New Wine in Old Bottles

Our current political debates are a conflict of unrealities. The leftist unreality is that consequences do not exist. The conservative unreality is to act as though the Left does not exist.

How else to explain this? 

Oh, I suppose if the government is going to babysit kids during the day, they might as well learn something, and if they learn something, they ought to be tested on it, and some of that should be basic civics knowledge, fine, fine. If I were a legislator, I’d probably vote for the bill myself if it came up, unless the cost were exorbitant.

But let’s get real here. Every single American kid who graduates high school has had about an hour of history/”social studies” classes every school day for a good 7-8 years at least. If they can’t name James Madison as the Father of the Constitution, or correctly identify the Battle of Okinawa as belonging to WWII, it isn’t because “in the past 20 years, civics has been eclipsed by a focus on reading, math and science.” (Well, surely in that time we must have raised a bumper crop of proficient readers, mathematicians and scientists, right? No? Hmm…).

No, the patient is sick, and does not want to get well. Certainly some of it is just kids who don’t learn anything. The poor you shall always have with you. But you can’t point to slow learners to explain why graduates of Yale and Princeton score worse on civics tests than freshmen at the same institutions. This is a system that is rotten through and through. I’m younger than most here, and I didn’t learn any real history (in school, I mean) until my sophomore year of high school. Every “social studies” class prior to that was racial healing, armchair psychology and environmental slogans. These are the people you depend on to fix the problem?

It’s hardly new, of course:

Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child ridden with Rupert’s horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side; at the age when  my eyes were dry to all save poetry — that stoic, red-skin interlude which our schools introduce between the fast flowing tears of the child and the man — Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry’s speech on St.  Crispin’s Day,  nor  for the  epitaph at  Thermopylae. The history they taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change. Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales, and Marathon — these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper.

[emphasis added]. The same young men who memorize the location of every single hidden weapon cache in Call of Duty can’t be expected to remember any details about Pickett’s Charge? Come on.

Anyone who thinks you can “fix” the education system by finding that One Amazing Trick, i.e.,  some new testing system or teaching gimmick, is either deluded, or just trying to add one more line item to their resume/obituary. The System is part of the opposing team. It’s hard to believe that nice Ms. Worrell who teaches your daughter’s sixth grade class is playing for the other side, whether intentionally or not, but it’s true. You can’t defeat the Enemy by asking them if they’re the Enemy, and shooting the ones who say yes. They’re more subtle than that.

Better to tear down the System, and leave neither root nor branch. We can then plant something fruitful in the fallow ground.