Teens Losing Touch With History?

[Arachno-capitalist]

I saw a couple news reports about teens losing touch with historical facts: http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20080226/1a_bottomstrip26.art.htm

I feel like this is a kind of younger generations not following the same educational priorities. It used to be that education was about studying and memorizing and answering multiple choice exams. These days it is more about analytical thought and problem solving. The study in question asks things like "what year was the civil war fought" or "who wrote the poetry collection Leaves of Grass" These are things we know how to google in a heartbeat from our smartphones. It is less necessary for students to know these things off the top of their heads and more necessary to know how to interpret the facts.
That said, I am in awe of people who are able to recall encyclopedic knowledge about their chosen field. However, I think it is more valued to know how to use that data to productive ends.
Are the current educational methods that shift away from facts and towards analysis making kids dumber or just deeper thinkers?

[wombat]

The thing is, every generation writes an article like this about the previous generation. I used to teach a class where I actually handed out examples going back to the nineteenth century of quotes saying that These Kids Today didn't know how to write, etc.  But it can't be as bad as they all said or we'd've descended back to the level of cavemen by now.

The statistics quoted in that article - I am willing to bet that they were the same for my generation when they were in high school.  Let's face it, teenagers don't give a shit about this stuff - they're too distracted by hormones, etc. But once we're old enough to think straight, most of us manage to catch up and fill in the gaps.

For instance - there was a point in history where the Soviet Union (remember the Soviet Union?) invaded Afghanistan and at first I was totally confused, because I had no idea where Afghanistan was but I sure didn't think it was actually adjacent to the Soviet Union. Yeah, I probably should have learned that in high school... but who had room to store that information instead of the words to all those Jackson Browne songs?  But no matter - once it was in the news, I caught up.

So, you go through a couple adult decades of that catching up and you become... the sort of person who writes an article that bemoans how little These Kids Today know.  Forgetting that you didn't know it when you were a kid either.

[CortJstr]

I used to work for the National Council of Teachers of Math and this was a huge deal with them. They think rote memorization is a waste of time and not really learning (see also: Chinese Box Problem). But they constantly get slammed in the media for "fuzzy math" and making kids dumber and too reliant on calculators.

Personally I'd rather be able to reason out problems even if that means it's going to take me an extra 2 seconds to remember what 7 times 9 is. Plus who cares when the civil war was fought? It was the lamest most boring war ever and I hope I never have to think about it again.

[AlohaDawg]

I think knowing history is very important. I don't know that being able to regurgitate factoids like dates is as important as understanding the impacts of decisions that were made, environmental and human factors that contributed to the decisions, and the outcomes.

Science and Society are driven by our understanding of the facts, our interpretation of the reasons behind outcomes, and what we learn from them and how we apply it. This is equally true in 'hard' sciences and social sciences; the factors are just a little fuzzier in the social ones.

We can't advance to adulthood without applying this same learning and experiencing logic.  Thankfully. some of us are good at and enjoy math and hard science and others of us enjoy the less predictable people-oriented history, language arts, and social sciences.

And, most thankfully a few of us still devote their time to the arts, which we all can enjoy without the burden of required interpretation.

I agree that rote is not a good tool because so often it isn't retained. I believe critical thinking is more important, and the way to teach history and maximize this is to teach history with an emphasis on reading, interpreting and discussing letters, documents, film, speeches, and other things that offer insight into the people that made the history. I had a teacher that taught this way and it made the biggest impact on me.

[jay-ell]

As an historian who is terrible with remembering dates, I have to say that I think there's a middle ground. 

There are things that are easier to look up than to memorize.  The exact date Lincoln was assassinated.  The names of the members of Andrew Jackson's cabinet.  The first thirty digits of pi.  But there are facts that the lack of knowing proves an impairment.  (Sorry about that sentence, I don't have much time today.) 

For instance, how can a student hope to analyze the impact of the Army-McCarthy hearings without knowing at the very least that (a) they happened at the height of the Cold War (1954, although the year is meaningless if you don't know anything else about the context) and also that (b) McCarthy was primarily concerned with communism? 

I'm ashamed of the fact that I can't name all the presidents in order.  Try as I might, I can't get the 19th-century ones straight in my head.  But I can give you the inauguration years for all the presidents in the 20th century, because that's my primary area of study.  Another historian might not care that Harry Truman took office in April of 1945, but given that I study World War II, the change in administration just before the end of the war is an enormously significant fact.  In order to think and write about the consequences of Roosevelt's demise, I need to know when it happened in relation to other events -- for instance, the decimation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August of that year. 

I think social studies teachers need to find a balance between teaching students facts and helping them develop critical-thinking skills.  Fortunately, the best teachers know that the two go hand in hand -- students will retain (at least in the short-term) facts they've used to solve an historical problem. 

Unfortunately, our schools are not always staffed with the best teachers. 

And that's all the time we have for today.  Tune in tomorrow for another episode of, "you didn't ask a historian, but she's going to answer anyway." 

