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Will Fitzhugh on the elimination of history requirements in NC

Mary Grabar — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 01:07:10 +0000

Relevant to Them
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
6 February 2010
North Carolina has proposed dropping the teaching of United States History before 1877
for its public high school students. Quite a number of U.S. History teachers have argued
for years that they should have two years for the subject, but North Carolina has just
dropped Year One.
One argument they advance for doing this is that it will make our history “more relevant”
to their students because it will be “closer” to their own lives.
The logical end of this approach will be, I suppose, to constrict the teaching of U.S.
History to the latest results for American Idol.
This is just one more egregious consequence of the flight from academic knowledge in
our schools.
One of the authors published in The Concord Review wrote more than 13,000 words on
Anne Hutchinson, who not only lived before the student did, but even lived and died
more than two centuries before 1877. How was this possible? That public high school
student (who later graduated summa cum laude from Yale and won a Rhodes Scholarship)
read enough about Anne Hutchinson so that her life became relevant enough to the
student to let her write a long serious term paper about her.
For students who don’t read history, and don’t know any history from any other source,
of course anything that happened “back then” seems not too relevant to their own lives,
whether it is or not.
It is the job of the history teacher to encourage and require students to learn enough
history so that what happened in the past is understood to be relevant, whether it is
Roman Law, or Greek Philosophy, or the Han Dynasty, or the Glorious Revolution or our
own.
If the student (and the teacher) has never read The Federalist Papers, then the whole
process by which we formed a strong constitutional government will remain something
of a mystery to them, and may indeed seem to be irrelevant to their own lives.
Kieran Egan quotes Bertrand Russell as saying: “the first task of education is to
destroy the tyranny of the local and immediate over the child’s imagination.”
Now, the folks in North Carolina have not completely abandoned their high school
history students to American Idol or to only those things that are local and immediate in
North Carolina. After all, President Rutherford B. Hayes rarely appears on either local tv
or MTV, so it will be a job for teachers to make Rutherfraud seem relevant to their lives.
Students will indeed have to learn something about the 1870s and even the 1860s,
perhaps, before that time will come to seem at all connected to their own.
But the task of academic work is not to appeal to a student’s comfortable confinement to
his or her own town, friends, school, and historical time.
Academic work, most especially history, opens the student to the wonderful and terrible
events and the notable human beings of the ages. To confine them to what is relevant to
them before they do academic work is to attempt to shrink their awareness of the world
to an unforgivable degree.
North Carolina has not done that, of course. If they had made an effort to teach United
States history in two years, or perhaps, if they decided to allow only one year, many will
feel that they should have chosen Year One, instead of starting with Rutherford B. Hayes.
These are curricular arguments worth having.
But in no case should educators be justified in supporting academic work that requires
less effort on the part of students to understand what is different from them, whether it is
Cepheid variable stars, or Chinese characters, or the basics of molecular biology, or
calculus, or the proceedings of an American meeting in Philadelphia in 1787.
Our job as educators is to open the whole world of learning to them, to see that they
make serious efforts in it, and not to allow them to confine themselves to the ignorance
with which they arrive into our care.

What do social studies teachers talk about? My latest report

Mary Grabar — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:00:51 +0000

Here in my report on the National Council for the Social Studies convention I reveal how social studies teachers openly discuss strategies for indoctrinating children while earning continuing education and graduate credit…thanks to you, the taxpayers. Pictured here (at the 2008 Democratic National Convention) is Obama’s sister, “peace educator” Maya-Ng, who had to postpone her speech to social studies teachers until next year. http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/Grabar_report.pdf

It pays to be gay

Mary Grabar — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:42:53 +0000

It pays to be gay…on many American campuses, especially Syracuse University. Well, one way to solve my health insurance woes (when you don’t march lockstep to the left agenda and have to work part-time and buy your own health insurance)…just get a “partner”! Oh, wait, no special consideration for single, heterosexual, conservative females. I forgot.

Public universities often take their cue from private universities, so while teachers are being furloughed expect calls for similar “grossing up.”

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‘Grossing Up’: Equity or Bias?

January 29, 2010

Syracuse University may be on the cutting edge of promoting equity for its gay and lesbian employees. Some of the university’s straight employees, however, say Syracuse needs to focus its limited funds on benefits for everyone — and recognize that it can’t be held responsible for the inequity of marriage laws in the United States.

The battle is over “grossing up” — a human resources term for paying someone on top of salary levels so that the employee takes home the full salary amount. So if someone would owe $10,000 on a $50,000 salary, grossing up would mean paying that person $60,000 (plus whatever tax is needed on the extra $10,000 and so forth) so

Read the entire article from Inside Higher Ed here

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/29/syracuse

Tebow pro-life commercial? Give the feminists equal time.

Mary Grabar — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:21:17 +0000

I have an idea for the feminists who can’t stand having a pro-life message from the Tebows during the Super Bowl: Buy some time for yourselves. Produce a commercial with one of your own people. She can be filmed with her six cats and provide testimony like, “Thirty years ago I made my choice to abort. I have never regretted it. I have been able to devote my life to Fluffy, and Princess, and . . . .”

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=123217

The Color Purple? The State of the Dis-Union

Mary Grabar — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:09:42 +0000

Michelle wore purple which went along with Barack Obama’s lip service to “bipartisanship.” Well, now that the Democrats lost “Ted Kennedy’s seat” and two governorships, they want “bipartisanship.”

They were singing a different tune a year ago, when Republicans practically begged to be included in negotiations for the stimulus bill, which was posted on the Internet only for speed readers at midnight—breaking one of a long list of campaign promises.

Obama’s rationale? “I won”

The “We won” line was recited by Nancy Pelosi and then by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and I can’t even remember who all else.

How stupid does Obama think the American people are?

What does he have up his sleeve as he lies and lies? He kept referring to the “crisis” and presented himself as averting another Great Depression. This is not a man to be chastened by failures. This is a man on a power trip who will do anything to maintain that power. The rhetoric and lies are not working that well any more. He’s trying, though, while at the same time giving jihadists all kinds of opportunities to attack. When the lies won’t work, he’ll have a crisis big enough to declare martial law. If the State of Union speech demonstrated anything, it was that Obama cares about one thing: power.

I don’t think that this is what Martin Luther King, Jr., had in mind

Mary Grabar — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:02:15 +0000

Cornel West at MLK commemorative service

Cornel West is no scholar; he is a racial hate-monger.

This is a travesty.

http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/worshippers-urged-not-to-277561.html