Ignorance to Make You Gasp

Aldistar, I had the same information as the nurse! Glad I didn't end up the way your friend did. Live and learn.

As for the kid at the store, I can only assume that this is a not smart person with tidbits of information floating around in his head. However, even someone relatively stupid can handle basic facts. I don't know what to say. I can't believe that even our watered-down education would have omitted the Civil War and slavery. As for the year, thud.

I was tutoring a couple of black teens in reading when the topic of interracial education came up. The teens told me that most kids in their school hung out with kids of the same race. One then said "...they liked being separate, but equal." I asked him what he knew about that phrase and he looked at me kind of blank. "Separate, but equal" I repeated, "Where did that come from?" He replies, "I don't know. I think I heard it on a music video". I was floored, he was 16. Yes, I got out another book and we did some reading about the South pre-60's.

Gasping, Green Witch. And a little scared.

Once again, as Chanukah has rolled around, I find myself explaining Judaism to a whole new crop of people. That's fine, I don't mind telling people about my faith as I think banishing ignorance is a way to banish prejudice.

Yesterday, I had to explain that, just because someone's town had put Christmas lights on non-evergreen trees did not mean those were Chanukah trees and that there is no such thing as Chanukah trees. I further explained that blue and orange are not Jewish colors and, instead, are the colors of the New York Mets.

No Chanukah tree, Phoenix? How disappointing.

I was flipping stations. Don't know what quiz show this was. Question: What country is the largest land mass in North America. Answer: Asia.

Thud, thump. (That's a thud with a bounce.)

Several years back (and i'm sorry, it was long enough ago that i can't recall the source, although, NYT, i think) i read about the textbook committee in Texas which was reviewing, at that time, history textbooks. In one that i recall, the start of the Second World was given as 1945, and Harry Truman was listed as President. Well, they sort of got it right . . . Harry Truman was President after April, 1945. There were other incredible gaffes in the texts as well.

But what was even stranger to me was when i saw a history text which a friend's daughter had had in high school--in an expensive and exclusive high school. It was horribly twisted by political rectitude, and just about every other page, the authors were sure to point out that blacks, women and Indians were excluded. Well, duh . . . yeah, we got the message about a hundred pages ago. But right from the beginning, it was full of just appalling errors--Columbus arrived in the New World in the late 14th Century (think about it a moment). The colony at Roanoke Island was in Virginia (not so, Roanoke Island lies of the coast of North Carolina, and Roanoke, Virginia is in the mountains, hundreds of miles from the ocean). I don't recall the other errors, and i tossed it aside after a while. I'll read survey histories, just to brush up, and because--if they are well-written--i often find things i hadn't known, which i can then check out to verify.

But that doesn't happen much any longer, and i've stopped reading survey histories. When i wanted to refresh my general knowledge of European history about a decade ago, i went to excellent Carnegie Library in Columbus, Ohio, and checked out books published before 1960. And i don't see this getting better any time soon. The History Channel is full of egregious crap, and one hour programs which, when you subtract the advertisements and the video fluff, have about five minutes of information, much of it often wrong. The historical programs i have seen on the Discovery Channel and the Learning Channel are little better.

The CBC was doing an interview of a gentleman who spoke in a very scholarly manner about Thomas a Beckett and the murder in the cathedral, instigated by King Henry . . . King Henry VIII! (For those who don't know, the King Henry in question was Henry II, and the event took place three centuries before Henry VIII.) Now, i don't expect that everyone will know these things, but this guy was claiming to have expert knowledge, and was peddling such glaring BS. I called in, as did several other people. The CBC program responded by cutting and re-assembling the tapes of the callers (me included) and replaying them over the sound of Herman's Hermits singing Hen-ery VIII--they were ridiculing the callers. So much for the future of the teaching of history.

Setanta,

I'm appalled, but not surprised, and what you're saying about history books. First of all, writers ain't what they used to be. Like knowledgeable. Able to write. Careful. Second, publishers ain't what they used to be. They've given up things that cost unnecessary money--like fact checkers. I remember the hours I spent as a new editor confirming one tidbit of information after another. No more. Editors are no longer experts. Often books are handled entirely by companies not in the United States, companies with very little experience or knowledge in lots of areas.

