History

There seems to be a never ending attack nowadays on our educational system and its failure to teach our children what is considered properly. I know I have problems with the educational establishment in our local school and the quality of the education that they provide dating back to when I went to school there. Well as <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41555-2004Mar8.html">this article</a>(free registration required) points out Americans have done a poor job for years in learning their history so maybe the schools aren't doing such a poor job, todays students are just maintaining the status quo.<br />n<!–more–><br />n<i>And still, Americans won both wars, and many of the 1943 students who said the United States purchased Alaska from the Dutch and Hawaii from Norway were later lionized in books, movies and television as "the Greatest Generation."<br />n<br />n"If anything," writes Sam Wineburg, a Stanford University education professor in a new Journal of American History article, "test results across the last century point to a peculiar American neurosis: each generation's obsession with testing its young only to discover — and rediscover — their 'shameful' ignorance. The consistency of results across time casts doubt on a presumed golden age of fact retention. </i><br />n<br />nDoes this mean I will quit holding our educational system accountable. No, we still need to work harder educating our children. But this does show with the proper work ethic and discipline that kids with a substandard knowledge of our history can still go on and become productive people. Otherwise this country would really have been in the toilet instead of the shining beacon of opportunity that it is today.<br />n<br />n<b> If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience George Bernard Shaw</b>