deal of creative energy in getting teachers to waste time and relax
requirements.^6 Teachers acquiesce partly because, as with much day-to-day
resistance during slavery, yielding does not really threaten the system. Day-to-
day school resistance also provides students a form of psychic distance, a
sense that although the system may have commanded their pens, it has not won
real cooperation from their minds.
How could it? Who wants to learn useless minutiae? Every chapter of The
American Journey, for example, ends with two to six pages of “Assessment
and Activities,” mostly stressing twigs. For example, the final chapter has a
“Time Line Activity” that asks students to “place the following events in
chronological order.”
- Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims sign peace agreement to end
civil war - Soviet Union dissolves
- Bill Clinton is elected to first term as president
- Geraldine Ferraro is first woman from a major party to run for vice
president - Iraq invades Kuwait
- Sandra Day O’Connor named to Supreme Court
- Ronald Reagan is reelected president
I defy readers to put these seven events in the correct order without looking
them up. Certainly I can’t do it, and I bet Joyce Appleby, Alan Brinkley, and
James McPherson, whose names are on the cover of the book, can’t either.
Even if they can, what have they accomplished? There is no important causal
or logical connection among most of the events, so there is no reason to
remember which came first. This activity merely asks students to memorize the
order of unrelated occurrences. Even though some items seem connected—
O’Connor and Reagan, for example—on closer examination it is not enough to
know that he appointed her; one must also remember whether he did so in his
first or second term.
Study after study shows that students successfully resist learning “facts” likethese.^7 Indeed, they resist all too well. When two-thirds of American
seventeen-year-olds cannot place the Civil War in the right half-century, or 22
percent of my students reply that the Vietnam War was fought between North
and South Korea, we must salute young people for more than mere ignorance.^8