posted
From OSC's last essay, "If you don't know rudimentary dates like 1066, 1453, and 1492, not to mention more modern dates like 1776, 1789, 1861-1865, 1914-1919, and 1939-1945, then how can you organize your conception of history?"
WW1 ended in 1918 of course. The teacher in me felt the need to correct. Of course I should say that I don't doubt for a second that this is anything other than a typo, and that our favorite authors knows much more history than little old me.
Posts: 94 | Registered: Mar 2004
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The conquest of Constantinople by the Muslims in 1453 is a piece of knowledge I didn't have, but I can't disagree with him on the state of education in the US.
Once, I was reading through the comments posted about videos at filecabi.net. There was a vid of Hinckley's assassination attempt on Reagan, and I couldn't believe how many people said, "This is obviously a fake, because no one ever tried to kill Reagan."
Another vid there was a banned cartoon from WWII portraying Donald Duck as a bumbling Adolf Hitler. One poster inquired why Hitler did the terrible things he did, and another poster replied by saying, "He tried to kill all the Jews because they had all the money, and that went against his communist beliefs." I think I would personally rank this as the dumbest thing I've ever seen on the internet.
Posts: 1080 | Registered: Apr 2006
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As usual it is OSC extrapolating the state of western civilization "Today our academic establishment functions like worms devouring our civilization from the inside," based on the use of a single word by an UNKNOWN and UNNAMED source. The problem is partly that OSC believes himself to be so infallibly insightful, but also that he must consider his readers to be unaccountably gullible, to actually look at that argument and say: "hmm, seems reasonable."
IF he has evidence of the negative effects that the academic culture is having on our civilization, he has picked the weakest, most easily dismissed piece of trivia imaginable.
In fact, the person he is writing about may not even be American, for all he knows (or for all he cares to share with us).
This all fits my criteria for "Mountain, meet Molehill," but that OSC actually thinks these wildly overblown ad hominem attacks sound reasonable and well formulated is just kind of mildly insulting. I say mildly because I don't expect better any more- I'd just kind of hoped he'd stopped all this nonsense a few months ago.
OSC will continue to be frustrated and alienated so long as he assumes that HE, and only HE, is the standard by which all educated people ought to be measured. You'll never hear him talking about anything, or anyone, who seems to know something he doesn't fully, FULLY appreciate, or which doesn't reveal some hidden level of genius he *obviously* already had.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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I don't buy at all Card's theories for *why* people aren't being taught things, and I'm not terribly hung up on specific dates, but for someone to not understand that Constantinople was originally a Christian city, and was in fact the seat of power for the Eastern Roman Empire...well, it suggests that they really don't have much of a grasp of history at all, and if such people aren't exceptions to the norm, it does mean that we have an educational system that is falling down on the job.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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All of which is reasonable, in the context you have given. Yet OSC fails to establish (because it would be conveniently impossible to do so) that the writer was not simply tired when he typed those words, was just misremembering his history (what's known as a brain fart), that it was not just a basic typo- "retook," instead of "took," that the writer was even a product of the American education system in the first place, and finally, that the writer is at all representative of anything.
Given the potential for minor errors (and this qualifies as a minor error) in the copy of a professional periodical writer, who was not even responsible for the research that went into the book, but rather is doing his research on the book itself, the notion that it is obviously or even likely indicative of *anything* important is laughable. OSC can let us know when he's sat down and interviewed 100 college professors and education experts and come to a conclusion based on substantive research. Having read a couple of books about the subject does not qualify him to diagnose society's ills based on one-line examples of copy mistakes. This is hubris.
How about a lambasting of the publishing review industry for hiring sub-par copy writers and reviewers? How about lambasting the individual for being lazy in his research, or simply not doing it, how about lambasting the magazine for failing to properly edit? No, the basis of OSC's point is that society is flawed because of academic elitist crypto-fascist pigs, and so we are presented with mistakes in privately owned magazines.
I don't know- maybe if you don't like the magazine, you shouldn't pay for it. Not every lapse in quality is a sign of the death of western civilization. We didn't hear too much about the fall of western civilization when Sarah Palin was talking about the country of Africa, the health care reform which is also important, and job creation is big also, like, and such as.
THIS MILK IS SOUR! LIFE IS ENDING!
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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I can only speak for the collage I went to. Maybe I just got bad teachers, but the few times any of them ever quoted original sources they were almost always misquoted or taken completely out of context leaving me to track down the complete text so the other students could read what was really written and make their own decisions on what happened.
There are good places to go and learn and bad places. OSC seems to have been exposed to a few schools like the one I went to, so maybe some of you could direct him to some good schools and teachers so he can see that what he sees isn't the rule. Let me know too, I'd love to find a place and people that talks history and not 100% politics. History is the one passion I have in life and I'd like to see people give it the respect it is due.
Posts: 147 | Registered: Aug 2003
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It is puzzling, though, how anyone could make such a silly mistake to say that the Ottoman Empire "reclaimed" Constantinople. No one is REALLY that dumb to teach that in school. (Frankly, I don't expect any school to teach it; I only know a thorough history of Islam in the Middle Ages because my seventh grade World History teacher was a Muslim and was eager to highlight her religion's part in history.) But if anyone was taught anything about the conquest of Constantinople, I can conceive of no way at all that someone would get the idea that it was a reclaim.
