Some people forgot the US history that they learned in high school or college...

Parent Cafe
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2017/07/05/npr-tweeted-declaration-independence-some-people-got-angry/451112001/
https://www.voanews.com/a/npr-tweets-declaration-of-independence-triggers-outrage/3930474.html
https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/declaration-independence-tweets/3929884.html
http://www.npr.org/2017/07/04/534096579/a-july-4th-tradition-the-declaration-of-independence-read-aloud
https://twitter.com/NPR/status/882313133863436288

NPR read the Declaration of Independence (a 29 year tradition) and quoted it in ~140 character chunks on its Twitter feed. Some Twitter users apparently thought that (for example) “NPR is calling for revolution” (well, the writers they were quoting actually were calling for revolution, but that was 241 years ago).

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You assume that they actually learned this history…

I doubt the vast majority of high school students have read the Declaration of Independence. Most college students don’t have to take US History and even if they do, they almost certainly will not read it.

History is very poorly taught in this country IMO. We need to teach it in every grade level, not just one year of high school and some fluff stuff before then.

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On the other hand, someone suggested that NPR should next tweet out War of the Worlds to see what would happen. I’m completely in favor of this idea.

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The dumming of America. Very sad indeed. My middle school students would know better.

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Saw jokes on Twitter today that they should tweet the Federalist Papers next.

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Not surprising, what is taught as history in the schools has been either turned into a data dump to be able to do well on some standardized test, or has been so bowdlerized and dumbed down so no one is offended (especially textbook publishers catering to places like Texas), that few people really learn anything about history, instead they learn myth or worse (for example, the notion that during the revolution everyone were these heroic people fighting the British, that everyone supported the revolution, …if that were true the continental army wouldn’t have been so badly supplied, the soldiers would have been paid, and so forth, and you wouldn’t have had those who made fortunes supplying the revolt while refusing to help pay for it).

It is telling that several years ago they did a study where they had people read a ‘series of proposed new laws’ that were basically the bill of rights worded in modern language and disguised, and large percentages of those asked for example thought the first amendment was too liberal and dangerous, thought the 4th and 5th amendments were the work of the ACLU, and so forth…pretty sad.

Not only have we gutted history, but what used to be called civics, the woeful ignorance of how our government works, how laws are made, how the power of the government is divided, is at least in part responsible for what we see today, people outraged at the congress and the politicians, yet the same people willingly support the legislators and executives whose policies they are upset at, politics is kind of like being a consumer, an ill informed electorate like an ill informed consumer is going to be manipulated and fleeced into ‘buying’ something they will regret later.

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This was one thing my HS US History teacher made a point to strongly debunk.

And I already knew from K-8 history classes(Catholic elementary, public junior high school) that there were a substantial minority of Colonial loyalists who were staunchly against the Revolution and fought on King George III’s behalf against the Revolutionaries.

A around a third or slightly more of the population sat on the fence or did their best to avoid the fighting.

One major reason why many suppliers preferred supplying the British during the Revolutionary period was very simple…the British had the fiscal resources to pay them in tangible widely accepted currency of the period whereas the Continental Congress could only pay in paper currency which rapidly depreciated in value*…and that’s assuming they paid their suppliers/soldiers on time which wasn’t the case for months…sometimes even years. Incidentally, this very issue was one of the key issues which caused Benedict Arnold to go over to the British.

  • Where the phrase "Not worth a continental" originated.
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When I sub I see elementary, intermediate, and middle school students learning the histories of various cultures and individual countries. Many students are required to do a report on a country’s history and culture. Students have access to chromebooks and use them to obtain information instantly about a country. Weekly Scholastic Magazines reinforce what they are learning about these various countries.

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Well, for starters, we’re currently living in some pretty politically charged times. People are going to react, and over react, to calls for a revolution far more quickly than they might have 10 years ago.

I’m fairly well educated. I’ve read the Declaration of Independence. I love American History, even as a math teacher. As a kid, I avidly watched every and anything to do with Watergate, and spent the summer of Iran-Contra on the beach with a radio, listening to the hearings.

But I’m not sure I would recognize too many lines from the Declaration of Independence, once you get beyond the opening and the closing. I just googled it-- I’m not sure I could have correctly identified the source of a line like this one: “He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.” If it showed up on Jeopardy, the odds are probably 50/50 that I would get it right.

I think it has become a common game in our country, and perhaps elsewhere, to deride others for not knowing exactly what we know. We push ourselves up by putting others down. And of course, making fun of the generations to follow our own, to think of them as somehow less worthy, less intelligent, less giving-- it’s all great sport for some.

My guess is that the people in the OP know THEIR stuff-- what they need to know in order to make their lives work. And that they would have recognized the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the opening to the Gettysburg Address, and a good part of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech. But if they missed the opening tweets, the ones that readily identified the source of the rest of the quotes, they were reacting to a call for revolution.

But after a while most of us forget things we haven’t used in a while. So, while the Cosine of 45 degrees is a no-brainer for me, I would struggle-- a lot!!-- with the chemical symbol for Manganese.

NPR got lots of mileage-- first, they were Good Americans for posting the Declaration of Independence. Then, they got to make fun of all the others who didn’t have an intern handy to go find them all the actual words.

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The news media has been acting irrationally since the election, with some even calling for a “new kind of reporting”, so it’s no wonder people jump to the worst conclusions when they see snippets of truly revolutionary speech flash by on official twitter feeds.

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Manganese - Mn
Magnesium - Mg
17th Amendment - no clue

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@droppedit --Not trying to be provocative here, but I read/watch a lot of news media, and I really don’t know what you mean by calling for a new kind of reporting by the news media. I’ve mostly seen the usual “claims/evidence” that has always been considered the norm–that’s what journalism is. I’m not sure what would be “new.”

As far as the D of I, I’ve taught it many times as an example of claim/evidence/conclusion–the structure I expect when teaching argumentative essays–so the litany of reasons (the evidence) is very familiar to me.

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@garland – here you go (I used “new” when it was actually “different”):

http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/01/politics/bernstein-calls-trump-presidency-malignant-cnntv/

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Well first, that’s the wording that one (albeit legendary) reporter used in one column. But more importantly, he’s not using “different kind of reporting” in the sense of “call to revolution” as you seem to be implying, but an approach to finding and studying evidence–a forensic study of what’s going on from all levels. Still classic news gathering and reporting. So I still don’t get what your larger point is.

And yeah, there’s a big difference between “new” and “different.”