“In the wider public debates about what students ought to know about the past, it is content knowledge that most animates these discussions.”
In the article, there is a question asked by a freshman on what part of the nation’s history should be studied, George Washington or Bart Simpson? The quote I pulled from the article implies that the students should be given the true facts and importance of these to understand why they happened and how it affects different things.
“The ‘ours/yours’ debate takes on such a great urgency because we tend to believe that history serves a very important function in the process of nation building.”
A debate that is still happening to this day and continues to be divided. There is an importance on what goes into building a nation but does not have any correct answer on what was most important. There are still questions that need to be asked such as “What values are used to create a nation? How much contribution did each group give to create it? Would these methods be used again as justification for something else?”
“Knowing facts about the past so the present can be improved is especially important to many students because they also believe that history regularly repeats itself…”
It is amazing how much people use the quote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” when it seems to happen almost every day. We all remembered what happened that started the Great Depression, which was bank failures and the stock market crash of 1929. Then nearly 80 years later, the 2008 financial crisis happened. It’s not to say that we cannot learn from the mistakes of our past, but instead need to take caution when facing these problems that happened to us before.
