Hillary Clinton criticizes pro-Palestinian protests and says many young people she’s spoken to “don't know very much at all about the history of the Middle East or, frankly, about history in many areas of the world.” pic.twitter.com/2OSSIbDnKO
— The Recount (@therecount) May 9, 2024
When I was a Teaching Assistant in 1977 (we had our own classes, so we actually taught rather than just handed out tests), I assigned a Woody Allen essay that was the shortest in the book, and basically all one-liners. But it was about history. It required basic knowledge of 18th-19th century European history. Which is to say, you had to have heard of the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution.Imagine being a student at Columbia's policy school (where Hillary Clinton is on the faculty) and having her go on TV and basically say that the young people she talks to are morons who don't know any history https://t.co/WDlEJzctXa
— Vicki (@VickiInBoston) May 9, 2024
None of my students had. And they hated the essay, which I figured would give them a break from the duller fare in the textbook. All of this, I have to underline, was 30 or more years before STEM and state imposed standardized testing.
STEM is supposed to have “evolved” into STEA(rt)M. But there are the fine arts (every college student should have art and music classes), and there are the liberal arts. Like: history. The emphasis in education, still, is on what produces functioning widgets: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Even C.P. Snow would be appalled. (If you don’t know who Snow is, you’re probably the unfortunate victim of STEM.)
Anyway, GIGO is still a useful rule from STEM. Because that’s what we’re getting. See, I have nothing against STEM; I just think the simplistic hegemony imposed in its name is a dreadful consequence of the lack of a broader understanding of the value of the liberal arts which, it turns out, are foundational, not ancillary or even just a concern for pampered and otherwise useless elitists. And it’s not just because those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it. It’s because those who don’t know history are pretty stupid about what’s going on.
But yet, they make good tech drones!
STEM like the almost contemporaneous "Coalition of Essential Schools" were largely the creation of people who never, once, set foot in a public school, from kindergarten to post-doc as a student or parent of a student. I think its most ardent advocates were mostly lawyers and other politicians who never taught a day in their lives. I knew one of Ted Sizer's prep-school teachers who, when his "Essential Schools" absurdity of turning a public school into a pretend prep-school, said that he'd always thought Ted had feet of clay. The distortions he advocated are still in effect in the public school district they damaged so badly, there isn't any notable increase in success as measured by the percentage of students who graduate from college, though plenty of them still drop out as soon as they reach the age to do that. Someone told me the administration encouraged that because it made their graduation statistics look better because drop outs weren't measured by convention. STEM was a plan to turn children into profit making units, not prepare people for a good, decent life. I blame Obama as much as I do Bush II for that.
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