Facts, please, just the facts

Several years ago I was working at a sports car race at the Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama. It was the first major event at that splendid facility and the feature race that weekend was everything the fans could have hoped for.

I was walking down a spiral staircase that Friday when my cellphone somehow popped off my belt and managed a short flight beyond the hand railing, whereupon it dive bombed its way through the middle of the stairs, three stories down.

First mystified and then amazed, I watched my phone crash onto the concrete walkway below. As landings go, this one sucked. The phone dissolved into several pieces and scattered in various directions. It was like watching the Coyote after going over a cliff in the old Roadrunner cartoons.

As you’d expect, I jogged down the stairs and picked up all the pieces, jamming them together just to see what happened. Unlike the Coyote, the phone was dead.

A lot of people feel today that there are aspects of education that are as ill-fated as the flight of my old cell phone. Simply put, it looks as if history instruction is on a crash and burn path. Maybe a crash and splash, like Amelia Earhart.

Ever hear of Amelia Earhart? Thank your teacher.

Math and science must be taught in our classrooms, as should reading and writing. And history must be a significant part of instruction, starting in the primary grades.

When I was a member of the county board of education where we lived in California, we reviewed text books for history and the books we reviewed included fewer actual facts than I imagined possible. Mostly, the book included fictional stories about non-existent people who reflected approximately what probably happened. Well, to be fair, the incidents in the book might not have happened. It was hard to tell.

That is what passes for history instruction today and I think it gives the students a severe lack of respect. Educational administrators today are fond of saying they need to engage the students using creative means. Judging from the books I reviewed a few years back, that means style, not accuracy, is the in thing.

To paraphrase Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, “That’s a (heck)uva price to pay for being stylish.”

I believe students today are as smart as they’ve ever been. They are as capable of learning as those of any other era, including my own. Yes, there are challenges now, just as there were in other eras. But if the challenges now are different from those of the past, they are no tougher. Does anyone capable of remembering the 1960s believe it is harder to teach now than it was then?

History is an extraordinarily important part of a student’s education. We need to teach it better. We might start by teaching the facts, kids. Here are the facts. Remember facts? We used to teach a lot of them without making stuff up and, incredibly, students used to learn.

The best way to avoid the mistakes of the past is to learn about them. We’ve made enough mistakes so that there is plenty to learn. Let’s teach kids what has happened and give them a decent chance to make a difference. They can’t fix anything if they don’t know what’s broke.

It is easy to blame the kids but what school children do not learn is not their fault. The fault belongs to the adults: Teachers, parents, state and district administrators and the jokesters who write textbooks.

When I was in grade school, wars were not mentioned when we were taught history. We learned about the so-called armed camps in Europe in 1914 one day and the next day the topic was the Great Depression. We learned about the rise of Hitler and the mean, war-like guys in Japan. The next day, we learned about rebuilding Europe and Japan.

The Civil War? We learned about slavery, secession and reconstruction. There was a Civil War era, but no Civil War.

How can we avoid the ugly mistakes of the past if we hide the past from our bright, young students?

Our education leaders have a difficult task in front of them but the toughest part will be overcoming the culture of nonsense they have built for themselves. Accurate instruction of history, a heavy dose of it, is needed beginning at the primary grades.

Otherwise we’ll just keep making the same dumb mistakes, generation after generation.

 

            Thanks for reading. At least you learned that much.