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Posted by: fkalich Jun 9 2008, 12:55 AM

Those us that were taught history before educational standards in American Public schools were overhauled, we clearly taught wrong!. How little we knew.

For example, I was thought about WWI as described here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLvo6FPSVr0&feature=related


But today they know better in our illustrious public schools, here is the true story of WWI, as described by your typical American graduating high school student....

Warning, "F" word used a few times....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdnKFW7uZEE

Posted by: FrankW Jun 9 2008, 01:16 AM

Boy, I'm chomping at the bit on this one! Hold me back, Andrew! I will say this: I am in complete agreement with your assessment of the state of the public school system here in the U.S...shameful!

Posted by: Trond Vold Jun 9 2008, 01:47 AM

.. Thats just sad ..

Posted by: fkalich Jun 9 2008, 01:59 AM

sure are a lot of people from North Carolina here. I have said that before, but you just see more and more.

Posted by: Eat-Sleep-andJam Jun 9 2008, 02:09 AM

Kids will be Kids I suppose

Now If we asked her about Paris Hillton,we might get a far different response

Posted by: kahall Jun 9 2008, 04:35 AM

Good grief! If you do not know the answer just say so and we can move on. I doubt I could have given many details about WWI when I was a teen, but I would not have gotten it mixed up with The Civil War.
Jay Leno sometimes asks serious history questions on his Jay walking segment and it is embarrassing.

Posted by: skennington Jun 9 2008, 04:59 AM

Absolutely pathetic. Notice how she was more concerned with outside interference than the question at hand. I'm not the sharpest nail in the wall but dang, come on. The history taught back in the day was embedded in my mind. I will not believe that this is the future of our country. I'm sure that this person is in remedial classes.

Please tell me she's not from NC

Posted by: The Uncreator Jun 9 2008, 06:01 AM

I laughed and cried, Seriously this person should have a hammer chucked at her.

I love how she focused on STATES when it came to WORLD war I.....Jesus, wow she needs to just ...... I dont know, I'm kinda sad.


EDIT

Holy jumping god of all things unholy, she called germany and great britain STATES.......WOW!!!

Posted by: fkalich Jun 9 2008, 06:57 AM

I assume most that hang around here have intellectual curiosity, that makes sense. Face it, this site kicks you in the face that being good at guitar is in the direction of being good at concert violin.

WWI is tough, because most the battles are so big and long, and most have French very non-Anglo names. Heck, I don't think the first and last German campaigns even had names. That video I referenced is quite good, if you are interested. That guy has the whose series. You pick up some interesting things, and covers events in the east, often overlooked elsewhere.

Posted by: Moon Boots Jun 9 2008, 08:14 AM

England and Germany states of America?


Videos like this make me wonder why people like my grandad fought for this generation

Posted by: tonymiro Jun 9 2008, 09:04 AM

Thanks fkalich - this btw is not a problem only of the US public education system.

I did rather like her idea that there was a 'whole bunch of democracy'. I kind of wish that there was the same now a days. Anyway, her grasp on geography and history seems in line with the previous Prime Minister -old TB seemed to think that England was a US State as well

Seriously though - it is scary how she concatenates the American Civil War and WWI and seems blissfully unaware of a distinction between a country and a state. I can understand her not knowing specifics about WWI but her confusion on these others .

I wonder how many students get their understanding of history from Hollywood films though? I ask because as a University lecturer it is shocking how many UK post-graduate students admit proudly to not reading books. They prefer to watch films as it's more entertaining - and indeed expect a lecture/seminar to entertain rather than educate them. History is reduced to a series of sound bites and scenes and so, to paraphrase Baudrillard, 'WWI never happened' because for them it is only entertaining celluloid images on a screen. For them WWI is, at best, what they saw in the film 'Gallipoli': surface without depth.

Sad really, very sad. To quote the philosopher Satayana ('Life of reason', 1905), 'When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.'

Cheers,
Tony

Posted by: Nemanja Filipovic Jun 9 2008, 09:36 AM

"Like.......OK"

Posted by: MickeM Jun 9 2008, 10:19 AM

To my knowledge they learn the basics in school, I can't speak for the US school system but here they do. At least if I ask my friend who's a teacher he'd claim that.

I wonder if the problem isn't rather that some pupils pay too much attention listening to music or watching movies in the iPods and texting messages on their phones during class, because I think the information is all there to grasp.

She obviously heard of the "important dude who got shot", Germany and Great Britian and she had the year 1914 right there. Then she had heard of the slavery, north and south. If she had payed attention in school perhaps she had both learned of WWI and the civil war. Question is, and the point of the video I belive, was that you don't need to know much to graduate.
It's way too lame.

Posted by: Tuubsu Jun 9 2008, 10:37 AM

Now... that's something... this reminds me of my friend who in junior high, wasnt the brightest type of guy and one day close to the end of school he decided to start to study seriously. Well, we had a 2 hour long test about WWII. He actually spent the whole two hours doing the writing non stop! When the test were returned it turned out he had written every single detail about WWI, so he had studied the wrong war, thinking it was the right one...

I dont know how things are in USA, but I woud still bet it's more personal, who knows about history and who doesn't.

edit. By Fcalich>"Face it, this site kicks you in the face that being good at guitar is in the direction of being good at concert violin."
And what does that mean anyway... I mean I hope nobody thinks that way...

