Authored by a professor at Providence University, this is a very well written essay for those that care about such things. Others might identify it as a diatribe by an angry old man.
https://home.isi.org/exercises-unrealitybr-decline-teaching-western-civilization
Teaching a civ on “Western Civ” has never seemed particularly useful to me. I took one such course as an undergrad and found it to be a waste. 15 weeks to study over 4,000 years of history is a disservice to the teaching of history IMO.
As for being diverse, reading from a Spanish author 400 years ago would certainly count as diverse among the students I know. They just are tired of reading books by white anglo-saxon men and only them.
For what it’s worth, I went into US history despite finding US history incredibly boring. Even if I were forced to teach early US history, I’d be 1- useless and 2- bored and therefore so would my students. So, in my courses, we teach a small subset of history and we dive in deep to that period. THAT is what got me hooked into history… not the way K-12 teaches it where were skim over huge swaths of time and are expected to know exact dates like they’re relevant at all.
I’m in the camp of a diatribe by an angry old man. I think his version of what history is is falling by the wayside and I, for one, have no problem with that. Sure, these courses should still be offered for those who want them but I don’t find them useful.
I’m also in the camp of “he’s exaggerating” about the students, but hey- it makes for a “good” rant.
I totally agree ^ I am a government major/poly scie major. I absolutely avoided taking classes that said you will learn the history of this ________ from the era ______ to now or something. I found those to be such boring classes. I am a huge geek for war history. It’s what I like about it, and reasons I took government as I liked to see how the government or countries acted during those times. I don’t know I hate k-12 structure, half of it is super boring, but it is what it is.
Most colleges have plenty of classes about different aspects of Western civilization, including everything he mentions in the fifth paragraph, so this is really a question of what should be required for general education. Everyone has different interests (for example, I would really enjoy a big-picture class about Western civilization, but I can see that a lot of people wouldn’t), so how can schools create a general education program that gives everyone some common ground without alienating anyone?
Also, if students are studying Western civilization less, it’s probably due to careerism more than anything else. Despite the hand-wringing, it’s not like people are earning “studies” degrees in spades either. The most popular major is business.
One other thing to think about is one reason for diatribes like the one above is due to anger from some in his field and their proponents that they no longer have as much of a monopolized captive audience in their college courses/K-12 curricula as they did a few decades ago.
Whereas even recently some respectable/elite colleges mandated all college students take a Western Civ course regardless of major or history concentration of actual interest, there is now more of an allowance for students to substitute other history/social science courses which they may have more of an interest.
For instance, some can take other history courses to fulfill the requirement ranging from histories of foreign civilizations to that of technology(History of the Automobile or Aviation are two courses popular among STEM majors at a few universities I know of).
In short, this author sounds like someone who doesn’t like the fact students have and are demanding greater variety of choices in history/social science courses beyond Western Civ. Yes…I’m in the camp of him being an angry bitter Prof.
And I say this as someone who not only enjoyed taking an equivalent of Western Civ…but also substitute taught a part of it at a Community College for an adjunct friend who had a family emergency. Enjoyed covering the chapter on the Roman Empire to 2 1 hr sections of 50-70 students each.
And no surprise…the essay is residing on a partisan conservative website.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the college curricula teaching Western Civ in the current manner has only been around for around a century.
Before that, the older college curricula followed the old classics pattern where EVERY undergrad* was mandated to learn the classics IN THE ORIGINAL Ancient Hebrew, Greek, Latin, etc. Not read them in modern English translation.
In fact, most of what was taught in US/Western Universities and the manner in which it was taught up until the late 19th/early 20th century would be quite alien to most current undergrads or those of the last several decades**.
Incidentally, the idea of a core curriculum in which Western Civ is taught as a component only came about sometime at the end of WWI. Not a longstanding tradition dating back to the founding of the American Republic or further back…to the dawn of the founding of the first Western universities/colleges.
** Possible exception being students at St. John’s College except I don’t think the language requirements are as extensive as they were in the old classics pattern.
These backward professors just do not understand how to properly teach Western Civilization. Instead of studying dead White men they should teach courses about dead White women, gays and lesbians and their courses will be big success. For example, when they teach the history of England they will concentrate on Elizabeth I and Marie Stuart and then fast forward to Queen Victoria. Fast forward feature is valuable and should be used more often. The most prolific French author of the 19th century had black heritage. Grandfather of the Father of Russian Literature was born near the lake Chad and the most well-known Russian composed was gay, etc… There is a lot to study in a properly designed Western Civilization course.
Dead white men, even Anglo Saxon ones, ARE diverse.
I wonder if most undergrads and their parents…serious classics majors excepted want to return to the old classics pattern college curriculum where they’re all mandated to learn Ancient Hebrew, Greek, Latin, etc to the level of proficiency that they can read the Western Classics curriculum in the ORIGINAL WITHOUT TRANSLATION.
