"What kids know about History...ackkkkk" Topic

Hey guy's,

I just need to vent for a second. I've recently started in the position of teacher for the local Adult School (High School and GED program).

Well...one of my first jobs is to grade some of their Social Studies Pre-tests (a test to see what their basic knowledge is before we bring them into the program).

Reading some of their answers is already giving me a headache.

This is what I got:

Question-

During the French Revolution, a mob stormed the Bastille, which was:

Answer-

A tennis court (thump..thump..thump; that's my head hitting the desk).

Question-

The Ottoman Empire was located in the nation which is now called-

Answer

Australia

Aaaaaaaaacckkkk.

I mean, I know not everyone loves history as much as I do...but these questions aren't that tough, are they?

I could understand if the students didn't know what nations formed the Triple Alliance and Triple Entente; I would understand if they didn't know, off-hand, who Napoleon put on the thrown of Spain during his reign.

But still....the level of historical knowldege is frightening.

Oh well....thanks for letting me vent. I have some work to do.

I agree. But I do know a 13 year old kid who knows all these things about the Afghan wars, the Boer wars, and an unsurpassed knowledge on the First and Second World Wars.

Um, I always thought it was Australia. Um, New Zealand?

Well, it's not just kids, really; one of my seniors at work was asking me how Nelson defeated the Spanish Armada...

hehhehehehhe I loved that deliberate mistake..."Thrown of Spain".....

it makes sense,no wonder fantasy is so popular. no appreciation of history is necessary with fantasy, except the fiction of the company churning out that stuff.

There's also a negative attitude towards history, remember that. Most people thinks it is boring OR you learn nothing from it. Which is why most situations in world history often repeats itself, I guess.

You really can't fault the kids, the various states and the Federal require so many minutes of this and that, that they only get a survey of what happened or where it happened. Going back 40 years to my youth we had a class called "Geography" and a different class called "World History" and a third class called "American History". Now they lump it all together and give a 40 minute class called "Social Studies", But they have to spend more time in class on "interpersonal relationships" and "angry management"

Welcome to the wacky world of teaching history my friend. Get used to it. After, taking as much as I could teaching, I gave up and went into business for myself. I taught my daughter history as hobby and science and math as career. Boy, did I save the day. She's on her way to med school. Good luck!

The tennis court is not that far off. It at least shows that they heard of the Tennis Court Oath, one of the precursors to the storming of the Bastille. Head feel any better now?

I think part of it is our culture, kids want an immediate fix like video games or Britney Spears.

We don't encourage the fact that something good usually takes patience.

I think, too that a twisted version of history is being taught in the States and UK at least, based on today's 'popular ' culture. It leaves a more negative view which stifles further investigation.

Hey all,

Thanks for your replies. I wanted to answer a few of your response directly;

Major Grubert: your right, and those are kids who are a pleasure (and sometimes a pain) to have in the classroom. My students are adults, with 90% being around 18-19 years old. They left HS and are back getting their diploma.

Ptolemy: You said it..I didn't. If you are serious, you should see me after class. We have to have a discussion :)

captain arjun: Who's Nelson? Just kidding, just kidding. I'm happy to say one of our World History books does justice to Trafalgar.

Quebecnordiques: I really really wish I could take credit for being bright enough to make a subtle word play there, but in all honesty, it was a typo. I witty typo, but a typo.

belasirius: It's just not history either. The sciences got it also. I remember in HS having Earth Science, Biology, Chemistry, Anatomy and Physics. Now it's all lumped into Life Science and Physical Science.

John Carroll: Actually, that does make me feel better, though I didn't know that fact. I'll have to do some reading :)

Hey Messk1...so you are a fellow professional, great to hear it! Shame that was just a typo, it would have been brilliant! Alamo1836t is also a teacher, can this be just a mere coincidence? Any more teachers on the site?

I'm sort of a teacher. I'm currently in training to be a biology and general science teacher but I would love to do history some day.

The most shocking thing that also has to be noted is the kids' general lack of literacy and numeracy these days.

In response to Quebecnordiques'question, I am a teacher. I teach Physics and AP Biology and do my best to incorporate history into my lessons. Admittedly it is easier to do that with Physics concepts than Biology though.

