Why Washington crossed the Mississippi
By: Joe Rajchel
American history is filled with many great events from Christopher Columbus coming over on the Mayflower and having the first Thanksgiving to Bill Clinton spending eight years of his presidency having an affair with the same woman. This is the history that many high school students believe and according to new surveys, it is only getting worse.
The first area of blame belongs to the culture and media that our generation is growing up with. It is not even all the time the media spends cover- ing Charlie Sheen and his latest exploit. The real problem is that we let the media get away with only brushing the surface when discussing an event.
“The media will broadcast an event and we will focus on what is happening and not why it is happening,” senior Alex Thisitlethwaite said. “We never learn why events happen.”
Let’s get down to the worst offenders when it comes to misquoting history: politicians. For some reason the American people are fine listening to what politicians have to say, and as long as they agree with it. Our generation cannot successfully take up the mantle of leading this country if we do not know when politicians are distorting our history.
“I wish that students had that media awareness and investigative zeal,” U.S. History teacher Jason Rowland said . “Students hear something repeated and take it as fact in- stead of looking it up.”
Mathematics and sciences are important, but they should not be taking the spotlight and resources over history courses. When President Obama makes a speech about the course of education in this nation, he will always preach the same lines about making sure we raise the standards of math and science which is fine but the question should be raised about where he stands on history. Maybe, he has gone against the old rule of not forgetting history and it will not doom him but future generations of Americans. “I do not think that the an answer is to spend more money on history but rather to place more importance on it,” Rowland said. “History always places near the bottom when it comes to importance and that needs to change, we needs to give it more attention and focus.”
Deviating from American history, all of world history provides insight into the way the world is today and those events shape students whether they realize it or not.
“It is important to understand how civilization was founded to realize how things work today,” freshman Andre Legarza said. “We tend to realize things happen over and over again and I feel it is important to know why things happen.”
The question becomes how do we make sure our students have a proper understanding of our history. There has been a suggestion of having a social studies proficiency. All that Nevada would do is make a really simple test and make sure that the teachers beat the remedial knowledge into the brains of the students until they could pass the test in their sleep. The students still would not comprehend the information.
“We will just lower our standards,” Thistlethwaite said. “Teachers will just stand in the front of the room and spit out the information at the students. We will care about getting the scores and not the un- derstanding.”
Not everyone can name the Vice Presidents of the United States forwards and backwards, nor should anyone have to. There needs to be some happy medium of what students should be required to know. The fact that hundreds of thousands students remain uneducated in the simple trivia of United States history should be the concern for the future.
