys intended to disparage the "average" American regularly reveal the lack of knowledge of public affairs (domestic and international) and current events possessed by American citizens. These videos are all too often the basis of ridicule of Americans across the world. While these sometimes misleading videos are produced to prove their maker's foregone conclusions and typically but conspicuously exclude the responses of Americans who know the answers (they query dozens of people and only select those most embarrassing replies captured on film in order to make their point), they are valid in consistently demonstrating the embarrassing ignorance of many Americans. These are real Americans randomly questioned in public and are not paid actors. Sadly, those are their very real responses. As a social studies educator, I can't help but to cringe in disappointment and embarrassment and to admit the failure of education or social studies education implicit in such answers.
While many Americans are competent to answer these questions, the ignorance of numerous Americans as portrayed in these street surveys continues to affect opinion of American diplomacy and our standing in general around the globe. That, generally, as we saw before, barely a quarter of American seniors are proficient in all but one of the various social studies taught in American secondary schools could lend credibility to the notion implied by these videos that an actual majority of those questioned actually do give unbecoming answers. Those making these points may not actually be engaging in intellectually dishonest hyperbole exactly after all (as so many claim in defensive reaction). The hard-earned standing and respect America has earned for generations through the sacrifices of our forebears is in peril.
CNNNN's (Australia's conservative Chaser Non-stop News Network akin to America's Fox News) street survey of Americans
Will Albino petitions to end women's suffrage at Padua Academy in Wilmington, DE (a Catholic all-female college-preparatory school)
The reality behind street surveys
Is America truly a dunce nation?
The 2007 Newsweek What You Need to Know poll showed that Americans were embarrassingly unaware of current events, history, science, and cultural literacy.
A 2006 National Geographic-Roper Poll showed Americans are also embarrassingly uneducated in the arena of geography.
A 2007 Pew Research What Americans Know Poll showed Americans have made marginal declines in their awareness of current events.
A 2004 National Science Foundation report found Americans lacking in their knowledge of science and technology (and that knowledge to be declining).
The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press contracted Princeton Survey Research Associates International to conduct randomly sampled telephone interviews of 1,502 Americans from February 1-13, 2007 inquiring about their political knowledge and awareness of current events. The resulting report, Public Knowledge of Current Affairs Little Changed by News and Information Revolutions: What Americans Know: 1989-2007, revealed that a growing number of Americans do not know their political leaders and are oblivious of many national and international affairs. The report also showed a confusing and paradoxical increase in the number of Americans who were aware of certain realities in national politics although they seemed to know less in other areas than they did nearly twenty years ago.
The 2005 Pew Global Attitudes Survey of people around the world revealed that the United States remains broadly disliked in most of the countries surveyed, and that global public opinion of the American people is not as positive as it once was.
Perhaps more alarmingly, in tandem with declines in confidence in the U.S. public image, seven countries (including Saudi Arabia, South Korea, China, and Russia) are presently considering abandoning the U.S. dollar as their currency "peg" to protect their financial reserves because of its declining value and declining confidence in the U.S. economy.
Declining real American literacy (an ever less- literate and attentive electorate)
Although the CIA Fact Book reflects nearly universal literacy in America—99% in 2007—the definition it employs is the broadest definition of literacy possible (focusing upon low-level basic phonics and decoding instead of comprehension and inference) and obscures reality. The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) was the most comprehensive assessment of adult literacy in America since the 1992 NAAL. The 1992 NAAL found that almost fifty percent of Americans can't read well enough to find a single piece of information in a publication and make low level inferences based upon short passages; it also found that nearly a third of Americans were functionally illiterate. The 2003 NAAL reflected only nominal improvement since 1992, with 43% of American adults scoring at the basic and below basic levels (14% scored below basic). Research shows that professionals must communicate at between a 5th-8th grade reading level in order to effectively communicate with the average American.
2003 NAAL Results
The National Endowment for the Art's (NEA) June 2004 report Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America concluded that only 46.7% of American adults, less than half of the adult population, reads any form of literature (prose, poetry) and noted a significant decline of more than 10% in readership since 1982. Surprisingly and encouragingly, however, there appears to be an increase in newspaper readership in spite of declines in print circulation due to online readership.
On one hand, it appears how Americans consume information is changing in response to the paradigm shift brought by the Information Age. On the other, it appears that Americans increasingly spend less time reading and more time on the internet (which may involve some marginal reading) but more importantly, in gaming and watching television for entertainment. This may be a worrisome and detrimental change with severe indirect consequences for our nation on every level. Excessive television viewing may have a direct link to the growing numbers of American children diagnosed with ADHD. Excessive television viewing has an adverse impact upon attention span in seven-year-olds. Current attention span research also puts the average American attention span at 7-12 minutes (an all-time low; the latter time being the average length of a television segment between commercials). It is clear that we are becoming an ever-less literate and attentive society—a dire reality that has profound educational, economic, geopolitical, and social implications for the future of this nation and the world in general.