Regards,

Marc

I'm a teacher of sorts, I guess. I'm actually a police officer here in New Zealand (which is NOT the Ottoman Empire, Ptolemy!), but my fulltime job in the police is teaching law related education programmes in schools (such as DARE, traffic safety, personal safety, social responsibility etc).

Unfortunately, most of those topics don't give much scope for talking about history! But I do sometimes tell the kids about my hobby when I introduce myself, and some kids have opened up to me when I say: "I play wargames, which are a bit like Warhammer, only historical"! They all know Warhammer ...

isnt the ottoman empire where all the otters come from *wink wink*

I once asked an 18 year old who we (the USA) had been allied with and who we had fought in WWII. He said, "That's easy! We and the Germans fought the Russians!" This was what he had deduced from watching action movies.

Arteis - You might like this one. Thirty-three years after being drafted out of college for Vietnam, I returned to teaching as a substituten in a fifth grade class. About thirty minutes into my first assignment, two boys got into a scuffle. I sent the one in tears outside and started to ask the other one what in 'ell happened. He started out first by pulling his sweat shirt over his head, then escalated into crawling under a computer table and bawling like Randy from a "Christmas Story." Of course I not no luck getting him out from under the table. I had just thought I really needed the principal to walk into when a police officer walked in for her DARE session. That of course was when a student announced "Bill, Officer Karla's here to arrest you. So while she coaxed Bill out from the table, I vent my wrath with a short leacture on no giving unwanted "help" to a law officer.

Then again last Friday I subbed in high school for Marie who was teaching WWI, had a terrible cold, her specialty was WWII and was just delighted to hear I tended to be more currect on WWI. One last thing, knowing I'll never do a kiwi buzz properly, how do you folks pronounce "maori?"

thanks. Oh yes you and your colleagues please do take care.

Jim

Is this a "Kids of Today" rant.....
Oh, already done, Pliney the Elder.
R

I've always heard Collage History Proffesors here in the United States, complaining that history is the only collage class that does not build on what a student learned in high school. It starts by having to correct all the information they had been givien. Most history in the USA tought high school and lower is so heavly censored so that it will "promote good citizenship" that it's almost useless. No wonder teens in the United States find history boring.

As a teacher of writing and critical thinking, I often center my research class around a historical event. In the past I have used the roots of slavery in America and I am currently using the Civil Rights Movement of the 60's. Student's leave with a understanding of the reasearch process and know something more about their own history. The key is to help the student find some figure or idea in the time period and explore it.

Students need to learn how to think like a historian rather then learn to memorise facts.

Emerson felt that the roll of the scholar (teacher/student) was to "raise, cheer, and guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances." If a student can learn to think in a discipline and follow their interests, they will learn the lesson that history has to teach them.

Personally, I agree that history has taken a back seat in Education as a whole.

I was fascinated by WW2 when I was a kid (Combat and Rat Patrol were my favorite series). Then I read Robert E. Howard and his Conan series. I found out that most of his nations in the Hyborian Age were based on actual historical nations. Talk about opening a whole new world for me.

Perhaps that is what we need, some sort of correlation between what kids enjoy and what they need to know about history. One of my most enjoyable times in the 8th? grade was a game where everyone was given a card that assigned them as a member of the Continental Congress. Each person was given an outline of the person and what he wanted (centralized or decentralized government, number of electoral votes based on free/slave population, state or federal currency, taxation issues, etc.). This nation could have been VERY different if we had had our way! It was a madhouse with people running around wheeling and dealing, but I imagine, so was the 1st Continental Congress!

I guess I am saying that history CAN be boring, but it CAN be fun. Most of us history buffs can look back and see some teacher who taught history with enthusiasm and enjoyment, which influenced us and made us want to know more.

I won't pound the kids of today, since I think that we, that is, society as a whole, have the final say in what is considered necessary for education. I will say that I got a BA in History and couldn't teach school because I didn't have the "right" history courses.

O.K. I will step down off the soapbox now. . . anybody read any good alternative history lately?

richardjblade - Didn't you also watch "The Gallant Men?"

Didn't Drake bash the Dutch at Trafalgar?

Sorry, couldn't resist. Randy Andy is narrating the real timeline on The History Channel.

Sorry again, it sounds like Monte Markham (spelling?)narrating, Prince Andrew introduced at least one episode, all featuring the Royal Navy.

