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Kids do something like 6,000 hours of school-time and schoolwork over the four years of high school, there is plenty of time to do both. Storm of Steel should of course be required reading. I think it would be cool if elite students read the Shakespeare historical plays, watched multiple play versions, and then read the actual primary source history and the secondary source history. You learn the literature, you learn the history, you learn about propaganda and how the magic of storytelling works, you break out of the present and immerse yourself in a world very different than ours.
IMO, it's important to read primary sources and the classics. First, multiple generations have concluded that these sources were edifying, whereas a new book is much more likely to be of low quality that will soon be forgotten (the Lindy effect0. Second, classic sources help you eliminate "presentism" and build a basic common sense and historical grounding for how the world works. It's easy to read a history book in 2023 and have also sorts of current ideologies imposed on the past, you may read about how terrible the patriarchy was and how everyone was secretly gay, etc, but if you actually immerse yourself in primary sources I think you come to a much more complex, interesting, and realistic view about the past. Even if the play itself is fiction, all the assumptions built into the background of the play tell you a lot about the people who created such a play and the people who watched it.
But when talking about reforming high school, the elephant in the room is that most kids should not be in high school, at least not until age 18. If your IQ is around 105, you probably should be done with school once you can write a business letter and know enough math to do some carpentry or double-entry book-keeping for your business. If your IQ is 95, you should be done with school once you can do basic reading and know enough math to make change. Sticking the majority of kids on an academic-heavy track is not doing anybody, any good.
I think Shakespeare’s histories tend to get shelved in US classes, usually in favor of one of the big tragedies. Maybe a comedy if your teacher is feeling motivated.
But also…there might have been a gap in the history classes, too, at least when I was in school. On the AP side, World History covered ancient and classical civs, then sped through the Guns, Germs and Steel approach to colonialism. European conflicts were remarkably absent, though one of the assigned books was Louis Lamour’s Walking Drum. AP US history was obviously not Euro-focused, either. You’d have had to take the specific elective to get enough context for any of Shakespeare’s histories!
Perhaps the non-AP route would have done a better job covering Middle Ages through Renaissance Europe, but somehow, I doubt it.
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It's not just about "how propaganda works", it's about the beauty of language. I think that is what gets forgotten with the "dump English as more than learning to read and write, what use is knowing how to write an essay, it's not a subject like STEM where there's a right or wrong answer, you can just bullshit" attitude.
Beauty, guys. Beauty.
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At least Germany has a pragmatic approach to things, those who can't crack the requirements for a typical white collar job that needs college are put on a different track far earlier in schooling, or simply can opt for that if they feel like it.
There's a lot of disinterest in "tracking" (dividing students by ability groups) in the United States because it makes the racial divides in educational outcomes very obvious. This isn't to say that such things don't exist (most notably magnet schools), but there's also a portion of the political left that attempts to stunt or eliminate such systems: selection to attend Lowell High School in San Francisco, one of the best (public) schools in the city, was switched from an academic basis to a random lottery in 2020. This led to a huge increase in failing grades in incoming classes, and a successful recall election of several school board commissioners in 2022 -- the school has returned to merit-based admissions as of this academic year. Stuyvesant in NYC also sees similar calls to end merit-based admissions from time to time.
Well, there’s also the history of tracking as a tool to dodge Brown v. Board. I’d say that’s one of the stronger cases for racism actually causing disparate outcomes.
More generally, tracking runs afoul of a particular brand of aggressive egalitarianism, and that brings a lot of centrists into the coalition. It’s the same sort of attitude that fuels pushback against charter schools. Americans get really nervous around anything that suggests a class system. Of course everyone should be given the same opportunity. It’s the American Dream!
This mindset may not survive close contact with public schooling, but it absolutely plays into the politics.
Yes, and the incident in junior high that greatly contributed to my becoming a reactionary monarchist (and when I tell people about it, they seem surprised at that, thinking it should have made me a leftist instead) was learning that we still quite clearly have one anyway, all "American Dream" rhetoric to the contrary.
