Books from the Past -or- Not out of the Woods Yet

My descent from Rocky Mountain National Park is coupled with news that the stock markets have taken a serious nose dive and people in Breckenridge are snobs. But I'm on the last stretch of my "unplugged period" (which is what this will be called in my memoirs) and as such I can now finally bother all of you with my thoughts.

During this break in the park I have read Erik Larson's new book In the Garden of the Beasts which proved to be a very easy and interesting read. I have also picked up a book that people have talked about for years and years but that I only just now had any interest in reading. James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me strikes me as both thought provoking and utterly banal at the same time. Maybe that's because any teach who had an impact on me in High School actually took Loewen's work to heart and applied it in earnest. In any event, while I have learned some really great little American History factoids, two things really stuck out to me in reading this book.

First, Loewen's book really dovetails into calls for the improvement of the American education system. Politicians and community members have been fixated on the really dismal performance of our public education system and have demanded that our students begin to perform better on standardized tests and other notable metrics. But what Loewen points to is that our education really is too geared towards the bland, unenjoyable memorization of facts in schooling. Loewen takes a very hard stance against the way American history textbooks have made history mundane, rather than exciting and dynamic. There were moments early in the book when Loewen would mention that blatant lack of discussing cultural syncretism in the expansion of the US or the unwillingness for textbooks to present just how contentious many episodes of American history really are. He even demands that textbooks teach High School students abou the less-than-savory episodes of our government's history. And at first I thought to myself "come on, these high schoolers are just not advanced enough to understand all of this." But I have to stop myself, because here is both my cynicism talking and my inability to recognize that the problem isn't the level of material presented at the High School level, but the fact that our education systems do not prepare students to really learn and think.

Over the spring I spoke with a professor from the University of Illinois at Chicago who spoke about how, in any given classroom only 30% of the students were actually ready for college work and material. The other 70% simply contented themselves with poor grades because they would not ask for help or blamed her for their own misfortunes. See, the issue is that there is a pressure for students to attend college as the logical next step in their development but the schools rarely provide the background it takes to really learn. The reason I, at first, scoffed at Loewen's suggestions is because these were all perspectives I didn't pick up until my senior year of High School and developed in college. But I'm a product of a really terrible public school- I was just lucky enough to have met the right people at the right time.

Lowen's standards seem so impossibly high to me because, from a young age, American students are taught to learn for a test and memorize dead facts- not living and vibrant disciplines. In short, we have done a really terrible job of teaching our students how to learn. Success is a 30 or better on the ACT, not critical thought and engagement with arguments. I have thought a lot about higher education without looking at the fact that the way students in the US learn is not conducive to real scholarship. And all students are not going to be college material of the highest order, but that should not be a measure of success. The measure of success should be equipping students how to engage their world critically. Alas, I dream.

Secondly, if the administration and community members are really interested in competing in terms of innovation, they must change education towards critical thinking, not bland memorization. Innovation is the product of real learning, and learning from contentious fields and arguments. If all we want to do is get students to repeat what already exists then we also resign ourselves to a country of limited innovation. We also hide real history (and by proxy, the other social sciences) when we conceal controversy and failure and glorify success and strip agency from many of the figures of our past and present. There is no innovation without an understanding of failure and an ability to ask and learn.

So when I read Loewen and think he's just a little bit over the top, I also have to note that the problems he's describing go much, much deeper than secondary education textbooks. But I'm not an educator, just a lucky product of public education.