(Via PowerLine.) This speech by historian David McCollough is [insert fancier way of saying "awesome"]. It's touches on a lot and I wouldn't do it any justice by trying to summarize it so here's just one of the many excellent passages. [Emphasis mine. Also this isn't really a permalink so you may need to search the archives.]
History isn’t just something that ought to be taught or ought to be read or ought to be encouraged because it’s going to make us a better citizen. It will make us a better citizen; or because it will make us a more thoughtful and understanding human being, which it will; or because it will cause us to behave better, which it will. It should be taught for pleasure: The pleasure of history, like art or music or literature, consists of an expansion of the experience of being alive, which is what education is largely about.
And we need not leave the whole job of teaching history to the teachers. If I could have you come away from what I have to say tonight remembering one thing, it would be this: The teaching of history, the emphasis on the importance of history, the enjoyment of history, should begin at home. We who are parents or grandparents should be taking our children to historic sights. We should be talking about those books in biography or history that we have particularly enjoyed, or that character or those characters in history that have meant something to us. We should be talking about what it was like when we were growing up in the olden days. Children, particularly little children, love this. And in my view, the real focus should be at the grade school level. We all know that those little guys can learn languages so fast it takes your breath away. They can learn anything so fast it takes your breath away. And the other very important truth is that they want to learn. They can be taught to dissect a cow’s eye. They can be taught anything. And there’s no secret to teaching history or to making history interesting. Barbara Tuchman said it in two words, “Tell stories.” That’s what history is: a story. And what’s a story? E.M. Forster gave a wonderful definition to it: If I say to you the king died and then the queen died, that’s a sequence of events. If I say the king died and the queen died of grief, that’s a story. That’s human. That calls for empathy on the part of the teller of the story and of the reader or listener to the story. And we ought to be growing, encouraging, developing historians who have heart and empathy to put students in that place of those people before us who were just as human, just as real – and maybe in some ways more real than we are. We’ve got to teach history and nurture history and encourage history because it’s an antidote to the hubris of the present – the idea that everything we have and everything we do and everything we think is the ultimate, the best.
Until I have kids of my own, I try to do my small part in passing on some history to the few kids I know.
Back in the late summer of 2001, I was helping out a college friend with his campaign for the NYC city council. [The primary was to be held on 9/11 but the polls were closed in the late morning.] One night a few weeks before the election after a long day of passing out literature and running the errands that come with a campaign the group of us went back to his campaign HQ. There were probably a dozen of us crammed into a tiny office with no air conditioning. There was some campaign related activity going on but mostly we were decompressing and eating tacos from a local Mexican joint. There about 4 or 5 kids, around Middle School aged, who were dragged along by their mothers who were helping us out.
They were probably tired and started getting antsy and speaking in their "outside voices" in the small confines of the hot office--generally just being kids. They weren't being disruptive, merely annoying. I was beginning to get a headache and pulled a trick my old man used to pull on us and whatever group of kids he was around when they started acting up. (I didn't realize it at the time that it was his move, I just did it without thinking.)
I lined them up and started an American History Trivia Bonanza.
Who was the first black Supreme Court justice?
When is Pearl Harbor Day?
Name the 13 colonies.
And other questions along those lines. It worked in calming them down a bit and if you've ever done something similar, the kids can't wait for the next question. A couple of my other friends joined in with questions and generally the kids were having fun, showing off what the already knew, and maybe learned a few new things.
Or not. But it shut them up for about a half-hour.
