From: Jasper
Date: 10/20/03
Time: 7:37:08 PM
Remote Name: 68.77.161.88
Charlie,
I know that you are not joking or exaggerating about the deplorable state of textbooks, particularly History books, or the ridiculous things teachers have been forced to do instead of teaching the basics. The thing that pushed me over the edge to write The Invisible Warriors was a textbook that didn’t integrate the peace terms that concluded the Word Wars with the forces at work that led to Korea and Vietnam. Korea only got a short paragraph and key names, dates and events were either omitted or incorrect. You could not draw logical inferences from what was there because the things you needed to know to draw them weren’t there.
My Aunt Edith taught in the Detroit Public Schools for over 40 years with an academic success rate among her students so outstanding that when she retied the Detroit Free Press wrote a long article about her remarkable career. That doesn’t happen every day or every year or every ten years. She was that good, and ALL of her students learned from her, even the bad kids. Did she ever receive recognition from the school board or the State of Michigan? No. Did they learn anything from her success? They didn’t. Before she retired, they saddled her with the same kid of nonsense you had to put up with, which made it impossible for her to do her job.
My Cousin Luther quit teaching because the books he had to teach from were so bad, the administrative chores he had to perform were so onerous and the prescribed method of instruction so wrong-headed and restrictive that he couldn’t stand it.
My friend Calvin Morrison quit teaching Art in public school because the administration would not allow him to tech the basics. They wanted to see “free creative expression” in the students’ artwork with no appreciation for the building blocks that would have given them the ability to express them selves creatively beyond a 3rd grade level.
Believe me Charlie; I’m on your side here.
I’m on your side with “Black History,” too. You shouldn’t have to go to “black history” to learn that Booker T. Washington was an oreo (as opposed to a great black educator) and George Washington Carver was a giant (as opposed to a token footnote). Everybody should know that Admiral Bird led the first successful expedition to the North Pole but his fellow explore on that expedition made the final surveys that located it and stood there first when Bird was too incapacitated by the elements to do it himself. John Ford should not have had to make Sergeant Rutledge to tell America something about the Army’s 9th and 10th Cavalry. This is history – everybody’s history. Without it, the facts are wrong or incomplete and the conclusions you can draw from them are misleading.
I think that where we are missing each other has to do with labels, Democrat, Republican, Conservative and Liberal. Politicians are politicians first and some of them will use whatever label is convenient to achieve their personal ambitions. Who says that these destructive programs we discussed were ever intended for the good of anybody except the politicians who cooked them up? --Jasper