When they did away with that in the early 20th century, many conservative academics/alums of the day decried the change as “diluting what it meant to be college educated”.
FWIW, at Providence COLLEGE (not university), all students take Development of Western Civ for 4 semesters, so it’s not 4000 yrs in 11 weeks.
And that is how we end up with students ignorant of basic history like in the following video filmed at Texas Tech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRZZpk_9k8E
At least they know who Snooki is.
If one waits until freshman year of college to teach basic history, that’s just like trying to shut the barn door long after the horse has ran off…
And even assuming the K-12 educrats and state/local politicians are up to the task…which I have severe doubts considering local/regional politics tends to get in the way.
One example of this was an account of how one HS history teacher was scolded and disciplined by the regional schoolboard for covering the US military interventions in Haiti in the early 20th century because it was deemed by conservative schoolboard officials and local politicians feelings it’s “offensive” to military families in the area. They weren’t even necessarily offended by the way that part of US history was covered…BUT BECAUSE IT WAS COVERED AT ALL.
regarding the @Zinhead 's video of people with a poor grasp of seemingly basic historical facts, I recall a term from another thread called steel manning that really challenged my modus operandi. It means seeking out the best argument of the other side and then wrestling with it, rather than its opposite which would be “straw manning” or attacking the low-hanging fruit
I realize that it’s easy to look at carefully crafted video compilations or FB memes or the bajillions of other click bait sensory inputs that assault us minute by minute (especially in this political season) – but I’m going to try to reform and stop engaging those.
It’s easy to snort at a video – it’s more difficult to really try to understand what is the “other side’s” best argument and try to attend to that.
There is no canon anymore, no commonly agreed upon body of knowledge that means one is an educated person. That did exist not all that long ago. I think the confusion that resulted contributed to the decline of the humanities, but in the end, quite some years from now, it will be seen as a good thing. The teaching goals mirror changes in society, and in some ways, contribute to them.
What was considered “canon” wasn’t monolithic, but was always changing over time even within the first century of the American Republic.
For instance, the teaching of Western Civ in the way we understand it now only started to become popularized after WWI and was considered “Modern” by Oxbridge as late as the 1920s.
Also, while William Shakespeare’s plays are considered highly respectable classics over the last century or so, they weren’t regarded nearly so much back in his day or some years afterwards.
In fact, when Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans won the English Civil War and beheaded Charles I, they actually BANNED and DESTROYED the very theater upon which Shakespeare’s plays were staged along with many others because they felt it was an affront to their religious sensibilities.
Only the restoration of Charles II and the elimination of the Puritan’s political influence brought Shakespeare and his plays from hiding.
The destroyed Globe Theater wasn’t rebuilt until 1997.
It’s actually really tough to figure out how Shakespeare’s plays were viewed during his lifetime. They were definitely considered excellent, though. I’d also argue that “classics” can only appear over time, and that even works that are widely hailed in their own time don’t always stand the test of time. At any rate, Shakespeare’s plays were extremely popular and respected and his poetry was certainly considered to be of very high quality during his lifetime.
As for the Puritans, well, that’s what they did.
The problem was even if his plays were popular as they were in his lifetime and sometime after, once the Puritans seized political power, they were effectively suppressed and thus…went underground.
And popularity doesn’t always correspond with being regarded as respectable within the academic or official establishment of the period.
One example from Chinese literature is The Dream of Red Chamber/Story of the Stone which is currently regarded as such a notable literary classic in Chinese lit in China and abroad that there’s an entire subfield devoted to the study of that one novel.
However, despite it being extremely popular during the lifetime of the author and sometime afterwards, back in the day(~18th century), it was regarded by the prevailing establishment as a “lowbrow guilty pleasure” similar to reading a “Penny Dreadful” or a Dime novel in the 19th century Britain/US…or in a more modern context…reading the National Enquirer in the print newsmedia context. Especially if the one doing the reading is a member of the educated establishment as many of the readers of Red Chamber were back in the day.
Aside from a few 17th century snoots, it [looks like a pretty unbroken chain](Timeline of Shakespeare criticism - Wikipedia) of critical adulation to me.
I’m in the cranky old man camp. I had to take two semesters of western civ from the history department simply because the dean of my department (NOT history) thought it was good. He was from Greece. He was biased. We had plenty of “distribution requirements” and could have been trusted to choose well from among them to round out our liberal arts education. I would not have chosen those two semesters of western civ, which was a huge class in a huge lecture hall. 6 credits wasted.
There is no universally agreed-upon “fleet” of works that all educated people are expected to have studied. There are atomization and tranches of knowledge. In general, 18-year-old college first-years know very little about world history. I have to give a potted lecture about X at the beginning of every literature class. My students do not know anything about the Reformation or the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution or the Cultural Revolution (or even the Vietnam War or the summer of love). They are very, very ignorant. They do know, however, about all the latest debates about transgender rights or the legalization of marijuana.