I have to admit that I dropped history in my second year at school (age 13). The school had just changed from being a grammar school to being a comprehensive and most of the teachers had been replaced. My first year was spent learning about the rise of Sparta and the Conquests of Alexander with a little Latin and Greek thrown in for good measure. The second year (with new teachers) was terrible, the first term was "The Terror of Colonialism", the second term "Britain and the Slave Trade" followed by a third term of "The Birth of Socialism and Communism in Europe". At this point I gave up and took woodwork instead. Twenty years later I am just starting to get back into history by taking a Classics degree with the open university, how many more of my generation will never open a history book again?

I was turned off of history at school by all the seemingly unrelated events. Then you spend weeks and weeks studying home life in the middle ages or some such sleep-inducing rubbish. One day I picked up my brother's school history text book where he'd summarised all the power play between Cromwell and the Stuarts, all the way to the Glorious Revolution.

I couldn't put it down and it gave me an interest in Common Law ever since. As Jordan Peterson says, it's the stories that give meaning and most woke teachers don't have very good stories because demonisation don't make for very good tales. Humanity will out – it can't be faked.

Although I knew something about the Napoleonic era – mainly the Waterloo film and then something of the politics by reading A.J.P.Taylor, I can't say it ever reaches much into popular consciousness in England. Admiral Nelson is famous and so is Wellington but not much else. Unfortunately the Peninsula war is hardly known about at all – I guess when you have an empire, once you get off the ferry, all theses foreign places look much alike! We have the song, "The Grand Old Duke of York", sung by children about the 18⁰9 Walcheren Expedition, proving we're happy to laugh at our leaders.

History still needs stories and ours are Cornwall's Sharpe series – the apogee of Napoleonic literature. More spell-binding personal reminiscences are within Kinkaid's Takes of a Riflemen – both supply endless scenarios for skirmish and brigade-level games. But the best storyteller-historian of the era has to be Alessandro Barbero and his book "The Battle", about Waterloo. Another book I couldn't put down.

May I point out that the rhyme The Grand Old Duke of York is not about the Walcheren Expedition of 1809, in which he did not serve. It is often thought to be about Frederick, Duke of York's campaigns in Flanders during the French Revolutionary War, but I have read that its origins may be even older.

Now that Prince Andrew has been all but erased from the Royal Family, I doubt that a song about the Duke of York will be considered suitable for schoolchildren!

arthur1815
"May I point out that the rhyme The Grand Old Duke of York is not about the Walcheren Expedition of 1809, in which he did not serve".

The song's origins lie in the 17th c. but was revived by satirists – Punch magazine, for example – to lampoon various iterations of the Duke of York over the years, including the Forces commander, Frederick, Duke of York. So yes, the Flanders campaign eight years before, rather than the Walcheren Expedition. Dundas was ultimately responsible for that débâcle by choosing Chatham, although Castlereagh got the blame.

As for Andrew, I guess they could have sung it about him during the Falkland Islands War – RAF personnel in particular derided him for never straying far from his ship. But then the RAF tend to take the Mick of anything navy and that appears to have been his job: flying missile decoy. He also helped rescue British soldiers from the burning Atlantic Conveyor. Oh, the Grand Old Duke York, He had two or three men, He flew them up to the top of the mast, And he flew them down again…
I'll get me coat…

You are complaining about them not knowing the answers from a pre-test? Before you taught them anything?
What age would you expect someone (not French) to know what the Bastille is?

Does this sum up your experience . . .

YouTube link

Stephen

Murvihill,
I suppose he was more complaining about the wildness of the guess. Tennis courts are not normally known for their magnetism for revolutionaries.

stephen1162
Don't mention the war.
link

I find adults don't know much either. Stuns me when I bring up a history fact and get blank stares. I work with many young people in their 20's and I'm told 9-11 in New York is barely mentioned, nor do they know who were the terrorists or why it happened. Just one anecdote of what I experience…. No way would I expect any of them to fathom 1789 in France..

sorry, must clarify. 9/11 not given much discussion in school.

pbishop12 2
Oh I used to teach second-generation immigrants (Pakistanis) who didn't know what a duck was. We passed a village pond on a school trip and they were convinced they were pigeons.