student obtain and read” it, indeed—most adults have never read a four-
hundred-page poem in their lives, and if one did, how does one respond to it in
two paragraphs?^53
Other questions are mindlessly huge. The Americans, for example, asks:
“How has location influenced the history of your city or town?” Now, that’s
quite a question. A PhD dissertation might make a good stab at answering it.
Quite an assignment for someone just starting a course in American history.
Next it asks, “How have the characteristics and concerns of your region
changed over the last generation?” Again, quite a question. If we think about
answering it for the South, we realize how formidable the question is. Yet the
South is America’s most defined region. To define the “characteristics and
concerns of the Midwest” would be still harder, let alone assess how they have
changed. What could these authors have in mind? Nothing, I submit. Someone
decided that the page would look better with questions on it; someone else
supplied them; but they aren’t meant to be answered. Unfortunately, questions
like these encourage students to conclude that idle speculation amounts to a
form of learning.
When questions aren’t mindless, often they are mind-numbing. Several
books have the annoying habit of ending every photo caption with a question.
Consider this question in The American Journey under a photo showing Hitler
at a Nazi rally: “What group especially suffered from the Nazis?” Three inches
above the photo, the text tells of Hitler’s “extreme anti-Semitism.” If “groups”
had been asked in the plural, the question becomes more interesting, with
additional possible answers such as the Rom people, socialists, homosexuals,
and others. All Journey wants, however, is for students to mutter “Jews.” The
Americans dots its margins with questions headed “Main Idea.” Next to a
paragraph telling why women organized the National Organization for Women,
for example, is the question “What prompted women to establish NOW?” All
students need to do is rewrite the paragraph in their own hand, and lo! they are
studying history!
Even when the question is interesting, too often the desired answer is self-
evident, hence boring. Holt American Nation provides the quotation reprinted
in Chapter 6 from the Chicago Tribune responding to Mississippi’s “Black
Codes”: “The men of the North will convert the State of Mississippi into a frog
pond before they will allow such laws to disgrace one foot of soil in which the
bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves.”That