Too Bored to Care

I teach about social change at Kennesaw State University.  Hence, every term I encounter a familiar problem.  You see, teaching about change involves teaching about history.  Because change takes place over time, the only way to understand how it occurs is to study what happened in the past.

But my students don’t know what took place before they were born.  When I allude to events that transpired more than twenty years ago, they are mystified.  It is as if no one had previously mentioned these.

If I subsequently ask whether they studied history in high school, they admit they did.  Yet they also insist that it was too boring to remember.  At first, I found this strange.  For me, history is fascinating.  I am habitually surprised to discover the real reasons things happened as they did.

So why aren’t the young equally enchanted?   They enjoy learning about the unexpected goings-on of celebrities, so shouldn’t they be captivated by the sometimes raucous shenanigans of our ancestors?

Only recently did I get a clue about their attitude.  Generations of students have contended that history is tedious, but now I got a peek into why they thought so.  It has to do with the way history is currently taught in K-12.

When I was young, the emphasis was on the reasons America is great.  We learned about the explorers, the inventors, and the founding fathers.  We were told how we ended slavery and saved the old world from genocidal wars.  As Lincoln alleged, we were the last best hope of humanity.

Ours was the land of liberty; the font of democracy.  It was where the wretched refuse of other’s teeming shores came to obtain opportunity.  We were rich; we were strong; we were good!

But no more.  Today’s students are taught that our nation was established on a foundation of lies, brutality, and exploitation.  In the very beginning, we stole the land from the natives.  Merely because we were militarily stronger, we illegally massacred them and forced the remnant into subjugation.

After this, we carried Africans away from their homeland and shackled them in cruel bondage.  Urged on by the lash and a fear of death, the slaves built our homes and created our wealth.  To this day, blacks are pressed into poverty and degradation.

The same sort of discrimination was visited upon immigrants and women.  The Irish, the Poles, the Italians, and the Jews were all herded into veritable ghettoes where they were forced to live in squalor and steered into dead-end jobs.  Now it is the turn of the Hispanics.

Meanwhile, women were relegated to domestic subservience.  They were required to be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen.  Of course, ordinary workers fared little better.  They were maltreated by bosses who squeezed every ounce of profit out of their labor.

American history is thus depicted as no more than a cavalcade of vicious injustice.  It is all about prejudice, discrimination and corruption.  It is about the powerful feasting off the backs of the weak.  Where is the inspiration in this?  Why would students take pride in a chronicle of nastiness and despair?

No doubt this narrative is supposed to serve as a cautionary tale.  The young are warned what to avoid so that they can buttress the social justice their forebears so egregiously violated.  Formal education has consequently been converted into a version of sensitivity training.

Not many years ago, when Dr. Frank Dobbin of Harvard visited the KSU campus, he explained that his research revealed why sensitivity training had virtually no effect.  It did not make those who received it more tolerant.  They regarded it as manipulative indoctrination and hence tuned out what was said.  They were too bored to care.

It is apparently the same with my students.  For twelve or more long years, they must endure moralistic scolding.  Routinely told how wretched they are, they lose interest.  History, as far as they are concerned, is compendium of their defects.  Why wouldn’t their attention wander?

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University