Why Social Studies educators fail
That American secondary students rank social studies as their least favorite subject and describe it as "boring" comes as no surprise to me. I believe this disquieting reality is, in large part, explained too often by a failure of social studies teachers to make learning meaningful, engaging, and relevant to secondary learners. Too many of us have memories of endless hours of note-taking, textbook work, and videos—and there is no surer way to bore and alienate than learning that focuses upon the basic recall level of Bloom's taxonomy.
Making learning engaging, meaningful and relevant: an example in why we study and teach history in public schools
Perhaps the generic questions of “Why teach history?” or “Why study history?” are deserving of the nearly programmed response, “So we learn from our past and don’t repeat our mistakes.” There is some basis to a reply of this nature; otherwise, it wouldn’t be so clichéd.
Personally, I prefer Mark Twain's apocryphal quotation, "History doesn't repeat itself; it just rhymes." Absolutely, we teach history, lest we forget (to learn from our pasts to spare ourselves pain in the present)... Still, what precisely does that mean? Isn’t there more? History isn't about the past. It's about understanding the present and predicting the future by creating it with the benefit of better information gleamed from that past. But is a cliché our best answer? Like individual memory is about our very survival (as we individually benefit from past memory), history is about our collective memory and our survival.
Unfortunately, in accepting this answer without further thought, we obscure the mysterious search for identity itself that is history. It strips history of its heart that resides in stories and storytelling from time immemorial.
Who are we? How did we come to be here? From where have we come?
The answers to these timeless universal philosophical questions are found in a story that begins deep in our prehistory with mythology and oral tradition and extends past the present into the future. It has continually been kept alive in the evolution of the spoken and written word and in human survival across the ages to the present generation. Not only is history the story of humankind, it is simultaneously the story of the individual searcher him/herself...
Practical reasons to study history…
We study history to become consummate conversationalists—to make apropos allusions in dialogue (as history creates infinite doorways into any domain of knowledge and conversations with others; it makes us more relatable and us both more interested in others and interesting). We study history to follow our roots and understand what shaped our ancestry. History is an avenue and vantage for comprehending every other discipline—from technology to the sciences to music to medicine to chemistry to philosophy to health to law to cuisine. No topic can be properly understood divorced from its historical context—every topic holds within it a complex history interrelated to all other histories. Studying history enables us to craft connections between these seemingly unrelated dots and understand the causal relationships that explain everything. As such, it supports critical thought and information transfer.
Studying history allows us to recognize patterns in world events. It provides the very mental framework for the comprehension of everything.
Most importantly, we study history in our quest to think for ourselves. We can't make informed decisions relying only upon the answers of others. Arguably, one cannot be true to one's principles if one does not appreciate their origins. It is only in the study of history that we can truly understand what it means to be human as it instills us with pride and shame—honor, humanity and humility.
“Lest we forget.” What does it mean?
Correlating history to memory, if we lost our memory, would it not be terrifying to make sense of who and where we are today? If we didn’t know what brought us to the present, how could we anticipate the future? As children learn to generalize about hot or sharp objects, we study history as our particular shared, collective memory of the past to spare ourselves painful lessons we've encountered in lives before. Without history—without memory—we lack comprehension or the context or frame of reference in which we can understand new experiences. Like pressing the reset button, without history, we start our amnesic life over with each day or with each new generation without the benefit of knowing who we are, where we've been, how we got here, or where we were headed and without the benefit of painful lessons learned from our pasts. Indeed, those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.
Sadly, as the evidence presented previously reflects, our nation is increasingly one lost without its identity. This collective amnesia and the resulting alienation and malaise express themselves in the apathy and decadence that increasingly define young Americans.
Why teach history?
The duty of every history teacher in this country is to ensure that no student sees themselves or their ancestors as existing outside of history or fails to understand how relevant these seemingly irrelevant stories are to each of our personal presents. We must personalize history. We are called upon to remove the veil and reveal a truth: our national history is not the story of strange people long since deceased to whom we have little or no relation or whose stories have no value; our national history is the story of each and every single one of us. History is an adventure in inspiration.
Until our students can see their ancestors as actors with whom we share a stage—enacting the very same story invisibly from the unseen borders of the stories we choose to tell about our pasts—we have failed as history teachers. Until we succeed in bequeathing our fervent hunger for knowledge to our students (by making learning relevant, meaningful, and engaging), we have fallen short of our mark.
Until every American student can once again say with conviction (as the 1988 film Gorillas in the Mist fictionally depicted Louis Leakey summarizing the driving motivation for his primatological passion at the end of the opening lecture), "I want to know who I am and what has made me this way," we have failed in that charge. It is this succinct formulation of this universal question that captures the essence of the social sciences—self-discovery in the consuming search for identity.
ABOUT ME § INFORMATION LITERACY § DISTINCTION § PHILOSOPHY§ WHY I BECAME A TEACHER