Month: May 2002

JillMatrix comments on George Will’s comments about why kids are still doing horribly at History.

And George Will says, I sh*t you not, that a major reason that U.S. students are not good at history is that the information is being kept from them because “so many of the heros are white men.”

She takes his comment as meaning that “American history studies have been diluted by including facts about women and people of other ethnicities.” She demurs, feeling that it’s mainly that people don’t value history.

She may be right. But let me make a feeble stab at defending George Will. I wrote the first draft of this in her comments, but I wrote enough to prompt me to write it here.

History, to be useful and interesting, must make sense. It must hang together, have meaning, create a tapestry. Threads and fabric swatches are interesting, maybe even pretty, but not real useful.

In that sense, history as a Bunch of Dead White Guys may actually make some sense. That’s not a politically correct thing to say, but to the extent that history is about facts, not niceness or politeness or making people feel good, I think it’s true.

Yes, it’s neat to know what life was like for a Jewish Lesbian of Color in 18th Century Vermont. I even daresay that people should know about that person. People should know a lot of things, but there’s limited time (not to mention, to echo JillMatrix’s point, interest) to learn history, so you have to pick and choose your battles.

The fact is, very few Jewish Lesbians of Color in 18th Century were elected President or had much influence outside of their immediate friends and family. That doesn’t mean our hypothetical subject wasn’t a good, valuable, worthwhile person, just not a good, valuable, worthwhile historic figure. It’s neat to know about people of all sorts, including this hypothetical person, but it doesn’t give you much sense of the flow of history outside of that one person’s life.

Dead White Guys have been in charge of things, both in this country and outside of it, for quite a while. It’s not stretching a point to say that they’ve had a disproportionate amount of historical influence. That may be (in fact, certainly is) unjust, but so was the San Francisco Earthquake. Pretending that either didn’t happen doesn’t teach you anything.

What Will may be driving at in a clumsy way is that by trying to make sure that half the people taught about in American History are non-white, non-male, non-Protestant, and non-rich, we’ve taught kids about a lot of fascinating individuals, but not much about history, or how the times of Squanto relate to the times of Frederick Douglass relate to the times of Susan B. Anthony (let alone to the times of a lot less significant individuals, carefully chosen for their ethnicity, gender, or interest to the writers of the history texts).

That’s not to say that Squanto, Douglass, or Anthony, or a random slave, a random settler woman, a random Native American warrior, or a random Hispanic settler in 17th Century California weren’t good, useful and/or brilliant people, or that students shouldn’t be taught about them. But if they are taught about them at the exclusion of Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln or either Roosevelt, something’s pretty important is going to be lost from that historic tapestry.

We’re not talking about memorizing dates and wars and Presidents — or maybe we are, because even though I sucked at doing that, it’s useful to know in what order things happened, if nothing else. Memorizing Presidents for the sake of doing so is kind of goofy — just like memorizing state capitols is. But it’s useful to know that Jackson came after Jefferson, but before Lincoln, because, damn, it’s hard to understand the Civil War, the Westward Expansion, or the international relations of the newborn US without knowing that.

What’s happened in developing current history curricula is that it’s been a matter of picking and choosing folks on a basis other than “How does this person fit into the story of the US? How does knowing about who this person was and what they did help us understand what came before, and what came after?” Instead, people are chosen to fit in with Black History Month, or with other politically polite and esteem-enhancing criteria in mind. History thus becomes a way to make people feel good about themselves, or to provide role models to people of their own race, ethnicity, religion or gender.

But that’s not what history is about. History is about learning how we got to where we are today, and maybe where we’re headed tomorrow. It’s impossible, perhaps, to divorce history from ideology, but to simply give in and let ideology dictate history is to put us in the same camp as the old Politburo hacks, frantically erasing Trotsky out of the chronicles of the Revolution, and then changing the spin on Stalin after Kruschev took over, and then damning Kruschev when he, in turn, fell. Historical thought always evolves with time, but the more tinkering you explicitly do with it, the more of a house of cards you’re building.

