Bill Borst
The Sam Cooke Syndrome
By Bill Borst
When I was a teenager on of my favorite songs was Wonderful World (sometimes referred to as (What a) Wonderful World).
It was written in 1959 by soul music pioneer Sam Cooke, along with songwriters Lou Adler and Herb Alpert.
Wonderful World was the paean of a lovesick teen that contrasted his lack of educational knowledge with his undying love and devotion to a mysterious lady girlfriend.
The song was first attributed to the pseudonym Barbara Campbell who was Cooke's high school sweetheart.
For me its most memorable lyric was when he confessed that he Don't Know Much about History.
What a sad testament to, not only today's high school students, who if you believe the studies, know virtually nothing about their nation's history.
A few weeks ago the Department of Education released the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which found that only 12% of high-school seniors have a firm grasp of our nation's history.
Their historic ignorance has literally cut them off from the nation's past.
They are akin to a child who inhabits a household with no visual memory...no picture of relatives or a grandfather to present a capsulated version of the past.
These teens the will eventually join the ranks of those immediately ahead of them who have likewise known only their present.
It is the horrible vision of Orwell's 1984 where all historical data subsequently disappears down a deep memory hole, providing its malleable citizens with amnesia for the times when things were done differently.
In a recent interview, published in the Wall Street Journal, noted historian, David McCullough told Brian Balduc that We're raising young people who are, by and large, historically illiterate.
McCullough is dead right on this accusation.
I can vouch for this because my last class at Maryville University in the mid-nineties was so dull that I haven't been back in a classroom since then.
I felt like I was teaching a remedial course so lackluster and uninformed was their general demeanor.
The fact that the liberal chairman of their department confiscated my course on Contemporary U.S. History also was an important factor.
McCullough identifies specific problems with the teaching of history.
McCullough argues that people who come out of college with a degree in education and not a degree in a subject are severely handicapped in their capacity to teach effectively.
This happens because they're often assigned to teach subjects about whom they know little or nothing.
To be a good and successful teacher they must love what they're teaching, he says.
It is a truism that you can't love something you don't know anymore than you can love someone you don't know.
McCullough believes another problem is method.
History is often taught in categories — women's history, African American history, and environmental history — so that many of the students have no sense of chronology. They have no idea what followed what.
He is also upset by the fact that so many textbooks have become so politically correct as to be comic. Very minor characters that are currently fashionable are given considerable space, whereas people of major consequence farther back — such as, say, Thomas Edison — are given very little space or none at all.
During the Balduc interview his eyebrows became raised at his final and most disturbing criticism.
Today's textbooks are so badly written that they're boring!
Historians are never required to write for people other than historians.
McCullough's best know work is his biography of John Adams.
For those who are unaware of his previous existence, he was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and our second president
His most recent book, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (which I'm reading) is the engaging story of young Americans who studied in a culturally dominant France in the 19th century to perfect their talents.
It is as if the nation were mired in a Sam Cooke Syndrome of ignorance that celebrated its detachment from its national past.
This same memory erasure is now evident for the French Revolution, which gave rise to this deplorable sense of induced national Alzheimer's.
Columnist Ann Coulter's latest book, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America can help to fill some of that terrible void.
Their idea of revolutionary change was to rename the months of the year and start the calendar afresh.
Its actual historical antecedents include Pot Pol's Cambodia where the clock of history was rewound and started anew.
It approximated the sentiment of radical Thomas Paine who proclaimed that we have it in our power to begin the world over again.
Paine's history of radicalism is a notable flaw in conservative commentator Glenn Beck choice of Paine as a spokesman for the common sense of the right's views.
Demonic focuses on the French Revolution and its birthing of modern liberalism.
She contends that the French Revolution has introduced a sordid history of political, social and economic changes to Western.
France's Reign of Terror served as the progenitor of the blind hatred of the cultural and religious traditions of the West that dominates modern liberalism.
Today's doctrinaire liberal feels that the 1000-year building blocks of civilization, such as marriage, Christianity, and private property are disposable relics of the past that must be eliminated from the public consciousness.
It is for this reason that many liberal high school and university history teachers don't teach anything about the French Revolution and its sordid history of bloody violence, decapitation and sexual mutilation.
The American left has also given us hate crimes, disparate impact rules, sexists and bigots.
Acts now have become irrelevant. Only ideas count.
People's motives are on trial.
You are presumed guilt of negative thoughts toward and favored minority group of the left's choosing.
But maybe there is hope for the future.
Recently I quizzed my eight-year daughter on her presidents and she could name the 19th president.