Posted by: Lithuanian Jun 9 2008, 11:30 AM

WOW. What a nuisance

Posted by: Marek Rojewski Jun 9 2008, 02:17 PM

Well the knowledge is at hand, people just need to be willing to take it. I was in a class that had many hours of history, but still half the ladies would forget about everything they learned after 1 - 2 weeks. Of course as we had many tests and hours of classes, most of them wouldn't mistake WWI with ACW, but you could not ask for much more. To learn something at least one side have to want it. I had to bad teachers of history, still I know it very well. But I always loved history. My classmates that weren't interested, know very little about it now. If the teacher could rise interest in them, than they would know more. Anyway the system won't work better in Poland. Most teachers are old, and have communism still in their heads, and the "new wave" of teachers, recruits from young people, that weren't capable of choosing some decent studies. There are almost no teachers that were "born" to teach, most of them are teachers, because they had to choose some studies, and the more profitable ones like law were out of reach for them...

To tell the truth, in Poland people tend to know more than in other western countries, because we have higher level education on the first two levels. But than we have poorer universities that aren't equal to the western ones, so our students don't have same chances of learning. And what is more important, we don't learn anything useful at school, on any level. So all our knowledge is worth nothing. I would rather spent half the time I had in school, as I really can't see how a knowledge about rabbits bones could help me ever...

PS: I got carried away a little I suppose. Sorry for language mistakes!

Posted by: Ivan Milenkovic Jun 9 2008, 05:10 PM

Well, that's just an individual case. I'm sure you can find a lot of people in my own country too who doesn't know anything about the WWI, specially of that age. This said, I don't wish to defend American education system. It is a poisoned educations system, and for a nation of that magnitude it is a BIG SHAME (i don't wanna use stronger word) to have such poorly education people. But powers to be want to have uneducated nation so they can control them better so it makes perfect sense.
Also I'm aware that in my country situation is 20x times worse, but this is a small and very poor country, much smaller and pooreer than USA>

Posted by: FrankW Jun 9 2008, 06:24 PM

The current state of the public school system in the U.S. requires that students be coached to pass final tests in order to move on. While they are becoming more adept at taking a particular test, they are falling behind in what truly matters. Teachers are required to coach rather than teach.

Teaching is an honorable profession, but truly gifted teachers are not given enough incentive to persue the profession. They can earn more money elsewhere, so they go elsewhere. In alot of cases, elsewhere is also alot less dangerous. We are stuck with mediocre 'babysitters' who must adhere to a flawed policy of moving students on to the next grade regardless of whether they can read or write. And, forget about history as an important topic. Tony alluded to that in Santayanas' quote regarding our reluctance to visit the past so as not to repeat it. Geography is another subject that apparently is not important. Kahall referred to Jay Leno out on the street asking trivia questions. It is absolutely pathetic.

I don't know about anywhere else, but I am afraid we are really 'dumbing down' here in the states. That's not to say that all school systems here are completely screwed up, but way too many of them truly are. In some school systems, if there isn't an armed guard nearby, there is complete chaos. As far as that subject is concerned,I'm not going there.

I urge you young ones to do one thing. Read. It doesn't matter what you read, just read. Read fiction, or non-fiction, or comic books, or guitar magazines, or cereal boxes while you're eating breakfast...just read.

Posted by: tonymiro Jun 9 2008, 07:35 PM

100% with you there Frank and I would add read often and read well!

There used to be a time when University students read for their degrees - nowadays they study . This tends to underscore the instrumentalism to which you refer - many study only to pass an exam; understanding is lost in the rush for a pass mark and any 'knowledge' gained is ephemeral: no depth only surface, all that is solid melts in to air. Ask many students a question on their chosen subject a few days after the exam and they cannot answer.

The situation is compounded in many UK universities where students are now official referred to as a 'customer' and academic staff are there to service their needs as 'customers' and to keep them entertained. To quote a VC (Dean) of one UK university, 'Anyone can teach any subject, all you have to do is read the lesson plan and notes before the 'customers'.' Yeah right . Go into pretty much any university and you will witness no end of lectures that comprise docile 'customers' passively watching a lecture of little more than a series of Powerpoint slides regurgitated to them by the lecturer at the front. Hegel by numbers; Heidegger's 'Sein und Zeit' condensed into 6 easy to remember bullet points; Derrida for Dummies: no depth, only surface. I was asked by a PhD candidate (whose thesis was on Michel Foucault) if I thought it was necessary to read Foucault rather then just relying on a 'Foucault for idiots' type primer. My response was that reading Foucault - and by that I meant all that he wrote AND much of what has been written on him - would in my view be a starting point.

Whilst I was reading for my PhD a Professor at my Uni said, 'You read too much Tony. You're not here to read.'
I've never understood what I was supposed to do instead but then again I'm not that bright.

Cheers,
Tony

ps - not meant as a slight on anyone who is, was or has aspirations to Higher Education - just a comment on the prevailing general situation.

Posted by: DeepRoots Jun 9 2008, 08:13 PM

It sucks, but i'm sure she doesn't represent the entire US population of that age...


...though probably quite a lot of it i should imagine.

Posted by: audiopaal Jun 9 2008, 09:26 PM

Holy mother of pearl, that was not good..

Posted by: FrankW Jun 9 2008, 11:20 PM

Yeah, right Tony, you're not that bright...and I'm the Kaiser Wilhelm!

Posted by: Duncan Jun 13 2008, 05:51 PM

To be fair I wouldn't expect half the people on this forum to be able to give a solid answer as to why the First World War started.