“Study History or Be History”

Was a poster tacked above a door in our high school social studies office.  For 19 years my philosophical mind asked questions.  Won’t you be history whether you study history or not?  And we don’t really ‘study’ history, do we?  We get a canned curriculum of rushed, condensed, and mostly biased (on multiple fronts) information.

I think the poster was trying to copy the more famous quote of: “those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”  And we already are.

Welcome to the new Middle Ages.

It’s not the Church this time, it’s big business. I’d like to expand on that later, but for now, the focus is on history.

“History, in every country, is so taught as to magnify that country: children learn to believe that their own country has been always in the right and almost always victorious, that it has produced almost all the great men, and that it is in all respects superior to all other countries. Since these beliefs are flattering, they are easily absorbed, and hardly ever dislodged from instinct by later knowledge.” Bertrand Russell

Russell’s essay on education is worth a read. Administrators I shared Russell’s article with disagreed.

Message clear- don’t talk about Education, just teach what ‘they’ tell you, be a goon for standardized tests, and collect data.

Oh, and put up threatening posters like: “study history or be history”. At least the second half is right.