Can you?
© Bill Borst
June 29, 2011
When I was a teenager on of my favorite songs was Wonderful World (sometimes referred to as (What a) Wonderful World).
It was written in 1959 by soul music pioneer Sam Cooke, along with songwriters Lou Adler and Herb Alpert.
Wonderful World was the paean of a lovesick teen that contrasted his lack of educational knowledge with his undying love and devotion to a mysterious lady girlfriend.
The song was first attributed to the pseudonym Barbara Campbell who was Cooke's high school sweetheart.
For me its most memorable lyric was when he confessed that he Don't Know Much about History.
What a sad testament to, not only today's high school students, who if you believe the studies, know virtually nothing about their nation's history.
A few weeks ago the Department of Education released the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which found that only 12% of high-school seniors have a firm grasp of our nation's history.
Their historic ignorance has literally cut them off from the nation's past.
They are akin to a child who inhabits a household with no visual memory...no picture of relatives or a grandfather to present a capsulated version of the past.
These teens the will eventually join the ranks of those immediately ahead of them who have likewise known only their present.
It is the horrible vision of Orwell's 1984 where all historical data subsequently disappears down a deep memory hole, providing its malleable citizens with amnesia for the times when things were done differently.
In a recent interview, published in the Wall Street Journal, noted historian, David McCullough told Brian Balduc that We're raising young people who are, by and large, historically illiterate.
McCullough is dead right on this accusation.
I can vouch for this because my last class at Maryville University in the mid-nineties was so dull that I haven't been back in a classroom since then.
I felt like I was teaching a remedial course so lackluster and uninformed was their general demeanor.
The fact that the liberal chairman of their department confiscated my course on Contemporary U.S. History also was an important factor.
McCullough identifies specific problems with the teaching of history.
McCullough argues that people who come out of college with a degree in education and not a degree in a subject are severely handicapped in their capacity to teach effectively.
This happens because they're often assigned to teach subjects about whom they know little or nothing.
To be a good and successful teacher they must love what they're teaching, he says.
It is a truism that you can't love something you don't know anymore than you can love someone you don't know.
McCullough believes another problem is method.
History is often taught in categories — women's history, African American history, and environmental history — so that many of the students have no sense of chronology. They have no idea what followed what.
He is also upset by the fact that so many textbooks have become so politically correct as to be comic. Very minor characters that are currently fashionable are given considerable space, whereas people of major consequence farther back — such as, say, Thomas Edison — are given very little space or none at all.
During the Balduc interview his eyebrows became raised at his final and most disturbing criticism.
Today's textbooks are so badly written that they're boring!
Historians are never required to write for people other than historians.
McCullough's best know work is his biography of John Adams.
For those who are unaware of his previous existence, he was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and our second president
His most recent book, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (which I'm reading) is the engaging story of young Americans who studied in a culturally dominant France in the 19th century to perfect their talents.
It is as if the nation were mired in a Sam Cooke Syndrome of ignorance that celebrated its detachment from its national past.
This same memory erasure is now evident for the French Revolution, which gave rise to this deplorable sense of induced national Alzheimer's.
Columnist Ann Coulter's latest book, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America can help to fill some of that terrible void.
Their idea of revolutionary change was to rename the months of the year and start the calendar afresh.
Its actual historical antecedents include Pot Pol's Cambodia where the clock of history was rewound and started anew.
It approximated the sentiment of radical Thomas Paine who proclaimed that we have it in our power to begin the world over again.
Paine's history of radicalism is a notable flaw in conservative commentator Glenn Beck choice of Paine as a spokesman for the common sense of the right's views.
Demonic focuses on the French Revolution and its birthing of modern liberalism.
She contends that the French Revolution has introduced a sordid history of political, social and economic changes to Western.
France's Reign of Terror served as the progenitor of the blind hatred of the cultural and religious traditions of the West that dominates modern liberalism.
Today's doctrinaire liberal feels that the 1000-year building blocks of civilization, such as marriage, Christianity, and private property are disposable relics of the past that must be eliminated from the public consciousness.
It is for this reason that many liberal high school and university history teachers don't teach anything about the French Revolution and its sordid history of bloody violence, decapitation and sexual mutilation.
The American left has also given us hate crimes, disparate impact rules, sexists and bigots.
Acts now have become irrelevant. Only ideas count.
People's motives are on trial.
You are presumed guilt of negative thoughts toward and favored minority group of the left's choosing.
But maybe there is hope for the future.
Recently I quizzed my eight-year daughter on her presidents and she could name the 19th president.
Can you?
© Bill Borst
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