Relatives of Don Barry,
Your brother, cousin, and uncle Don has written an editorial for our regional newspaper, the Tallahassee Democrat. The subject is higher education, and the article is a hard-hitting, curmudgeonly ballbuster that is guaranteed to alienate assholes, which is a true talent that he always relishes. The article will be easy enough to understand. The editorial won’t make any difference in the world, but it was hellacious fun to write. All the best.
Don
See, it runs in the family.
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Won’t Know Nuthin’ ‘Bout History
By Donald H. Barry
William Faulkner, arguably America’s greatest novelist, once commented on the awesome power of History to shape our present and future world: “The past is not dead; the past is not even past.” Faulkner was merely explaining how our living experience is informed and impacted by long-ago events and developments. In the spring of 2013, however, the governor and state legislature of Florida, in their infinite yet predictable un-wisdom, abolished the requirement that college and university students study even one course of History. This change will be implemented in the fall of 2015. Thus, after one more year, most students in the state will study History, in the word of Poe’s Raven, “nevermore”.
That decision was incredibly thoughtless because the subject of History is the most important one for understanding the entirety of the human experience. It is the only subject, if taught competently, to cover everything—the political, social, economic, military, cultural, scientific, and athletic realities of the world as well as their inter-relationships. Elimination of History can only further dumb down and numb up the American mind even within its “educated class”.
The decision is disastrous also because many college graduates cannot gain employment in the field of their chosen major and specialization, which means that a solid general education becomes crucial in providing the knowledge and versatility to enable them to adapt to different professions and jobs.
Yet our politicians did not act alone in this debacle. Many educational administrators and “reformers” for four decades have presided over the replacement of broad, all-inclusive, comprehensive core courses with narrow, exclusive, popular-culture subjects that appeal to the child-like inclinations of our youths, lower academic standards generally, pass more marginal students, and manufacture more degrees while creating the fiction that America is a better educated society.
The mentality of some top-level administrators, especially at the community college level, was expressed to this professor a few years ago by a prominent dean and division director: “We must become more and more like McDonald’s. The students are our customers, and our duty is to give them whatever they want and to make them happy.” This preposterous notion insinuates that teenagers know what constitutes a good higher education better than professors with decades of teaching experience. Administrators still wield the authority to reinstate a required History course within the students’ choices of general studies in Florida, but so far they have adamantly declined.
Veteran professors with academic integrity often assert that education in America has been done to death by politicians, who insufficiently fund our public institutions, and by lofty college officials, who respond to financial shortfalls with strategies to “retain” more students by hiring easy-grading instructors, harassing or dismissing teachers with rigorous standards, introducing courses that entertain more than educate students, and pressuring for the classroom use of glitzy technological gizmos that dazzle the gullible over verbal articulation.
As a result, community colleges in Florida now annually grant degrees to some graduates who possess elementary-school-level capabilities in reading, writing, thinking, and calculating. Those persons who would challenge this claim lack this professor’s experience of teaching more than 12,000 students in three different institutions with a PhD for forty-five years. Meanwhile, some universities have sold their scholarly souls for big bucks to reactionary, elitist corporate interests by permitting the latter to dictate curriculum, book assignments, professorial hires, and even presidential selections.
The state of Florida has decreed the death of a study of History for most university students, and there is little chance of reversing such a stroke of splendid senselessness. The loudly publicized educational “Race to the Top” has merrily morphed into another “Slog to the Bottom”.
But there is a third culprit in this tragedy. The French political philosopher, Joseph de Maistre, wrote that, “Every nation has the government it deserves.” That comment is also true of educational systems. The fact is that most Americans absolutely refuse to pay the taxes and demand the high standards that could make us a well-educated society. Consequently, our blissful ignorance of the world is highly unlikely to pave the road to a happy future.
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