At one level, history of the
present day as chronicled by those that matter today may not entirely be a
product of fantasy. They may convincingly rationalize the conflicts of the
present day to suit their political or religious point-of-view. They may possibly
succeed in carrying the day with them. However, it is the succeeding generations,
which have the benefit of a perspective view of things, who can judge whether what
was accepted in the past was really a good piece of history.
Ideally, Good history tries to be
as objective as possible. It tries to describe what happened, with the kind of
detail that creates an honest, dispassionate and accurate, although imperfect
picture. It is not confined to whatever is congenial to contemporary way of
thinking. It is also not a tract to propagate an ism.
We can impulsively draw up a checklist of what a Good
history is not. However, those who live through it can seldom judge it
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I often have the discussion about education with my wife. She maintains that it was better in the past; I say that it seems that it was better because less people went to school, so, by being more elitist, education could better serve a smaller number of people.
That being said, there are some periods when education becomes better, and then it gets worse. It has a lot to do with the culture at the time and the mass media, in my opinion.
When a new medium is introduced, only the upper classes have access to it due to its costs. For this reason, it often carries high quality content. As more and more people have access, the quality shifts to get greater market share, and it goes down.
If we consider schools as a medium, we will see that only a few got to go to school, mainly upper middle class or middle class. The few poorer students that made it into the classroom got to enjoy a greater quality of education. And these poor students normally had a great talent for learning, which is necessary to make up for the lack of education in their homes.
But after there is enough people from a poorer background going to school, the school must adopt to the new demographics, often having to try to catch up for what was lacking at home. Then the school turns into a great remedial education program.
The school systems in the U.S. were not ready to handle desegregation, and to the most part failed to integrate the new students into regular classrooms. The failure came in part as white middle class students fled the system, and the administrators didn't know how to deal with the new students. The social unrest of the 1960s also brought a lot of confusion on how to quickly teach students.
There are also a number of social conditions that determine how well education will be in public schools or not. For example, Whole Language in the US, the technique of teaching sight reading of words, is a cyclical fad in this country from at least the beginning of the century. Reading gets worse during these periods. The result is a hard yank towards phonics methods of reading, this is, decode each sound in the alphabet, which improve reading on most students. However, the socio-economic problems that phonics make evident seems to encourage the return to whole language.
So, people learning how to read at some brief moment in the 1970s were exposed to phonics; after that, they probably had to do whole language. After that, there was another brief phonics period, etc. etc.
Sputnik brought a golden age of math and science education in the U.S. A lot of great educational resources were made at the time. I often run into them. For example, a professor figured out a way to teach formal logic to school age children!
However, the experimentation ended toward the end of the 1960s, after the New Math techniques of the 1960s, which have many great ideas, were discredited. Science and math are still waiting for their next Sputnik.
Finally, don't forget how political education is. Schools are the battlegrounds for many groups from the right and the left, and these people, often well intended, can do great damage to the education of children and young adults.
For this reason, if there is anything that one considers important, one should teach it oneself to our children.
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