Episode 145: Survey Courses? Yes, We Desperately Need Them. (Wed. April 10, 2024)
Our schools have often given up the very idea of teaching lots of stuff, and even if they try, they have no idea how to do it. Train the teachers better and then let them loose.
Survey courses can be a great help, but skip the politicking. Left-wing professors think the whole point of education is to indoctrinate kids. What a selfish idea.
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Bruce Deitrick Price
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Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, poet, and education reformer.
(For a list of literary titles, visit Lit4u.com.
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION: OVERVIEW
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION --- by --- Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 145 --- Wed. April 10, 2024
Survey Courses? Yes, We Desperately Need Them.
No maps, no memorization, no multiplication tables, no dates, no memorizing poetry, no foreign languages, the goal of all these gimmicks and many others is to kill off big swaths of knowledge, of content, of information that students should know.
Once you learn the pattern, everything makes sense. You can predict what our Education Establishment will do. For example, how would they deal with survey courses? The criticism you often hear is that these are shallow, moving haphazardly from one decade or country to another. These efforts are not deemed legit enough for college or even high school. But what are the professors really accomplishing?
They don't seem to like the fact that millions of ordinary students with no special academic ambitions suddenly could learn the sweeping outline of world history. Don't think the weird elves in charge of our schools are going to allow anything to happen in a fast efficient way.
Some brave professors are urging that we become re-acquainted with survey courses. That's good. But I predict they will be polluted with heavy admixtures of CRT and the perennial profundity that the US is evil. Here are two quotes from a conference:
“A lot professors don’t want to teach a survey class, but I take the opposite view,” said Kyle Longley, the …Distinguished Professor of History at Arizona State University. “It’s an opportunity to recruit majors.” Longley spoke during a session on teaching the U.S. history survey in a global context;…It doesn’t mean abandoning U.S. history, but rather situating key events, ideas and figures within a more international context. So parallels may be drawn between the Jim Crow U.S. South and South Africa under apartheid, for example.
Laura A. Belmonte, chair of history at Oklahoma State University and co-author of a new textbook, Global Americans, said the global dimension also helps students re-examine aspects of U.S. history with which they’re already familiar. “It’s a different spin,” she said. “They have to fundamentally rethink things.”
I argue that we should teach as much as we can, but forget the politics and indoctrination.
Lots of knowledge, as quickly as possible, from K to 12. That's a concept that the Education Establishment treats as an enemy. They seem much more comfortable with teaching a little over long periods of time. If you keep watering down wine, finally you don't have wine. That's been the pattern in our schools.
I remember, many years ago, hearing people criticize survey courses because they are superficial. I thought, yeah, that could happen. But they wanted to give up all such courses, and then the children had no education instead of some. Even when I was young and foolish, I sensed a dirty trick was played here.
Without the survey course, the average student learned close to nothing. Predictably.
Instead of making History about each professor’s sociopolitical opinions, the professors should work to make instruction more memorable.
The main ways to make learning easy is to start in kindergarten with maps and posters on the walls, showing beguiling pictures and captions. Constant direct instruction to the students. Quizzing the students. And having competitions. Every day teachers go to various maps and discuss something in the world, somewhere maybe far away, Sri Lanka or Antarctica. Doesn't matter. As the months go by, these kids will become geniuses, if compared to today's empty-headed victims.
Young people, especially studying for exams, often wonder if there's not some secret trick for mastering lots of material quickly. Not exactly. The trick is to forget quick and focus on this wisdom: knowledge is cumulative.
Massive walls are made from many little bricks. Corny? Never mind, it's still the ultimate truth.
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3 LINKS;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
HOW TO TEACH ANYTHING (short video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae534esDXEw&t=3s
K-12: In Praise of WOW! (short article)
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/k12_in_praise_of_emwowem.html
Conference of academics quoted mid-article
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/01/10/history-professors-say-even-survey-courses-should-make-students-think-historians