Beyond School

He wins in a Democrat landslide. Hopes are high for a progressive agenda unseen since the New Deal, and he delivers, in the first days of his presidency, an avalanche of legislation meant to fulfill those hopes.

But he also inherits a military conflict that his advisers are counseling him to escalate - with a “surge,” we might say - and the president follows that advice. Things go downhill from there.

“He,” of course, is President Lyndon Baines Johnson - LBJ. But the parallels with President-Elect Obama are obvious. Just substitute “Afghanistan and Iraq” for “Viet Nam.”

LBJ on PBS (click image for larger view)

What an amazing time to be a US History teacher - especially with resources like the “American Experience: The Presidents” documentary series from America’s Public Broadcasting System (PBS) available, free and online (and many available for free download, with close captions ideal for ESL students, until Obama’s inauguration day - get ‘em while they’re hot!).

I just watched the LBJ episode and can’t wait to watch more. Coupling Obama’s presidency with LBJ’s in a compare/contrast discussion would surely enliven any US History classroom this year.

Whether you’re a teacher, student, or life-long learner, you can’t go wrong with this adventure in education. It beats the pants off of textbooks.

(And teachers, be sure to notice the teaching resources and podcasts also available for free on the site.)

‘Nuff said.  I hope it puts the emotion in history for you as it did for me. It’s tragic how emotionless schools can make such an intense subject.

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Looking ahead, I have great hope that we will have the courage to embrace the changes necessary to save our economy, our planet and ultimately ourselves.

In an earlier transformative era in American history, President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon within 10 years. Eight years and two months later, Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface. The average age of the systems engineers cheering on Apollo 11 from the Houston control room that day was 26, which means that their average age when President Kennedy announced the challenge was 18.

This year similarly saw the rise of young Americans, whose enthusiasm electrified Barack Obama’s campaign. There is little doubt that this same group of energized youth will play an essential role in this project to secure our national future, once again turning seemingly impossible goals into inspiring success.
–Al Gore, “The Climate for Change.” NYTimes, 2008/11/08 [emphasis added]

How dire is the climate situation? Consider what Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the United Nations’ prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said last month: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.” Pachauri has the distinction, or misfortune, of being both an engineer and an economist, two professions not known for overheated rhetoric.

In fact, far from being an alarmist, Pachauri was specifically chosen as IPCC chair in 2002 after the Bush administration waged a successful campaign to have him replace the outspoken Dr. Robert Watson, who was opposed by fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil. So why is a normally low-key scientist getting more desperate in his efforts to spur the planet to action?

Part of the answer is the most recent IPCC assessment report. For the first time in six years, more than 2,000 of the world’s top scientists reviewed and synthesized all of the scientific knowledge about global warming. The Fourth Assessment Report makes clear that the accelerating emissions of human-generated heat-trapping gases has brought the planet close to crossing a threshold that will lead to irreversible catastrophe. Yet like Cassandra’s warning about the Trojan horse, the IPCC report has fallen on deaf ears, especially those of conservative politicians, even as its findings are the most grave to date.
–Source

Your political persuasion aside, I hope we can all agree that the level of engagement and enthusiasm for democratic engagement - for citizenship - seen in the US presidential elections was an inspiration.

It would be sad to watch that high tide recede, now that the elections are over, as if citizenship in a democracy consisted of nothing more than voting once every few years.

That’s why I’m passing along this request from Ståle Brokvam at International School of Manila to encourage both teachers and students to consider going to the 350.org website to call on President-Elect Obama to attend the UN Climate Meetings in Poland this December.

This 30-second activity, done now, might be a memorable experience for students, if you think about it. Sending a personal appeal to such an historic president might leave a deep impression on them (imagine being able to send JFK or Ronald Reagan an online letter), and one that’s good for the future of democracy in the world. Why? Because this is an act not of adulation and celebrity-esque buzz, but is instead one of treating elected officials - even the president-elect - as the public servants we expect them to be. And letting them know the public will by communicating it in writing.

Put another way, teaching kids to feel excited about an historical politician is one thing; teaching them to feel empowered to communicate their will to that person is another. The first is more about pride, which is fine; but the second, finer still, is about citizenship.