So I'm just scratching my head here. It would be pretty undignified if it really WERE a PC-reinterpretation. I'm going to guess, using the most remote obscurities of Occam's Razor, that whoever labeled the picture knew just about nothing about Islamic/Constantinople history, and just thought that "reclaim" was a good word.
Posts: 1029 | Registered: Apr 2007
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What, no lip service paid to the 4th Crusade, without which I doubt Constantinople would have fallen in 1453? After those idiot Europeans sacked the city it never really recovered, and they never would have been able to get inside if the people there hadn't opened the doors and let them in (this refers to the 4th Crusade).
I think without that, the city would have been in much better condition and would have been able to hold out a lot longer.
I think history in general gets the shaft these days in favor of math and science. Don't get me wrong, math and science are infinitely important, but history has value far beyond what you'll do with your career. Especially in a democratic republic, it's all the more important that we have as good an education as possible to make us good citizens, rather than just productive workers, and that requires training to think differently than just scientifically.
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Actually, it is not unknown to use the word reclaim like this. All of the development of arid Western US was called Reclamation. Unless you look back several ice ages, the blossom like a rose desert was not put back to the way it was before. Using the word in that manner it would be correct to say that Constantanople was reclaimed by the Saracens. In my Oxford Universal Dictonary this is defination 3. "to reduce to obedience, tame, subdue"; 3-c "to remove (rude qualities) by means of instruction or culture; to bring (savage people) to a state of civilization"; 3-d "to bring (waste land, etc.) under, or into a fit state for, cultivation". Looks like OCS just needs a bigger dictionary. (or a little more time out west)
Posts: 1167 | Registered: Oct 2005
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But Lyr, you obviously don't go so far as to agree that this particular slip is conclusive proof of anything. As C3P0 points out, Occum's Razor cuts this high-flown theory to pieces.
This is not even close to being about PC history. At worst, the person who wrote this is just misinformed about history in general, and about this particular period of history in particular. I imagine PC history to be reinterpretation, but a reinterpretation of history, no matter how bent, would not credit Muslims with the creation of Constantinople. It might make claims about the style in which Islam was spread, highlighting its pluralism rather than its spread by conquest, but you can't toggle the facts. You can't say that Muslims were the discoverers of America, for instance, because no amount of interpeting would cross the divide between what you want to be real, and what is.
That's why this is a mistake. Just a mistake. Not ideological, not purposeful. Just a mistake. At the very, very worst, it's a lie. But then, it's a stupid lie, because everyone who reads it will know it is wrong. If they don't know it's wrong, and they believe it without checking other sources, then they too are just wrong. Lazy, maybe, possibly stupid, but just wrong. That doesn't an evil conspiracy make.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: All of which is reasonable, in the context you have given. Yet OSC fails to establish (because it would be conveniently impossible to do so) that the writer was not simply tired when he typed those words, was just misremembering his history (what's known as a brain fart), that it was not just a basic typo- "retook," instead of "took," that the writer was even a product of the American education system in the first place, and finally, that the writer is at all representative of anything.
Oh, absolutely. The leaps that Card makes are more than a little ludicrous.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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quote:Originally posted by Mark: WW1 ended in 1918 of course. The teacher in me felt the need to correct.
Then the teacher in you needs to go back to school. The Armistice was signed in 1918; the peace treaties that ended the war and set up the next one were signed in 1919. To attempt to artificially divide off Versailles from the Great War is just silly.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Mark: WW1 ended in 1918 of course. The teacher in me felt the need to correct.
Then the teacher in you needs to go back to school. The Armistice was signed in 1918; the peace treaties that ended the war and set up the next one were signed in 1919. To attempt to artificially divide off Versailles from the Great War is just silly.
I suppose this must be what he meant.
Posts: 94 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
Just out of curiosity, is there ANYONE here that actually believes the US education system and general academic setting is actually on an acceptable level at the moment?
Posts: 1321 | Registered: Jun 2006
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quote:Originally posted by DDDaysh: Just out of curiosity, is there ANYONE here that actually believes the US education system and general academic setting is actually on an acceptable level at the moment?
Short answer: Not me. As far as my experience goes, the two states I've been educated in might have been on an acceptable level at one point but are now going downhill. (Talking public school system, anyway.)
I'm going to rant a bit here but feel free to ignore me. The elementary school I went to actually switched over to a new math system that was about two grades of difficulty below what it had been (I was going to middle school for math by that time but I had to sit in on that class for part of my school day). This year it also cut all of the advanced programs I once attended.
Washington relies on a standardized test called the WASL that every student must pass in order to graduate high school (their version of No Child Left Behind), and teachers have started teaching to the test. I'm not sure what's going on in Arizona, as I'm just here for college, but state Republicans are proposing a 20% budget cut for all K-12 schools ($103 million this year, $800 million next year). A lot of fingers are crossed for a federal stimulus, I can tell you. [/end rant]
Posts: 973 | Registered: Apr 2005
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quote:Originally posted by DDDaysh: Just out of curiosity, is there ANYONE here that actually believes the US education system and general academic setting is actually on an acceptable level at the moment?
Is there anyone who believes that mountaintop preachings about the end of western civilization are acceptable as statements about the US education system? I don't know- education is hard work, and it needs earnest and careful attention. What it doesn't need, frankly, is this crap. When OSC gets around to making thoughtful pleas to the public to do the right thing, rather than blowing his own horn about the fall of the Empire, I'll be there to listen. Really, I will.
But I'll tell you something that does disturb me. What he's doing now is easier.Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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