Comments on 1/23/09, and responses

willy lump lump wrote on Jan 25, 2009 7:55 AM:
" It would help if we taught today's kids some good old US history, so they would know how this contry has evolved. I have a young friend, a coollege student who didn't know anything about Pearl Harbor. She thought it was a battle in WW2. Didn't know we weren't at war when it happened. Can you imagine what she knew of the French and Indian War, the Revolution, war of 1812 and on and on? "

*****

I'd agree that history is important, though I'd add that we should be teaching world history just as much as American.

For one thing, America is a young country created in a larger global context. How can we understand our own revolution if we don't have the context of medieval and Renaissance times in Europe?

And how can we understand the times we're living in now without the histories of rising non-European powers? Americans seem to know very little about non-Western countries, and at least from an economic perspective, it's important that we learn.

Thanks, willy.

*****

Eugene wrote on Jan 28, 2009 11:49 AM:
" The only thing we need to teach our Children are the 3 r's.Spanish should not be it should a up to the country sending them here to speak English at their exspense. History should be home schooled which is also available in any library. One just hsa to watch the Jay Leno show and his Jaywalking skit to see what a waste this subject and others produce.6 assistants are the really needed? "

*****

Eugene, I'm afraid your policies on education are lacking, well, an educated perspective.

I've written about bilingual education before, so I won't get into that here. But suffice it to say that teaching kids other languages prepares them for an increasingly global workforce and also allows them to use their brains in new ways that will allow them to learn new languages more quickly, encourage parallel thinking and make them more versatile and better critical thinkers overall.

Also, countries don't send people to America, in general. People choose to come here on their own.

If as Americans we'd like to make sure we don't benefit from any of their experiences or allow recent immigrants to contribute to our society with any of their skills, then we should definitely do as you say and make sure they're responsible for learning English in advance, at their expense.

Alas, many of them will still thwart us, learn English despite our lack of encouragement or help, and become great contributors to American society. That's the cross we bear as a nation that attracts some of the best minds in the world. We're just going to have to learn to put up with it.

I've never heard of anyone suggesting we stop teaching history. This seems an excessively extreme view to me.

I'm curious, in fact, what "reading" (one of the "R's") would be worth in that case -- what would you like kids to learn to read, if not history, or, presumably, literature, which can also be found in any library? There would have to be some content for them to practice on, right?

What would you suggest they read?