An added bonus: since the president of the US affects the world with his decisions, this site is open to the world. There’s even a globe upon which you and your students can pin their identities.

And the best bonus of all: This would not be an act of irrelevant schooliness. Unless you doubt the overwhelming consensus of scientists worldwide (see the article linked above), climate change does require rapid and decisive leadership on the part of President-elect Obama. So this beats filling out a worksheet.

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Body Language: Blue-Eyes in Front, Brown-Eyes in Back

Preface: What I Learned from the Comments on My “Portrait of the Teacher as a Young Racist” Post

I was surprised that my story of anti-black racism in the American South drew strong reactions in the comment thread from readers in New Zealand, Australia, England, and regions of the American Mid-west (where there were no African-Americans, but there were Native Americans).

I start with this point to urge Americans and non-Americans to at the very least watch the film linked below. It’s one of the most remarkable moments in education I’ve ever seen. And it should resonate on a global, and not merely American, scale.

A Day for History

It’s November 4, 2008, an Election Day in the US that, barring a miracle or a crime, will live as long as human history does.

It makes me regret that I’m not teaching US History this year, and able to share this hopeful teachable moment the way I shared the hopeless US invasion of Iraq when teaching World History in 2003.¹  So consider this little post a fantasy of what I would somehow squeeze into my syllabus this week - which I also fantasize someone reading this post might do in the real world.

It has to do with an online documentary goodie that I’ll deliver at the end of this post, but first, a little background from a great book:

“Emotional Objectivity”: A Paradox

Toward the end of his must-read Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, James Loewen writes:

When two-thirds of American seventeen-year-olds cannot place the Civil War in the right half-century, or 22 percent of my students reply that the Vietnam War was fought between North and South Korea, we must salute young people for more than mere ignorance. This is resistance [to " 'learning' isolated, incoherent, and meaningless data"] raised to a high level. Students are simply not learning even those details of American history that educated citizens should know. Still less do they learn what caused the major develpments in our past. Therefore, they cannot apply lessons from the past to current issues.

Unfortunately, students are left with no resources to understand, accept, or rebut historical referents used in arguments by candidates for office,² sociology professors, or newspaper journalists. If knowedge is power, ignorance cannot be bliss.

Emotion is the glue that causes history to stick. We remember where we were when we heard of the attack on the World Trade Center because it affected us emotionally. . . . As textbook critic Mrs. W. K. Haralson writes, “There is no way the glowing, throbbing events of history can be presented fairly, accurately, and factually without involving emotion” (Loewen, 342-3). [Emphases added.]

Linger on the paradox in that last line. In essence, it argues that without emotion, historical objectivity is a fallacy, and this goes against the popular conception of objectivity as a dispassionate stance - “Present all sides and let students come to their own conclusions.” While some history teachers I have known and worked with understood that “all sides” (yes, a problematic concept) can be presented with the emotions attaching to those respective sides, but without crossing the line into indoctrination, more have mistaken this tightrope-walk for a breach of the objective ideal of the profession.

Loewen and Haralson, though, claim that without experiencing the emotions of history, students find it irrelevant and boring, and really don’t learn it more deeply than is necessary to pass the class. Garbage in and out.

The Connotative Maelstrom of a “President Barack Hussein Obama”

Without getting too deep about all of this - I swore I’d keep this post short - just look at all of the strands of major themes in U.S. history woven into that title: President Barack Hussein Obama. Race and racism. The legacy of slavery. The challenge of Islam and post-9/11 terrorist fears. Intermarriage and single parenting. Black liberation theology. FDR and the Great Depression.  JFK in an African-American Camelot. Bobby Kennedy. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jim Crow. Now factor in the race against McCain, a Vietnam Cold Warrior.  On and on go the tropes attached to this man, and back and back into US history go all the attendant hopes and fears. It reminds me of a long-ago post in which David Warlick plays with the idea of teaching history backwards, from the present to the past. All of these issues could begin with explorations of the Obama presidency, and trace the causes of its controversy that make it so historical.

This is more than a “teachable moment;” it’s a full-blown teachable year.

