Daniel Quinn and The Teaching of History

Last Sunday Joshua took me to a movie and then let me play around in Half Price Books for two hours. I came home with several fabulous finds, including a copy of The Story of B by Daniel Quinn. Quinn has been highly recommended by several people I adore such as Pace Smith and Taylor Muse. So of all my purchases, I decided to start with that. Here are some thoughts on my reading so far:

I’m a little annoyed with the ambiguity of whether you’re supposed to read the sections in the back as you go or all at the end. The Asterisks claim that the lectures “will” be found on page “#” but that does not directly tell you to wait or to read now. I decided at first to wait, because why would it be at the back if you weren’t supposed to read it first. But then the characters in their elenchus (a style of philosophic writing I love by the way) began to discuss things I didn’t understand to I went back and read the stuff at the end of the book.

Story wise I’m on page 91, but teaching wise I’m only a few pages in, the ‘agricultural revolution’ is being torn to little pieces and demonized. I know I am not a history major, nor am I a history minor.. but I am a literature major and so I have some serious thoughts on history and literacy.

Quinn’s characters make the claim that the use of terms like pre-history and agricultural revolution are meant to make non-civilized human seem unimportant. I disagree. I believe that these terms are used and these periods are less examined because there is simply no record of the times- everything we know of them comes from paleontological observation of long buried bones. And I’m pretty sure any forensic investigator will tell you that the longer a body goes unexamined and the more compromised the crime scene, the less evidence can be uncovered.

The fact is, we don’t talk much about pre-history because we don’t know much about it. I had the benefit of teachers that thought this time was important, who did stress the fact that we’re still searching for lost answers- who brought in magazine clips of “new” finds. So the way Quinn talks about the education of history is very offensive to me.

But then I stopped and thought about it.

That’s my experience. I was lucky- when I was young I was recognized as a student of high intelligence and was shoved head first into the advanced classes of nearly everything. This is not the case for everyone.

Recently I spoke with a high school principal about whether I should take a second teaching field in history so that I could teach it and he flat out told me that most history teachers in high school are coaches, they major in history so they can teach at the school but really they’re coaches- so most of the history positions go to people in that situation.

I wanted to shake him.

No wonder you get a shit education in history if you aren’t in AP. No wonder they constantly come up with statistics that say half of Americans can’t find North America on a map of North America.. This is the problem, people. Right there. Open your fucking eyes. Get real teachers in there or you have helped to create the system of shortchanging the students who happen to not fit into your excellence scheme.

As a future educator, I am ashamed. First, why are you letting coaches teach history if they don’t actually give a shit about it. Second, why are you discouraging young people who actually want to instill a real knowledge of history into their students?

I don’t agree with a lot of what Quinn says about history.. but I do agree that a lot of history is mistaught. So I guess that’s a middle ground.