A few weeks ago, I was helping mythical gf clean out her classroom, and I couldn’t help but take a little bit of time to look through some of the textbooks that her students used. Obviously, it’s been nearly 20 years since the last time that I had a county-issue textbook to learn from, so I was curious to see just what kind of stuff children are inundated with these days, since the world has for lack of a better term, changed somewhat over the last 20 years.
Now, not a tremendous amount of things were at all that different, since math is math, and the rules of math aren’t ever going to change. However, including the math, the social studies textbook were giant explosions of color and photographic content, that I certainly don’t remember being the case when I was in contemporary education. The text is gigantic, the photos are bold, colorful and honestly visually captivating, as I am sure there are educational experts who do this by design in order for the eyes of young children to absorb them as much as possible.
Naturally, as an adult looking at elementary school-level content, it’s a little surprising to see how rudimentary the subject matter is, but then again I’m 20 years past this point in my education and should know this stuff and thankfully I do. But I think things are meant to be way easier for the kids of today than they were back when I was a kid, with pretty much all key information and subject matter being pre-bolded, pre-highlighted and basically be given to students on a silver platter for testing purposes, without the kids necessarily having to study that much.
However, the point of this whole post really stems from the thought that despite the fact that mythical gf’s class didn’t have any U.S. history textbooks, it really got me thinking about how I’d be very curious to see one today, to see just how educators spin some of the more historic things that have happened over the last 20-30 years, as well as how they describe and try to educate of events that I remember learning about, like all the wars of American history.
This is of course, leading to the inevitable mentioning of the rise and regime of our current president, whom it doesn’t require a lot of imagination to see just how divided the nation is as a result of their ascent. But I’ll admit that I think I’d be fascinated to see just how the educational field treats all of it from the standpoint of teaching children of what was happening in the United States during this time.
Back when I was a kid learning history, it seemed like the units and major landmark points always revolved around wars, presidencies, and international conflicts, with seemingly very few issues happening on the domestic front, save for like The Great Depression. With that in mind, I’d love to peruse through a history book of today, to see how things like the multiple conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest of the Middle East are discussed, as well as all of the presidencies since Bill Clinton.
Shit, I’d like to see how history books talk about Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky, because I didn’t have to learn about history anymore by the time these things started happening in the world. I’m sure they won’t explicitly talk about blowjobs and sex in the White House, but it seems impossible to dodge around the scandal that very much occurred.
Perhaps it’s because I’m an adult now versus the student that didn’t give a shit about history back then, but I figure the most interesting part of history becomes all the elections themselves, and not so much the things that occurred during the actual presidencies. Like how Bush vs. Gore turned into this legal shitshow at the end, Obama vs. McCain was basically a race issue, and then we have Sanders. vs. Hilary vs. Trump in the election pretty much defined by social media and democratic arrogance.
Obviously, as the photo above shows, it would probably be literally impossible to objectively skate around the presidency of 2016-2020, and this is what I’m admittedly most fascinated to see how textbook creators handle this particular regime. And then it dawned on me that with the rise of social media and just how it basically put a man on the throne, I’m wildly curious to know if in future textbooks, children will literally see screen caps of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media outlets, to describe the major happenings of history.
I mean, even the photo above was lifted from the Instagram account of the German chancellor (the female staring down the orange dude), and to me, it looks like a very impactful photo that says more than words can actually describe in body language alone, since it looks like a tense conversation between actual world leaders, with other nation’s leaders looking on with disgust and/or indifference. Maybe this is the kind of stuff that kids of tomorrow will need to learn as the things that shaped our world?
And then there’s the earth-shattering meeting between Twitter’s most insufferably influential users, the President of the United States and… Kim Kardashian. Like, I fully imagine that this particular image of them posing at the desk will be in a history book one day, and I cringe for the children of tomorrow that it might actually be considered essential learning.
I guess I can only hope that the history of today is given the same treatment as the history of tomorrow, as in that it’s boiled down to extremely little, and glossed over. Perhaps some of the less-essential bullet points be omitted outright, and left for children to learn about on their own through independent study, or through college, where the slackers of tomorrow all have the internet and plagiarize everything anyway.
But I fear that as it’s shaped history today, social media will have a profound presence in the future of education, and I dread the day when screen caps of various social media outlets from various deplorable personalities are the basis in which children learn about history. It’s not so much that those who forget things are doomed to repeat things, if they’re not taught correctly, if at all, it’s like not ever learning them in the first place.