But I’ll stop there, confess again my envy of all US history teachers worldwide, and move on to deliver a plug to a documentary that PBS Frontline makes available to us all, online, for free. It’s called:

A Class Divided

If you take no other recommendation from me ever in your life, take this one. I had read about this famous lesson before, and about the documentary film, but had never watched it myself. So I just took a break during this post to watch it with my wife, and it jolted me in ways text couldn’t.

This third-grade teacher put the emotion in history, and judging by the film, taught her third-graders a lesson that changed them not “until garbage out,” but for life.

From the PBS FRONTLINE site:

This is one of the most requested programs in FRONTLINE’s history. It is about [Jane Elliott,] an Iowa schoolteacher who, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, gave her third-grade students a first-hand experience in the meaning of discrimination. This is the story of what she taught the children, and the impact that lesson had on their lives. . . .

[O]n the night of the day that Martin Luther King was murdered, [Jane's] memories and experiences had coalesced into an idea of how she might give her third-graders a sense of what prejudice and discrimination really meant.

Jane took a deep breath and plunged in. “I don’t think we really know what it would be like to be a black child, do you?” she asked her class. “I mean it would be hard to know, really, unless we actually experienced discrimination ourselves, wouldn’t it?” Without real interest, the class agreed. “Well, would you like to find out?”

The children’s puzzlement was plain on their faces until she spelled out what she meant. “Suppose we divided the class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed people,” she said. “Suppose that for the rest of today the blue-eyed people became the inferior group. Then, on Monday, we could reverse it so that the brown-eyed children were inferior. Wouldn’t that give us a better understanding of what discrimination means?”

So I’ve said enough. If you do watch it, I’d love to read any thoughts in comments. The social engineering aspect of the lesson is particularly gnarly. After seeing its results, though, and hearing the views of the townspeople about it, is this something you think should be used in classrooms around the world? Have you any stories of such a thing, or lessons similar to it?

Whatever the case, here’s to Jane Elliott, a new hero in my teaching pantheon.

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1. And any Surge Enthusiasts out there, please note Petraeus and other generals are far from sharing the blithe forecasts of Bush, McCain, and others in Washington. Several bombings this week in Iraq show how fragile that peace is. [↩]
2. For more on this angle, see yesterday’s post on the correlation of successful fear-mongering campaigns to voters’ educational levels [↩]

Campaign news, Supreme Court analysis, evolution and intelligent design textbook battles and history, the future of books and reading, “freedom of e-speech,” and more in today’s mix.

• My wife made me canvas for Obama; here’s what I learned | csmonitor.com

  By a Southern banker conservative. Hopeful, wry, beautiful.

  tags: obama, elections08, history, usa

• Declarations - WSJ.com

  Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan writes a fine endorsement of Obama.

  tags: obama, elections08

  • He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice.

    Ken Fallin

    A great moment: When the press was hitting hard on the pregnancy of Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, he did not respond with a politically shrewd “I have no comment,” or “We shouldn’t judge.” Instead he said, “My mother had me when she was 18,” which shamed the press and others into silence. He showed grace when he didn’t have to.

    There is something else. On Feb. 5, Super Tuesday, Mr. Obama won the Alabama primary with 56% to Hillary Clinton’s 42%. That evening, a friend watched the victory speech on TV in his suburban den. His 10-year-old daughter walked in, saw on the screen “Obama Wins” and “Alabama.” She said, “Daddy, we saw a documentary on Martin Luther King Day in school.” She said, “That’s where they used the hoses.” Suddenly my friend saw it new. Birmingham, 1963, and the water hoses used against the civil rights demonstrators. And now look, the black man thanking Alabama for his victory.

    This means nothing? This means a great deal.

• Why Obama-McCain race deserves ‘historic’ label

  tags: politics, usa, history, elections08, obama, mccain

  • Take the strong link between age and views on gay rights or abortion. Young people take both for granted. “For every 100 people over age 70 who die and are replaced by 100 people between 18 and 24, you get more liberal social attitudes,” Fiorina said.

  • Not only McCain but much of the conservative intellectual elite warn of an impending turn to European-style socialism at home and appeasement abroad, especially if Democrats seize a monopoly in Washington.

    Historians call the fears exaggerated, a reflection of the country’s 30-year rightward shift. On many issues, Obama is to the right of Nixon, the Republican who proposed a guaranteed income for all Americans, supported affirmative action, imposed wage and price controls, and established much of today’s environmental regulation.

