In case people think I’m too hard on secondary education, here’s an example. As I shared before, my daughter’s fourth-grade class spent a month last spring reading a book about the Holocaust. It was a work of fiction about a family who was hiding a little Jewish girl from the Nazis. At no point did the teacher attempt to explain the context. The following words were never mentioned in class to explain what the book was about:
– Nazis
– Germans
– Jews
– World War 2
It was not explained when this took place or why. It was not explained who won the war. My kid lit up when I explained that Americans won the war and helped save the little girl in the book. I explained to her that her great-grandfather was in the war and possibly grandfathers of some of her classmates. None of that was mentioned in class. The story was presented as a completely disembodied instance of people being randomly mean to other people.
I once had a student in class who expressed shock at the “news” that Hitler was dead. I had no idea how that could have happened, but now I do.
In the fall, the students spent a month playing settlers in class. At first, the activity seemed fine if way too oriented towards explaining how the past was bad because women and minorities were oppressed. At least, the students seemed to be learning about how the settlers ran their households and how they organized their lives. But the last activity of the sequence was beyond strange. Kids were supposed to throw coins into a hat, and if you didn’t manage to get your coin in, that meant your entire family as a settler was dead and your household was destroyed. Almost nobody managed to get the coin into the hat. The idea, it seems, was to demonstrate how completely arbitrary everything was in the lives of the settlers. This is an unusual idea for a Christian school. But at least it was mentioned that these were settlers, even though what exactly they were settling and for what purpose remained shrouded in mystery.
For almost two decades, I was puzzled when I saw that the minds of college freshmen were blank slates. I couldn’t understand how it is possible to spend twelve years in school and learn absolutely nothing whatsoever. Now that my own kid is in school, I know how.
Clarissa's Blog 
Leave a comment