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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (92183)	4/11/2003 3:05:40 AM
From: kumar	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

The "soldiers" looked pretty clean, and yet said they had left their uniforms back where they were staying...they looked as if they had all just had showers and didn't look dusty at all. On one hand, I wondered if any of them were suicide bombers..as Saddam said he would send out...and on the other hand, I wanted to invite them home for a meal. Most US/UK soldiers I have seen on TV looked pretty clean too. So, the point is ???? these guys have been walking for less than a day. Brent Saddler was the CNN reporter interviewing these folks. They are WALKING from N Iraq to S Iraq. They estimate its a weeks worth of walk. They have no food, no water no money. One of them said "as we pass thru villages and towns, the people there will help us".

To: KLP who wrote (92183)	4/11/2003 10:34:54 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

your students....I've ALWAYS felt the schools, ALL of them at every level, should have MUCH more history than they do! And in particular, American History, and a good deal of World History in the higher grades as well. Studying History does make the students do much more research, and should open their minds to thinking and wondering, if nothing else. Definitely agree, Karen. Many entering college students are very deficient. But they not only need the information, they need to learn the skills to "think" the history they are given. How do you evaluate the sentences in history books which claim to offer the truth, when others offer something else as the truth? How do you evaluate the frame of those same works, when other works on the same period, same country, offer different frames? One problem students have is that they leap from some kind of literalism of the text to a sophomoric version of "all frames are equal." Takes a good while to get them to the point of actually evaluating them and coming to conclusions of their own. I sat next to a teacher/librarian at one of our local Middle Schools last night....where they are trying to cope with students speaking 37 different languages!! That is another story altogether. Sounds a little like my wife's classrooms at City University of New York. Moving those students to the point at which they can think and write well organized thoughts in English is daunting. And funding has been consistently cut for those efforts through the 90s and continues to be so. BUT, while she is quite liberal in her political thinking, she thought as I did, that it would help the children to have a good deal more American History. She "doesn't know why it isn't in the curriculum more...." I can guess, but we didn't go there. My college students tended to be reasonably well versed in US history. (Well, they tended to get a top down approach in high school, but that was better than nothing.) The problem is that, with rare exceptions, they had no exposure to European history, let alone global history. And geography. Forget about it. I think these educational deficiencies partially explain such howlers as almost 50% of the US population believes Saddam had something to do with 9-11.