In addition to simply entertaining, Charlie Wilson's War reminded me of several of my pet peeves. Least significantly, I can never watch a semi-historical movie without constantly asking myself exactly where the line between fiction and fact lies. As with any product of Hollywood, one has to assume that whatever appears on the screen has been exaggerated by at least a factor of three. While I realize the intent is solely to entertain, it does a disservice to truth to warp reality for this purpose. It's also worth noting that my wife and I were the youngest people in the theatre by a wide margin. Apparently the 30-something crowd isn't interested in historical drama. That's probably related to the fact that none of this ever happened...
I don't know about you but when I was in school they taught the same 450 years of history every single year. Somewhere around 1500 some guy found the New World and then there were some wars and finally there was this Hitler guy who started a HUGE mess in Europe but we never really found out how that ended because then it was time for summer vacation and when the next year rolled around we just started all over again at 1500. As far as I was concerned (at least in class) the Korean War, Vietnam War, and the Cold War didn't even exist. So while watching this movie, one's forced to ask: "Afghanistan? Where's that and why would the Russians be doing anything there? Aren't they busy enough with Hitler on the Eastern Front?" (at least if one depends solely on your public school education).
And really, if you take a look at the Indiana Academic Standards for Social Studies it's not hard to see why. Who in their right mind can look at this 149 page document and think that there's time to teach all this? Remember, there are similar documents for other subjects too that all need to be taught concurrently and consider that there are standards like:
6.1.4 Analyze the reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
That's one standard out of about 100 in 6th grade social studies; how long shall we dedicate to it? A week? A month? It's such a simple topic after all that can be easily summed up in 1300 pages of text or so.
It's no wonder then that teachers come up short at the end of the term. My question though is, why neglect the end of history that's has the most to offer? One can easily see why kids always think of history as 'dry' and 'uninteresting' when most of the history they've been taught is so dusty and ancient that they cannot possibly relate to it in any way. If kids were exposed to the history that's taking place around us every day they'd be much more likely to appreciate it (and remember it).
Imagine that little Stevie spends the first month of history class learning about the first war in Iraq. He goes home and mentions this to his parents who may very well have taken part in the war and may even have the scars to prove it. At that moment the child experiences the most important revelation history has for us, that history isn't merely "something that happened" but "something that could happen to me." That's when history is truly alive and meaningful but in the traditional history class you never actually get to this point. Without this connection, the realization that history is real and happens to people JUST LIKE YOU, history is just a jumble of unconnected facts, a series of dry and uninteresting tidbits to be memorized until the next exam... and then discarded.
In the teaching of history we bow to the logic of cause and effect without regard to the audience we're trying to reach. From a purely logical standpoint we have to teach history in chronological order because that's the way it happened. World War I perpetuated World War II, not the other way around. Unfortunately, that leaves our audience with no sense of what any of the facts and figures really mean. To teach history or any other subject effectively we have to teach from the standpoint of the student and work your way outward. We must give our students history in a context they can understand and relate to first, and as their sphere of knowledge expands so does their ability to connect with what we're teaching. Learning is like a bridge, we cannot simply begin at some arbitrary point in the hopes that when we finally arrive at our destination the student will still be there waiting for us.
No comments:
Post a Comment