A nation in need of perspective needs kids who know history

It's been a couple of weighty weeks for Tess Adeline Dorman.

Tess, my brainy 12-year old daughter, earned a slot at College for Kids on Coe's campus. When she got her schedule, Tess hit a history trifecta.

The Civil War, the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement.

So how was it? I would say, daily, as her sister and I met her outside Hickok Hall.

'We saw a video on amputation,” Tess said one day, referring to her Civil War course. She went on to describe what she saw, her 8-year-old sister's mouth agape.

'He died anyway,” Tess concluded. 'Can we go to McDonald's?”

So between talk about lunch, softball games and going to the pool, we waded into Josef Mengele's horrific experiments and Bull Connor's vicious dogs. Jim Crow and Adolf Eichmann. Freedom riders and Holocaust survivors, such as the woman who swallowed her family's precious diamonds rather than let the Nazis find them and likely kill her.

Tess, her voice steeped in indignation, read us questions from literacy tests designed to stop black voters in the South from gaining access to a ballot. She wants to read 'The Diary of Anne Frank,” and go to Gettysburg sometime.

Some of it was pretty 'disturbing,” as she put it. But I'm glad history interrupted her otherwise carefree summer.

You can't swing a dead president without hitting some new study or bold initiative stressing the importance of science and math. STEM is the hottest acronym in politics. And it makes perfect sense, considering the world of rapid-fire technological change and global economic competition that our kids are facing. Tess, fortunately, is terrific in math and science.

But I worry about history. I worry every time I hear someone shout into the nearest media megaphone that this politician or that legislation is surely going to 'destroy” America. Our growing lack of understanding of our own history has robbed us of the ability to cool and question such passion with broader perspective. Exit history, enter hyperbole.

It's not getting better. In 2010 the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed just 18 percent of 8th graders scoring proficient or better in U.S. History. It was the worst performance among seven subjects. Only 2 percent of 12th-graders correctly identified that 'separate education facilities are inherently unequal” had something to do with segregation in the nation's schools. Seventy-three percent skipped the question.

A report released in March of this year on state-by-state civil rights education by the Southern Poverty Law Center gives Iowa an F, counting it among just five states 'that neither cover nor support teaching about the movement.”

I know there are great teachers in Iowa working to put some meat on the skimpy bones of Iowa's core social studies curriculum. God bless them. I'm also hopeful when I see innovations such as Iowa BIG, where high school students in Cedar Rapids learn by digging into complex, hands-on, real-world projects, many with strong social studies components.

We should all be thinking about ways to make the past more vital and engaging for our kids. Otherwise, it's the future that may be disturbing.

l Comments: (319) 398-8452l todd.dorman@thegazette.com