El-hi publishers will do backflips and other acrobatic displays for states like Texas and Iowa, where the state adoption committees exist. A committee that selects textbooks for an entire state. (Most book adoptions are not statewide.) I've known publishers to change content to accommodate the demands of these committees.

Still, the mistakes you cited leave more more than gasping. Unforgivable.

Even I of the non-coherent memory knew it was Henry II.

And you two are right about the appalling dumb down in data.

Odd, at a time when data and analysis of it seems so much more readily available than before.

I don't see the ignorance in folks not getting the non-Christian view of the holidays when it is the Christmas season. Lest you forget.

I am not a religious person, but if we are going to have Christmas, then for the love of god, let it be Christmas. Ho ho ho and Santy Claus and Christmas trees and all that.

You want "holiday trees" and non-Christian holidays, do it it in the comfort of your own home and shut up already.

Merry Christmas everyone.

The Discovery Channel does similar disservice to sportsmen. Hunting and fishing, according to them, are horribly unnatural.

I'll just go in my garret.

Celebrate whatever you want but remember the reason for the season.

Which reason would that be? The solstice celebration, or the Mithraic feast day--both of which are older than christianity--would they be the "reason for the season?"

Roberta, after i posted yesterday, i recall why i had stopped reading that textbook from the private high school. The authors (there were two) stated that Lincoln had one in a landslide in 1860 and in 1864--their intent was to suggest that there was a groundswell of support to end slavery. That is problematic, because it would leave an intuitive disconnect in the mind of the student to explain the survival of the Democratic Party and the race riots of which began in the late 1860s and survived for a hundred years until the 1960s. In fact, Lincoln only polled about 40% of the vote in 1860, but won the White House because Douglas and Breckenridge split the Democratic vote--which, combined, would have buried him in a landslide. In 1864, he won a clear plurality, but it was 55% for Lincoln to 45% for McClellan, which goes a long way to explaining why the Democratic Party survived. If one understands that many of those who voted for Lincoln, and fought for Lincoln, did so because they wished to preserve the Union, and had little real interest in the plight of black Americans, one can more readily understand how race riots and lynchings began so soon after the war, and began in the North as well as the South. They did a disservice even to their thesis about the oppression of blacks by failing to carefully and accurately portray the attitudes of Americans in the 1860s. That was when i tossed to book aside.

cjhsa, If people think that lights on trees are Chanukah trees, shouldn't someone set them straight? How is this not ignorance? "We are not going to have Christmas." Millions and millions of people don't celebrate Christmas. If I choose to discuss Chanukah or any holiday that isn't Christian, I will--inside or outside my own home. I'm generally very nonconfrontational, but you upset me.

Set, You're bucking a losing tide. Popular opinion is more likely to re-form history than fact is to form it. People like to think that Lincoln's sole purpose as president was to free the slaves. People also like to think that freeing the slaves was the sole purpose of the Civil War. You can't beat 'em, even in history books. People also like to think that Lincoln was a very popular president. You can't beat that either. I hesitate to think of what I accept as history that is in fact nothing more than what generations have chosen to believe until it becomes so.

BTW, I'm in awe of your knowledge.

I appreciate your kind remarks, but there is no need for awe. Consider all of the other things i have not studied in life because i've been reading history.

Whether the impetus comes from the right or the left, it disturbs me to think that history is prostituted to someone's notion of political rectitude (something of which the conservatives are as guilty as the liberals). What has happened in the academic world in the last 40 years, originating with the New Left of the 1960s, is the gravest threat to history of which i know. The conservatives have been quick to pile on with this sort of distortion as well, which is ironic, because the idea that history should "serve" ideology is a notion of Karl Marx.

Set, I agree that political agendas have distorted the facts. When do they not? And I agree that both sides of the political aisle are guilty of distortion. But I also believe that the distortion of history is at least in part influenced by what people want to believe. Not so much political as popular opinion which eventually becomes "fact."

I think there's more to it, too. Lack of scholarship, lack of depth, lack of thinking skills, unwillingness to look beyond the obvious, etc.

I've seen a deterioration in publishing that sickens me. Writers who talk off the top of their heads (and who can't write). Publishers who will publish anything, just to fill quotas. This is less true in academic publishing than in other kinds of nonfiction. But I've seen a slow and steady decline everywhere.

BTW, if I wanna be in awe, I'm gonna be in awe. I have my own interests, but I don't think I've pursued any of them with the passion you have.