    “A conservative in 1968 was far more liberal than a liberal is in 2008,” said Schulman.

  • An Obama victory offers two potential paths: a major political realignment, following Roosevelt in 1932 and Reagan in 1980. This would require that he rack up successes in his first two years, a honeymoon when presidential power is at its peak.

    If he does, and realignment is under way, he could avoid the catastrophic losses that Clinton suffered after his 1993 health care plan crashed under a Democratic Congress, replaced in 1994 by a Republican one.

    Another model is 1964, with a big Democratic win followed by a collapse four years later, or 1976, when Democrat Jimmy Carter ran a flawless campaign but proved a weak leader unable to control his party or rally the public.

    “You could have a scenario where Obama is under a lot of pressure from his left and yet can’t do big economic things because of the difficult situation we’re in, where he can’t disengage from Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly as the base would like,” Fiorina said. Obama could then come under attack from his left, face congressional losses in 2010 and by 2012 a challenge from his own party, perhaps Hillary Rodham Clinton.

• Bob Cesca: The Mandatory Rejection of Sarah Palin

I so hope this election serves as a death-knell referendum on the divisive Roveian electioneering of the past 8 years. Here’s to a reformed conservatism in the future that plays to ideas instead of fears.

• tags: palin, conservative, usa, elections08, racism

  • More than Palin herself, I’m looking forward to the end of an era in which the aforementioned gomers — these relatively small pockets of bigots and witch hunters — have enjoyed undeserved attention and disproportionate sway over American politics and policy.

    The truth is that politicians like Sarah Palin are merely manipulating, exploiting and inciting these people. In other words, it’s the ignorance, stupid. And next Tuesday, we have a chance to seriously marginalize this darker, uglier side of America.

    It’d be crazy, though, to suggest that Tuesday will be the last day. To be sure, if Senator Obama wins, we’ll be hearing from these knee-jerk wackaloons quite a bit. Hell, Sarah Palin might try to run for president in four years. Nevertheless, we have a chance to tell the Sarah Palin’s of the world that there’s no room in American politics for fire-eaters who stoke archaic prejudices and fears rather than ameliorating them. We have a chance to tell them that not only doesn’t it work anymore, but that it actually exacerbates electoral failure.

• Excitement and Anxiety Swirl as Chicago Prepares to Host Obama Event - NYTimes.com

  Pray for safety here.

  tags: obama, elections08, politics, history, usa

• The Canadian Press: Quebec comedy duo talks porn and politics with oblivious Sarah Palin

  Unbelievable. Ethics are sticky, but so is the story.

  tags: satire, hoax, palin, humor, politics

• 3 evolution critics on advisory panel that will review standards for science courses in Texas schools | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Texas Regional News

  Science takes another hit in Texas. Troubling.

More below the fold….. Read the rest of this entry »

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Interesting post on “secular parenting” writer Dale McGowan’s The Meming of Life:

….If it’s true that education leads to the left, fear-based campaigning should increase in effectiveness as education levels decrease, and you’d expect states with the lowest per-capita educational attainment to favor the fear-mongering candidate.

The list below ranks all 50 states and the District of Columbia in order by proportion of college degrees in the population (highest to lowest). Those in blue are favoring Obama (as of Nov. 1). Those in red favor McCain. Black indicates a current toss-up:

TOP THIRD BY EDUCATION LEVEL (15 blue, 2 red)
District of Columbia
Massachusetts
Maryland
Colorado
Virginia
New Hampshire
Connecticut
New Jersey
Minnesota
Vermont
Kansas
California
New York
Washington
Utah
Delaware
Illinois

[click here for the rest of the list]

The colors change remarkably as the list continues down the educational ladder, and McGowan concludes with interesting info on the conviction levels (”I’m sure my choice is best”) of voters across the states. Seems the “intellectual arrogance” accusation so often tossed at the “educated elites” from those who seem to prefer a Joe the Plumber in the Oval Office is actually a quality that is common among the “elite-bashers” themselves.

See the full article here, and draw your own conclusions.

[Last paragraph revised for clarity.]

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