[lprkn]

There was a that segment on This American Life about the woman who worked for a quiz show on the Oxygen network. The contestants were teenage girls. The lady was the writer for the show, and had to come up witht the questions. Her goal was to show the world that teenage girls were smart and quick on their feet, role models for any girls watching. Thing was, they couldn't answer questions about things like, "When did WWII start?" So she made the questions easier and easier until she got down to things like, "Spell your name backwards the fastest." She started out to show everyone how smart these girls were, and sort of ended up doing the opposite.

[wombat]

  But there are facts that the lack of knowing proves an impairment. 

Right. (Like where Afghanistan is.)  It's a false dichotomy.  There's no point in just knowing a list of facts, and there's equally no point in knowing how to think critically or to reason if you've got no facts to think critically or reason about.

But still - teenagers. I don't think I knew when World War II started when I was a teenager, if only because the history classes always went too slowly at the start and never got very far into the 20th century. I don't think that testing the knowledge base of teenagers proves a damn thing.  And "smart" doesn't necessarily mean "has a lot of facts memorized," either.

[CortJstr]

My history classes generally ended with a mad sprint in the general direction of D-Day. WW2 was often so rushed that they never even had time to give us any quizzes or tests about it. It was more like, "oh we'd better mention some stuff about it before the end of the year but you don't have to actually learn it or anything."

The 4 solid months wasted on the civil war didn't help this time crunch.

But I guess that still beats the US history teacher I had that insisted we couldn't understand the material until we covered british history from 1066 through the revolution. That class lasted 2 months before the teacher even mentioned this hemisphere.

[jay-ell]

Wow, somebody got stuck teaching something she really hated, apparently. 

I forgot to mention earlier that facts that are imperative for me to know are different from the facts that a different historian might consider basic general knowledge.  I can tell you from memory that Frieda Miller resigned as head of the Women's Bureau in November 1953, but I couldn't tell you when the War of the Roses happened within three decades.  And your average person on the street has little use even for information about what happened in the twentieth century in more than general terms. 

Also, like Womb@ said earlier, much of the information that most adults take for granted was initially learned in high school but reinforced by cultural cues as we go out and experience the world.  The more often we hear references to "the patience of Job," the more likely we are to be bale to absorb and recall the context of the comment, if not the details of the actual literary source.  How many of us can name the trials visited on Job, or even the book, chapter and verse, wherein they are described?  Yet few of us would say we don't know what the phrase "means." 

Often, the facts are less important than the accepted cultural understanding of an event.  If people, as a whole, believe that the Civil War was about slavery, then doggone it, it was. 

Just don't tell the other historians, OK?  They'd be awful sad. 

[lprkn]

Often, the facts are less important than the accepted cultural understanding of an event.  If people, as a whole, believe that the Civil War was about slavery, then doggone it, it was.

Q&CFT

This was definitely my high school experience. The Civil War was fought over slavery, and WWII is important because of Anne Frank. Only once I got into an AP history course was I taught that yes, those things are true, but so are a million other things. The understanding that things are always more complicated under the surface is a valuable concept to learn, and I think that it is lost on most of our education system, including university.

[theinevitable]

How many of us can name the trials visited on Job, or even the book, chapter and verse, wherein they are described?

isn't it the book of Job?

i am always really amazed when I realize historical events that happened at the SAME TIME.
Like, you know, that events I had to memorize the dates for in different classes were ACTUALLY COINCIDENT.
Because, yeah, I know that the Manson murders were in 1969, and that the Altamont concert was that year, but that they happened AT THE SAME TIME was mind-blowing.
Or, that is a bad example, because obviously those are both end-of-an-era type events. But things like... that such and such book came out the same year as WWII started, or what have you.

[jay-ell]

isn't it the book of Job?

OK, bad example.  (Who is buried in Grant's tomb?)  But, you catch my meaning. 

Cut me some slack, I was typing (still am) one-handed with a baby on my lap. 

[lprkn]

No slack for you. I don't know why that baby's not typing for herself yet.

[jay-ell]

Everybody knows girls are dumb when it comes to computers. 

[Doc]

I used to work for the National Council of Teachers of Math and this was a huge deal with them. They think rote memorization is a waste of time and not really learning (see also: Chinese Box Problem). But they constantly get slammed in the media for "fuzzy math" and making kids dumber and too reliant on calculators.

This stuff pops up in the news annually around here and it just annoys me so much, parents saying teachers need to go 'back to basics' etc. when I doubt they could even help their kids with the homework they are bringing home anyway. I know my maths stuff started confusing the hell out of my parents once I got to high school, not just because they didn't know it (though the majority they'd forgotten) but also because they were taught it in a different way which made communication difficult.

It's even sillier to me when it gets to subjects like english, in general I don't believe that someone can be taught to analyse a text any better because that text is Macbeth instead of Rent. It's just scared old people demanding that the world be more familiar.