Hey Teacher, Leave Those Kids Alone

School is about to start up again, and I was supposed to write a humor column about it for a magazine. Only life interfered, as it has been wont to do lately, and I never got the article written. And while I could leave it at that, there’s something else that kept me from recycling jokes about school supplies (this would have been the third back-to-school article I’ve written, and, frankly, there’s only so much one person can do for the subject):

Frankly, I don’t think American public schools are anything to laugh at.

We all know by now that American students receive abysmally low scores when compared to other students around the world. We suck at math, at science, even at English, which we’re supposedly so good at that some of us insist foreigners who can’t speak it shouldn’t be allowed to come here. Our reading comprehension sucks, too, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this; American kids all have guns nowadays, and if they could read all of the bad things I’m writing about them, one of them might try to shoot me.

Everyone old enough to have forgotten how stupid they were in high school insists that kids today are even dumber than kids were 20 or 30 years ago, and this is where I start to have strong objections to things like people who are 20 or 30 years older than I am. Because, thanks to some of the grossly underfunded schools I went to, I’ve seen some pretty old textbooks, and I promise, none of you learned anything relevant, either.

One of the biggest objections I have to the American education system deals with the way we’re taught history. I’m willing to bet most of the people reading this post hated taking history in school. You should have; the history you and I were taught was boring, stupid, and completely irrelevant. Who cares that Teddy Roosevelt had a toy named after him? What does that have to do with anything unrelated to Trivial Pursuit? What’s more important is that Teddy Roosevelt was one of the key players in American Imperialism, the push to expand beyond our borders in emulation of the British and French. What’s more important is that, after Teddy and his (sorta) famous Rough Riders (sorta) helped take Cuba from Spain, they failed to liberate the Cuban people the way they’d promised and instead slipped into the cushy spot the Spanish had just vacated, controlling the exports created by Cuban farmers and the money they generated. Ever wonder why the Cubans hated us so much that they revolted and let somebody like Fidel Castro lead them? Ever wonder why we’ve got such a grudge against Cuba ourselves? Now you know.

And while we’re at it, you know what else we picked up in the Spanish-American War? How about Puerto Rico? How about Guam? How about the Philippines? Call me kooky, but these little tidbits seem far more important than whether or not Teddy really enjoyed hiking as much as Presidential historians claim he did.

We’re not told that this whole credit crisis we’re currently in is not new, that we’ve been here before between the end of World War I and 1929, when the stock market nosedived and sent the country into the Great Depression (which probably wasn’t all that great). According to textbooks, the Roaring Twenties were full of jazz and moonshine and flappers and a little bit of cartoonish organized crime.

We are a country with a limited amount of memory for the past and an unwillingness to do anything about it. If you think the problem lies with this generation, you’re about seven generations shy of being right. The problem started at around the turn of the previous century, and it really does sound like some kind of conspiracy theory if you’re used to the watered-down history most of us were spoon-fed between the first and twelfth grades.

The thing is, the Civil War didn’t end with the Emancipation Proclimation, and unrest and civil disobedience weren’t limited to former black slaves. The biggest rabble-rousers in the country were labor unions, which formed in response to appalling conditions in America’s factories. Unions themselves were not new, and many of the most prominent people in them were immigrants, particularly German and Russian immigrants. Because of this, it wasn’t too difficult, once the war was over, to paint unions as being thoroughly un-American. But then actual American citizens, people who’d been born and raised here, started getting involved and lobbying for shorter work days, safer working conditions, higher pay and restrictions on child labor. And the stronger the corporations came down on the labor movements, the stronger the workers pushed back. The history of strikes in this country is fascinating and (frankly) inspiring if one has a desire to do a little background reading. I’ll recommend Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and leave it at that.

So, with honest-to-goodness Americans to contend with, the Government had to get smart about dealing with dissenters. Okay, it said, let kids out of the factories. Send them to our schools instead. Thus the public education system we know today was born. But there was a catch: in government-funded schools, children would spend hours every single day away from their Socialist parents learning whatever the government-funded teachers taught to them. So they learned their three R’s–just enough reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmatic to work in a factory–and, along with them, they learned to be good, obedient, unquestioning Americans, not to mention good, obedient, unquestioning factory workers. If patriotic propaganda films had existed in 1898, they would have been a scream compared to the piffle from the 1950s that can be viewed for free at Archive.org.

By getting to the issue of unpatriotic dissent before it actually became an issue, the Government all but eradicated its problems with labor unions in a generation or two. And by creating an education system that mirrored the production lines its students would eventually work on, the Government was able to control the flow of information in its favor. Kids learned watered-down history that only made the U.S. look good.¹ This standardized education sought to create uber-patriots and capitalists. The lessons were vehemently anti-socialist and anti-immigrant, which were (and continue to be) two of the Government’s greatest fears.

One of the biggest problems with this, of course, is that we no longer live in a country that is dependent on production. The industrial parts of our industries have been moved overseas, and most of us make a living within the vast service sector. But our publicly-funded schools are still run basically the way they were at the dawn of the twentieth century. We have spent over 100 years denying our children the basic facts about our own country’s immensely important history. It’s no wonder we find ourselves facing the same threats we faced in the 1930s, easily the bleakest decade of the last century. Few of us, even those of us who grew up in that magical, mythical time known as The Good Old Days, seem to have any idea that we’ve even been here before. If you don’t teach people about the past, you don’t equip them with the necessary tools for dealing with the future.

We can change things, of course. We can demand that our children be taught relevant history, of the world and of our country, the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful. Yes, the beautiful. I am not an anti-American American who hates what this country stands for. I’m an angry American who hates what this country doesn’t stand for, considering how far we’ve come in such a short amount of time. Progress should be our goal, we should be constantly striving to better ourselves and our country, but we’re not. We are quarreling over whether or not students should have to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. We are arguing about the magnificent and poetic discoveries of science because they contradict a bit of piecemeal, archaic text. We are actually going backwards while the rest of the world–even the third world–takes giant leaps forward. To quote Sam Harris, “Our country now appears, as at no other time in her history, like a lumbering, bellicose, dim-witted giant. Anyone who cares about the fate of civilization would do well to recognize that the combination of great power and great stupidity is simply terrifying . . .”²

So what do we do? First, we stop denying the problem. We stop pretending that things were so much better ten or 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or 100 years ago. That is what they want us to think. They want us to forget, to idealize the past. This is what they’ve taught us to do.

And though it is–or has been–my job to point and laugh and nitpick at the absurdities of the human race, I have to admit: there is nothing funny about any of this.

¹To the point of ridiculousness. How many of you thought that the White House merely burst into flames of its own accord in 1814? How many of you were actually taught that the British army set fire to it? Very few of you, I imagine, as it makes the U.S. look bad.
²from Letter to a Christian Nation