From: Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Date: Sun Aug 25 2002 - 07:47:04 MDT
spike66 wrote:
> Political history
> teaches students to hate other groups because of historical conflicts:
> the Jew vs the Arab, the Irish vs the English, etc. Study of the
> historical writings of Mohammad are dragging us to the brink of
> World War 4.
Hmmm I dunno. Recently I was trying to make a record of what books I had
read before graduating high school. What struck me was that there was
very little science, or even science fiction, instead there was a lot of
history and biography, along with philosophy, much of that about eastern
systems.
Much of it was military history from WWII. But I don't remember ever
hating the Germans. They invaded and occupied my homeland, they did
terrible things throughout Europe, they killed millions of people. I
think I have a strong stomach, but scenes of piles of corpses being
bulldozed or just laying around are still very uncomfortable for me to
watch. But as far as blame and hatred goes, that always seemed to be
directed either to the Nazis or just *generally how people were back
then*. And in any case the Germans were hardly the first or the last in
(for example) killing Jews. As a child in America I was often terrified
that nuclear war would break out. But I never hated the Russians. I did
hate the idea of MAD.
Maybe I'm biased from my own reading, and while I can agree with Bruce
Sterling that the millenium gave us a chance to relieve our collective
guilt and blame the past (such as oh man that's so 20th century), but my
impression of what Gatto and that Anti-Social Studies article is saying
is that history is very important for effective citizenship.
Forrest Bishop wrote:
> Thank you for the Gatto reference, it appears to be fairly accurate. The above is a continuation of this most destructive crime
> against civilization.
Hmmm you're welcome but just to confirm the Anti-Social Studies article
isn't by Gatto. But I can attest my own social studies education seemed
very poor to me. Basically, american revolution, pioneers going west,
frontier living, then the american civil war. The changes wrought by the
industrial revolution? Nothing at all about that. But Gatto is by no
means the only person identifying and discussing deep, core problems in
american education.
> *Creature* is a particularly well-researched history of the early 20th Century, a critical subject for any would-be futurist.
> We can and we do trace a clear and true chain of causation of the current plight of the sheeple back over a century.
I agree, the tough part is that it *worked*, as Gatto says, it did bring
about a prosperous society in which most folks have food to eat, feel
safe, have television, etc. Would a nation of libertarian craftsmen and
tinkerers have produced heavy industry? Would they have built the
railroads? I think we may have seen advancements in computers and such
happening quicker (like steampunk fiction). Gatto says (it seems to me)
that the thinking was that such a nation would be chaotic, with an
overheated economy, building too many useful things for people to buy.
dehede011@aol.com wrote:
> The idea is that the uneducated worker doesn't give the manager the
> difficulties the educated worker does. I was an "efficiency expert" and
> spent a lot of my career eliminating large numbers of low skill workers. Of
> course this resulted in a higher proportion of highly skilled workers.
> Relatively speaking, the lower skilled workers were more docile but
> managing the highly skilled was like herding cats.
I agree! And I think the lower skilled workers were more docile since
they *lacked to vocabulary* to fully express themselves. They could be
manipulated by little gifts of another penny per hour or an extra loaf
of bread and some such, with the business owner pounding basic needs
into their heads (food, shelter) and convincing them that any further or
deeper debate was useless.
These days, working for myself, I have to discipline myself, which isn't
as fun as it sounds :-)
-Mike
--
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:16:24 MST