By Warner Todd Huston ——Bio and Archives--November 24, 2009
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At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, out of the 45 history faculty members listed (many with overlapping interests), one includes diplomatic history as a specialty, one other lists American foreign policy; 13 name either gender, race or ethnicity. Of the 12 American-history professors at Brown University, the single specialist in United States empire also lists political and cultural history as areas of interest. The department’s professor of international studies focuses on victims of genocide.This is exactly inverted. There should be one or two “gender historians” (if any at all) and 13 professors of military, diplomatic, and general history at any university. But this upside down status portends a complete loss of useful historical study. Sadly the problem isn’t just evident in our institutes of higher learning. It’s also getting hard to imagine our primary schools successfully teaching anything much less mere history. Recently I had opportunity to visit a few classrooms of a north suburban Chicago middle school and was shocked by its new way of serving its developmentally disabled students, a way that served neither these special needs kids nor the rest. As it happened the school no longer had a special needs class. Each of the school’s special needs kids had their own Teacher’s Assistant sitting next to them right in every classroom. Was this good for the special needs kids? Perhaps. But regardless it isn’t good for all the other kids in that classroom. What I saw was unnerving because in every class there was at least one kid constantly yelling out, laughing inappropriately, violently pushing at his TA handler and generally disrupting every single class. I saw exasperated teachers repeating themselves over and over to be heard over these disruptive kids, I saw students distracted, and above all I saw a failed environment for learning. Was it the disabled kid’s fault? Certainly not. Their constant disruption was a result of their diminished mental condition not any maliciousness. Now, was it good for these kids to be among normal kids? It may be. However, we have to weigh what is good for these mentally disabled kids with what is good for the 95 percent of the others. Is it worth destroying the education of 20 kids in a classroom to make one developmentally disabled kid’s life easier for his mental incapacity? Is that good for our society? The only logical answer has to be no, it isn’t a good idea. Certainly a caring society will do its best for its mentally disabled. Without question we should do our best to educate these kids. But should we do that at the expense of normal, potentially productive members of society? It would be a mistake to do so. In any case, what does all this mean? It means we are disgorging from our schools students that know nothing of our system. In fact, we are graduating kids that really haven’t been taught much of anything. They know nothing of our political history, our governing philosophy, our founding, our civics and our diplomatic relations. It all adds up to the end of history, alright. It’ll end not because anything has been solved, not because we have found a system that works best for the most, but because soon no one will even know it all happened before contemporary times. History will end because no one will even know it exists. Unless we act to save it.
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Warner Todd Huston’s thoughtful commentary, sometimes irreverent often historically based, is featured on many websites such as Breitbart.com, among many, many others. He has also written for several history magazines, has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows.
He is also the owner and operator of Publius’ Forum.