(Most people try to make the system live up to the rhetoric; I say, simpler to make the rhetoric match the reality.)
Interesting: my deep-rooted American egalitarian sentiments do show up occasionally, most recently in a "um, hell no" reaction to rumors that Meghan, Duchess of Sussex was considering running for office in California. Royal titles are cute, but very un-American.
A school administrator told me to my face that, with regards to state education law and their ongoing violation of it in my case, "The law doesn't matter. The law can say whatever it wants," but what matters is what you can get a court to enforce "and I know your parents can't afford a lawyer."
But when a friend of mine was about to be in the exact same situation, except this friend's last name is on a major street of this city and a whole bunch of buildings (including the former mall that is now the school district's headquarters), suddenly they were able to shake loose the supposedly-nonexistent resources to do for him what they couldn't possibly do for me, law or no law.
Because I'm a peasant nobody, and he's local petty nobility. It's that simple. Over two centuries of "the American Experiment" attempting so hard to create a society free of hereditary class in line with those "deep-rooted egalitarian sentiments," and look at how little we've accomplished. Apparently, most people think the response to looking at this utter failure should be the conclusion that we need to double down and try even harder. Me, though? It may be that us autists are apparently resistant to the "sunk cost fallacy" and other common forms of human irrational persistence, or it may just be that I'm personally given to calling it quits on things, but I look at that, and I just see trying harder as "throwing good money after bad," that we should just accept the sunk costs as sunk, admit the goal, however noble, looks impossible, declare the whole "experiment" a failure, write it all off, and just openly acknowledge who are born to which class and how that still matters (will always matter).
No offense, but that's very ... autistic. Sure there's still large differences and resentment is not inappropriate. Especially given the often extreme hypocrisy and prejudice of our woke betters. But nevertheless, it's also important to keep in mind that we did in fact make great advances. My parents come from poor rural super large families (I literally don't know the number of my cousins) and didn't even enter high-school. Nevertheless, they build up a comfortable middle class existence and I'm now a postdoc at a decent university.
My gf, who is also a postdoc, comes from a post-soviet background where they lost EVERYTHING, twice (once her grandparents due to being silesian germans, then her parents due to their entire education not being accepted by west germany, so they were suddenly untrained workers with no private ownership).
We lived together with a thai girl for a while, whos parents most prized possession was ... a donkey I think? Some large animal like that. And they lived in a literal shack. She's now a nurse with, comparatively, amazing living standards in germany.
And so on. Re-introducing monarchy, or even just formalizing classes/castes solves exactly no problems, and in fact just makes everything worse. What we need is an honest perspective on what real privilege looks like, and less (sometimes literally) royal girls lecturing everyone on how they deserve to get special treatment. The current petty woke framework is so popular because it's very easy for even the most privileged to conjure up some kind of oppression. Monarchy, as we have seen in the past, would just make them go "actually, I deserve this", which is even worse.
Read Gregory Clark's The Son Also Rises. Most people tend to both overestimate modern inter-generational mobility (note that wealth/income only partially correlates with social class), and underestimate past intergenerational mobility. Clark argues that, except for the uniquely low social mobility in India thanks to the caste system, intergenerational class mobility has been pretty uniform across periods and societies (where societies are large and complex enough to have stratification, that is), and the present is no exception.
Counterpoint: Toby Young's "The Fall of the Meritocracy." If anything breeds "I deserve this" attitudes among elites — and the belief that the people beneath them deserve their station too — it's the view that they earned their position via "merit" (and those lower are so because they lack merit), and not mostly due to being born to the right parents (a better description of the reality). Whereas, when you openly acknowledge that the people on top are only really there thanks to mere accident of birth, "there but for the grace of God go I." It looks to me like you can't really have noblesse oblige without the noblesse part.
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This is the sort of thing you really ought to get on tape.
This was the mid 1990s, so it would have had to have been literal cassette tape. And usually the type of thing teachers would confiscate if you brought to school.
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