since I was a high school kid in NJ, and had to deal with the two-year US
History requirement, there is something to be said for spending a lot of
time learning about "your own family" before you learn about the people down
the street or across town (more on that later). And as for the person who
wondered what on earth you needed two years to do this in when college
students could do it in one semester, my answer is very simple: You need two
years to do this in a leisurely high school manner with lots of high school
type projects, trips, and diversions. If the goal is to pack as much
American History into as little time as possible, then just give them an
iPod packed with a month's worth of stuff. It'll be crammed in one ear and
pushed out the other in no time. Two years seems just right to me for
planting the broad foundation needed to successfully tackle those
one-semester college courses. It also seems just the right thing for
beginning a possible lifelong love of history - US or otherwise.
Come on folks, we're talking from 1620 to the present day. That's almost 500
years of history that you say we can condense down to one semester. I doubt
it. I suspect that those one-semester college wonders are looking at a
specific issue or a specific era. Not the entire 500 year ball of wax.
Now, let me talk about "the family." I've come to conclude that where the
history of your country is concerned, or at least where American history is
concerned, it's like genealogy. It's all about *us*. It's all about how we
got to be us. It's all about how the different threads got woven together,
sometimes artfully and sometimes not, to create the tapestry that is this
country. In the end it's about how people in the past got together, for
better or worse, to create the people we are now. And that might just take
two years.
Yeah, other voices are nice too. I represent one of those other voices; but
I don't think that the desire to acknowledge the "other voices" should mean
that less time is spent on the whole choir. Indeed, I believe that if we're
really looking at this genealogically, we have to talk about each of those
other voices as they enter the picture, and see how they influenced the
mainstream, and how mainstream decisions toward those voices led to certain
events and situations later on that everyone would regret. But don't draw
them out as separate items. Not in high school. That's not the place for
such specialization as "African-Americans in US History," "Irish in US
History," "Native Americans in US History," or "Germans in US History." And
yet, how much though has anyone really given to the Germans in US history.
I'm betting that most of you are thinking, "Germans, Scots, Brits, just
another subset of the dominant white people." But perhaps a closer look will
show that it ain't necessarily so.
My wife, who is of German ancestry said that when she wanted to find out
more about Germans in US history, she had to go to the library herself.
There was no German History Month, there was no bulletin board devoted to
famous Germans, there was no "Other Voices" class devoted to the Germans.
And certainly, no one talked about the anti-German propaganda during both
world wars, or the fact that Germans had been sent to "relocation camps"
just like the Japanese. I'm sure that my Italian brother-in-law will say the
same thing about having to find out about famous Italians as a group on his
own time.
I say let the "other voices" be part of a two-year course on US history that
looks at the entire choir.
On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 12:14 PM, Knies, Don <Dknies@statenislandacademy.org
> wrote:
> I wondered that too. It seems that a two year lock in to one course with
> the same students loses some opportunity for other perspectives and other
> focuses. (I refuse to use the word foci, in this context)
>
[ For info on ISED-L see http://www.gds.org/ISED-L ]
Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.
RSS Feed, http://listserv.syr.edu/scripts/wa.exe?RSS&L=ISED-L
