Battles in American History reveal key flaws in our education system | Katherine Kelaidis

no Part of Trump’s 2.0 agenda reveals more about the administration’s ideological intentions, while the ongoing efforts to adhere to the “pro-American” version of history. It is an effort to take many forms, including Recent letters The White House sent to the Smithsonians to announce that it would review the National Museum’s half-memorial day plan.Ensure consistency with the Presidential Directive To celebrate American exceptionalism, eliminate division or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions. “This is just the latest move A wider range of movement Command the historical memory of the country, Activities reflected in the state assembly and School affairs across the countrythe history course has become the central front of cultural warfare.

Unfortunately, the battles of the past – how we should understand it, and more importantly, how we should teach it – are conflicts that most Americans today are not prepared for. This is because over two generations, the American education system systematically devalued the liberal arts and supported career-oriented STEM education. By doing so, we have failed to achieve the main goal of democratic education: to create citizens capable of engaging in the difficult work of autonomy. Of course, vocational training and STEM education are crucial to personal livelihood and national prosperity. But when they become the sole focus of education, at the expense of liberal arts, they make citizens unprepared for the demands of democratic life.

Liberal arts get its name from Latin Ars Liberaliswhich actually means “the trade skills of the free people”. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, more importantly their Enlightenment worshippers, citizenship was a kind of trade, like any craft that required a profession that required a specific skill. The skills required by citizens include critical thinking, a kind of speech and historical literacy. Importantly, historical literacy means not only remembering dates and facts, but also the ability to evaluate arguments, weigh the interpretation to evidence and connect the past.

The decline of the humanities also led to the collapse of empathy in American society. Literature and history, in particular, have cultivated the ability to see the world through the eyes of others. Of course, compassion can be learned in other ways, but the humanities have unique powers in different societies where civic life depends on the compassionate ability of people who are completely different from ourselves.

that’s why Trump administration Its allies zeroed in on historical education. They know the enemy that free and compassionate society always knows: people who understand the content on the historical page are harder to oppress and harder to coax cruelty.

They hope to present advocacy to ensure that the critical thinking, compassion and perspective fostered by true history education is rejected by American students. It’s an education for American students that have been denied for a long time, which is why the American public is so vulnerable to the escalation of this administration.

Initially, public education in the United States was not a creation to empower students with “work skills”, because today there are many people on both sides of the political aisle that believe in you. Teaching the skills necessary for a particular profession, which has long been critical to economic health, is seen as a responsibility of private businesses and industries, which directly benefits from a trained workforce. Publicly funded schools exist to ensure that students will have the skills required to participate as a republic responsible citizen. Therefore, the liberal arts, including history, is at the heart of the curriculum.

This began to change in the late 1950s, as Cold War paranoids drove the shift in education focus to science, mathematics, technology and engineering, aiming to prevent the United States from lagging behind the Soviet Union in these regions. These themes will eventually gain additional appeal over the next 60 years, as changing economic winds seem to indicate that the career prospects of the rapidly expanding “technology” sector are the best guarantee for a stable (if not a prosperous) future. The facts that future employment prospects even consider prove the fact that another, less often changes occur.

Our understanding of education is transforming into the idea that every part of the curriculum must have a direct economic utility perspective. Whether it was someone who realized this at the time, or the dangers and unconsidered changes to the fundamental goals of education, it assumed that the assurance of economic prosperity required more public attention and public funding than the protection of political freedom.

It was a gamble that cost us a huge price. Many of us are becoming increasingly vulnerable to foreign propaganda, and the reasons for “fake news” and simple bad arguments are easily explained by the fact that many American courses simply teach students how to think critically and deprive them of important historical and geographical information they can discover when they are deceived.

One of the greatest ironies of our time is that the economic benefits of STEM education have proven to be a fantasy. It is now clear that in a generation, many non-research-based STEM work (and many research-based STEM work) may disappear in front of AI. The public without liberal arts education may simply lack the imagination to get rid of economic reordering. We will replace our freedom with prosperity, and ultimately nothing.

But it’s not too late. Maga’s attack on history may be the boundaries on the beach – the moment we recognize that we are almost lost. The most reliable way to defeat the dark forces that are gathering in our politics at present is to make education achieve its true purpose again: to prepare freedom for citizens. The liberal arts have always been at the heart of the task. If we want to be freelance people, we have to restore them to their due location as the American Education Center.