I am grateful to Sleepy and to Darcus Howe for prompting this one.
I had a really dispiriting experience this week. One of the units I run this semester is for final year undergraduate students and is concerned with the impact of virtual technologies on markets, marketing, work and organizations. I do the front end of this generally popular but challenging pantomime horse and cover philosophical questions like ‘what is virtuality?’ ‘Is it anything new?’ as well as the historical context such as the rise of the Internet and the forces that gave rise to it and allied technologies.
Of course, one of the things you come across when you investigate why the Internet was formed was the existence of the cold war and the rhetoric and realities associated with it. I understand that this might be slightly challenging for kids born in the early 1980s to get their heads around, I also understand that they might only dimly be aware of the existence of Ronald Reagan and the Star Wars initiative…but to be honest, I am getting a bit sick and tired of being understanding because they should have a sense of history – their history, their family history, their society’s history as well as those of others – but it seems to me that for them, history is what occurred last year. The sense of disconnect with the past is actually quite profound and therefore quite worrying. I am of the belief that if you do not understand history you will almost inevitably repeat it – you’ll probably repeat history anyway for other reasons, but at least an historical perspective allied to some form of self and societal awareness might give pause when the big questions are being asked.
So after talking about Star Wars to blank faces, I was so glad to see it resurface.
I so totally rule.
But my sense of triumph is a bitter one and I have concern for the generation of young adults whose sense of time and context is so weak and whose curiosity about their world is almost non-existent. At some point, my fear is that we will reap the national curriculum whirlwind and it ain’t gonna be pretty.
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6 comments:
Was it Fukuyama who wrote about 'The End of History'?
Yes. I've never read it, much to my shame. Maybe we should invest?
I read it during my degree. It's in the house somewhere, unless it was lent out!
Oh, cool. Let's give it a go if it turns up?
Read Hegel. Ooh, 'Reid-Hegel', interesting.
Anyroad, I simply don't understand why kids don't have a sense of history, they start it in primary school and it's compulsory to the end of KS3. I wonder if it's because the emphasis has changed from the whole 'learn everything, just learn everything from the beginning of time to the end of the cold war' approach from when we were at school to the whole, 'sources, how do we know this? we must analyse everything' approach now. The modern approach sounds superior but maybe the cramming everything in was more suitable to a child's actual abilities.
Schnee, this sounds about right. I think that I was taught history from a fairly wide perspective that seemed to narrow once 'O' and 'A' levels kicked in. But then again, I find history inherently interesting - one of the things I'm looking forward to is my summer hol break. I'm going away with my sister, her hubbie and his brother who is an historian. We're staying somewhere inaccessible in the Lot region - very Cathar so I am told - and I love that period of history and literature. Going to be good.
But I guess that this means I have a complete incomprehension when people seem to have no location of their self or their family etc. I don't just think that it's a school thing, I think that it is a home and parent/family thing too.
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