It may very well be that a coherent, useful, educational curriculum of history can be developed that studies (if not celebrates, because history is not about celebration, either) historical figures in proportion to their modern presence in the population. We’ve only been trying for thirty years to do so, and much of that effort has been distorted by political concerns outweighing historical ones. We should keep trying — but we should be realistic as well. Dead White Guys have run things for a long time (that’s kind of the point of a lot of rhetoric from the Left, right?). To then try to teach how things have been in the past while not talking about Dead White Guys seems sort of … well, unrealistic.

I’ve never had much sympathy for Native American groups that complain about sports teams that use various “Indian” themes for their team names. It seems to open a whole can of worms for other, parallel complaints. As if to prove me right (ahem), now comes word that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) thinks Austin HS in Minnesota ought to change its name from the “Packers,” since being named after slaughterhouse workers is “nothing to be proud of.”

They suggest (one can only hope tongue-in-cheek) the “Pickers” might promote a healthier diet.

The story, ironically, is on the pages for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, which refuses to print the names of Native-American-dubbed sports teams. Presumably they are still going to print the name of the nearby Green Bay football franchise.

OpinionJournal suggests that animal rights groups will ultimately demand that teams named after animals be renamed as well (since it’s so inherently demeaning), and that ultimately all we’ll be left with is “those dumb abstractions like the New York Liberty and the Orlando Magic.”

Until, of course, the Fundies start objecting to teams named after “magic,” and people who see American culture as jingoistic object to “liberty” as a team name.

Cool. Not only were seven fourth graders suspended from school for playing “army and aliens,” which game involved “shooting” at each other with pointed fingers, but the school questioned the kids on whether or not their parents own guns, too.

Last time I checked, that was still legal.

Better yet, the story notes that this took place at Dry Creek Elementary School, only mile or two from my house (though, mercifully, not in our school district).

The kids in question were sent home with their parents for the day, though it was not formally listed as a “suspension.” They were also sentenced to a week’s lunchtime detention, on public display. For shooting at each other with their fingers.

(They’re lucky. In some schools they could have been suspended or even expelled.)

The school and the Cherry Creek School District both, of course, defend their action as appropriate and in keeping with their dedication toward safety. The rules which the kids evidently broke?

The Student Policy and Discipline Handbook defines “violent and aggressive behavior” as “threats directed, either orally (including by telephone), by non-verbal gesture, or in writing, at an individual, his or her family or a group.” Under “intimidation/bullying,” the code includes “any written or verbal expression, physical act or gesture, or a pattern thereof, that is intended to cause distress upon one or more students.”
Even without the school policy, zero tolerance is the law in Colorado, considered at the forefront of the movement. Colorado law mandates expulsion for students who “carry, bring, use or possess a firearm or firearm facsimile at school.”
Nowhere does the law mention fingers, but Mrs. Mickle [the principal] said the conduct code gives administrators the latitude to deal with problems as they arise. “It’s definitely not spelled out in the district discipline policy because we can’t predict what every student is going to do,” she said. “That’s what we’re here for: to interpret those details.”

Ah. Is that what you’re there for?

Of course, the touted strength of ZT policies is that they are supposed to avoid any sort of namby-pamby interpretation of the rules by laying out in black and white what is always disallowed. Mrs. Mickle’s stance seems to be that it’s perfectly acceptable to extend those rules even further, as the administration sees fit.

That sounds like a valuable lesson in civics, yessirree.

The kids, of course, had never been in trouble before, and even though finger-pointing was not explicitly spelled out in the rules, it would have been tantamount to capitulation to the terrorists for the administration to simply warn the kids that what they were doing was wrong.

But that’s why they call it zero tolerance. “‘No tolerance’ means more than just a warning, because that would mean tolerance,” Mrs. Mickle said.

As to the inquiry as to whether any of the families had guns in the home?

“The district must know whether a student has the means to carry out a threat of violence to help us determine the level of the threat of violence against other students or staff,” said Ms. Amole, the spokeswoman.

Let me make sure I understand. Kids playing “army and aliens” during recess constituted a “threat of violence” to “other students or staff,” therefore the district was entitled to find out if the kids had access to real guns at home, just in case they … what, came back to school and played “army and aliens” with real guns?

This is getting more and more absurd, and, frankly, more and more scary.