No, Jayden, You’re Not the Center of the Universe

Why do most public schools think students are too dumb to really learn history?

I realize that’s a provocative, biased statement, but I’m not so sure it’s too extreme to be truthful: after all, consider the history education you and I and others probably got in school.  Especially since about the 80s,  it became the fad in education (one that hasn’t really died out) to teach a “me-centered” curriculum in which the teaching of history (and other curricula also, but that’s another post for another day) centered upon the individual.

The idea was that a child would first learn all about his neighborhood, his own family history and ethnicity, his immediate society and country, and then theoretically widen the radius of his interest until finally he would see how he fits into the whole world — rather like how Google Earth works when you pull far back from your house and see the planet.  The problem, though, is

that what actually occurs is not an accurate worldview, but a relentless narcissism centered on the self.  Did you ever see that famous cover from the New Yorker in which it presents the New Yorker’s view of the world?  Looming large in the foreground is 9th Ave., 10th Ave., and so on looking due west across the Hudson.  The rest of the world recedes before New York: Jersey is a mere strip, while semi-indistinguishable lumps far in the background are labeled “China,” “Japan,” and “Russia.”

The idea of the me-centered education works much like that New Yorker cover, but the underlying assumption here is that students are so relentlessly narcissistic that they can’t or won’t find anything outside of their own limited radius to be interesting, and certainly not countries which aren’t America.   Mesopotamia, the birth of written alphabets and home to The Epic of Gilgamesh?  BORING.  Ancient Greece, the home of the twelve Olympian gods and The Iliad and The Odyssey, two of the world’s greatest epics?  Naah.  As for other ancient texts, we all know Beowulf without naked animatronic Angelina Jolie is basically just a bunch of armor-clanking Geats. 

Frankly, I find this absurd. 

I think every kid who’s ever picked up a copy of D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths and read it to tatters knows that this idea is absurd.  As Mary Pope Osborne knows, Greek epics rock — and as common sense can tell you, any child who’s grown up reading the Mary Pope Osborne version of The Odyssey is going to find the actual Odyssey to be a reunion of old and well-loved friends, not some boring text written by a dead Greek dude who smells like dust. 

I’m just enough of a conspiracy theorist to wonder whether or not there’s some kind of big plot to keep our children ignorant of their place in the world’s history, to keep the little Jaydens and Haileys out there blissfully numb to the idea that there might have been ten thousand and more years of recorded history (and ten times ten thousand and more years of unrecorded history) in which they play their part, but not the most important one…at least for now.  Maybe later.

I’m just enough of a tinfoil hat-wearer to wonder whom this kind of historical blindness and ignorance really serves, because it certainly doesn’t serve our kids.  If they knew, for instance, the fact that the history of Mesopotamia is one of aggression between Babylon to the south and Assyria to the north all along the limited strip of what Charles Pellegrino calls “the riverworld” or the Bloody Crescent, then the present-day tensions between Iraq and Iran would be far more comprehensible — and we would be far less likely to think that these people are somehow the same.  They’re about as much alike as Canadians and Americans, with different cultures, worldviews, and experiences.  (FYI, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is not a bad place to begin understanding this difference.)

Bottom line: Who benefits?

~ by adsoofmelk on December 15, 2007.