John Hood has an excellent article on the state of history education, and why that has a serious impact in the here and now, in Carolina Journal Online.
The fact is that we continue to graduate generations of North Carolinians from our schools and colleges who do not have a firm grounding in the history of our country, the history of our state, and how our founding principles and experiences affect ? or should affect ? our lives today.
History matters. I don?t mean in a ?Jeopardy,? quiz bowl, instant-recall, when-was-the-War-of-1812 sense. It may seem hackneyed to ask this, but how can we move forward as a state or a nation unless we have a clear picture of where we have been? The international and national challenges we face, the controversial social and moral issues of the day, the dramatic changes we are experiencing in such areas as industry, trade, finance, medicine, and technology ? none of these sprang up suddenly, as Athena from the head of Zeus. They all have antecedents and causes stretching into past decades and centuries.
The most frustrating thing to me about this sorry situation is how utterly unnecessary it is. Case in point — when we started homeschooling in Louisiana, I picked up a high school-level state history textbook on the Pelican State at a used book sale. What an incredibly rich history that region has — from the pre-Columbian era, through the disastrous early French settlements, Spanish rule, the exile of the Acadians — Jean Lafitte, General Jackson, the Civil War, Huey P. and Earl K. Long, Evangeline, Audobon, Life on the Mississippi — honor, oppression, romance, scandal, heroism. How could you lose? This was going to be one good read.
Alas, no. This is now my prime example of how not to teach history, and a major reason we now teach from contemporaneous sources and biography, and use adult historians as needed to knit things together. Once the committee responsible for that book got through with it, they had sucked every bit of interest, drama, wit, and humanity out of the subject. How in the world you can reduce the most vibrant culture in the south into a souless recitation of policies, demographics, and fluff ? it’s criminal.
John’s right that true, useful, applied history is more than lists of dates. If we are to learn how to think, how to live, from the lessons of history, then we have to recapture the romance of the subject. And that requires more than data — it requires insight, and it requires passion.
