Geeking the Library

I Geek Schooners. I Geek Beekeeping.I Geek Worms. If you live in Georgia, you may have seen those great posters. Being a bit of an oldie, I had to figure out that geek, used as a verb, means to be passionate about, or obsessed with a subject. Historians, by their nature, are obsessives, and that obsessiveness tends to spill over into our amateur interests: My geeks (if you will) have included baking, the music of Edward Elgar, and (lately) vintage postcards.

Without libraries, geeking is not just expensive, but impossible. At some point, usually early in the process of geekery, one's need to know everything about a subject demands that one consults books--and not just those that Google has so helpfully uploaded, bless them.

Geeks need libraries. And America needs geeks. Do I really need to give examples? Okay, then: Bill Gates. Thomas Edison. Julia Child (yes, I just saw the movie, thank you.)
More than that, geeking adds soul to every life: Our passions define us, entertain us, soothe us, and make us happy.

But why a campaign about geeking?
Folks, America's libraries are in huge trouble. Nationwide, we're seeing slashed hours and services, even closed libraries. Before public libraries, libraries belonged only to the wealthy (a point I make in Book 2, by the way.) The web has helped democratize information, but we cannot rely on it: In-copyright books remain accessible only through our public libraries, which are essential to our democracy.
Did you know that the operating revenue per head for libraries in America is just $35? And that, to our utter shame, it is only $20 here in Georgia?
$16 comes from local sources
$3 from state sources
$0.08 from federal sources
$1 from donations and fees.
We need to make sure that, here in Georgia and throughout America, our local governments stop cutting library budgets. Even during the boom years, the budgets were lean: This is a question of priorities, not resources. To find out how you and your community can help, please visit www.geekthelibrary.org
Oh, and by the way? The Geek the Library Campaign is brought to you by OCLC, and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, not frpm library budgets because, trust me, your library can't afford it. Please spread the word in your community, and I'll do the same right here in Snipesville.

Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education? Oh, Great. Not.

I know I'm not alone in being deeply disappointed with, indeed angered by, President Obama's appointment of Arne Duncan as secretary of education. Here's a man from a privileged background (the private University of Chicago Lab School, which was full of faculty kids like himself, followed by Harvard), who has never spent a day as a teacher, whose "qualifications" are in the dubious fields of educational policy (the sort of rubbish that explains why we're in a mess to start with), and whose Wikipedia bio gives us many anecdotes about his basketball playing and coaching prowess, with nothing to indicate that this is someone who gives an iota of a damn about the humanities.
His early pronouncements do nothing to reassure me, starting with his suggestion that we ought to compare our education system with those of India and China, with the implication that ours will be found wanting.
Excuse me?
Last time I looked, Chinese education still betrays its roots in Confucianism and in the depressingly authoritarian culture that has been China's Achilles heel from the first Emperor to the present. It values mindless obedience and memorization. I don't care if it creates jobs (Yeah, great, let's all live in factory dorms, and get up early for calisthenics.) And India? Don't get me started. Hey, what happened to Japan, who, we were told twenty years ago, had a school system that supposedly guaranteed a national economic success story? Notice how we don't talk about that anymore. And anyway, lying behind the suggestion is an obsession with churning out workers: The last thing America (and that includes its economy) needs is for the education system to become more job-obsessed and less conducive to creativity.
Nobody knows better than I how badly off our schools are. But Arne Duncan's prescriptions (a longer school year and yet more bloody tests) is NOT the answer. It's OK for the President, whose kids go to one of the country's finest schools, but it is NOT okay by the rest of us. Many parents--me included--have voted with our feet, and taken our kids to private schools or, as in my case, are reluctantly homeschooling them to save them from the worksheet purgatory that is elementary education. Nothing that Arne Duncan has said will speed my child's return to public schools, or slow the exodus of committed teachers, for whom June, July, and August are the only things standing between them and mental breakdown.
Let's hope for as little damage as possible to an already disastrous system. And wake me when he's gone.

Save a School: Dump the Bureaucrats

Sandra Tsing Loh, one of America's funniest and most astute writers, points out in today's NY Times that the American upper middle classes, like the Obamas, who send their kids to private schools, have no idea what is going on in public education. Agreed, but given that many parents who are not quite as engaged as Tsing Loh don't get it either, I would argue that what is most essential is that teachers reclaim (and be allowed to reclaim) their professional status. Part of that must involve drastically limiting the bureaucrats' influence.
(As an aside, years ago, as an undergrad, I spent a summer sitting in a superintendent's office in California working on my research project on the history of high school fraternities. Over those few months, I was witness to more inane conversations than I had ever heard in my life among the district administrators: Their main qualification seemed to be being overconfident men: They certainly didn't seem to have much going on up top. One of them, disturbingly, went on to a career in high places.)

My E-Mail To President-Elect Obama

..or, more accurately, to his campaign staff, sent via Change.gov. I'm expecting my appointment as Secretary of Education any day now.


Merit pay is an extraordinarily bad idea, and the idea stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the teaching profession. I resigned this year from a tenured job in Georgia as a university historian of early America, after 12 years of misery arising from the toxic atmosphere cultivated in large part by merit pay. It rewards cronyism and cynical tactics (such as teaching to tests, no matter how inane), while demoralizing the very creative people we must attract to teaching.
I have talked to many, many K-12 teachers (including as a presenter at the Georgia Council for Social Studies last month), and I have come away convinced that policymakers won't make a difference until they understand some hard truths:
1. Policies like merit pay often seem to be designed around a mythical figure akin to Reagan's welfare queen: Someone who might resemble the Ben Stein character in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, who bored his students with the monotone recitation of arcane facts.
But most teachers are women, and they don't go into the profession for the money. They consistently spend their own cash on their job, and otherwise go above and beyond, many of them doing the thankless but crucial work of teaching elementary school, where a love of learning must be cultivated if we are to change anything They are experienced, which matters, and they are rightly pissed off at being blamed for the failures of society, families, idiot administrators and senseless curriculum.
2. Policymakers either don't examine or fail to understand curriculum. Have any of you actually looked at the state curricula in subjects like social studies? Everywhere, it favors the pursuit of trivia that only the die-hard old boys favor--it certainly bears no resemblance to the interests and emphases of professional historians, and it doesn't work in elementary school. Teachers are leaving because--heads up--teaching this nonsense to bored kids for the sole purpose of passing a meaningless test is soul-destroying.
3. Policymakers consult idiot administrators, college of education people, and even union heads. They rarely talk with teachers in the trenches, or with the college faculty who have to somehow try to teach the demoralized and apathetic graduates of our public schools.

Historic Crisis

Over the past few days, I've been thinking: Not so much about how history applies to the economic crisis (although it certainly does), but rather about how the economic crisis may affect public history and the historical profession.
This summer, I resigned from my academic job after twelve years. I was disgusted with my "university" (the quotation marks are well deserved, believe me), and not much more pleased with the direction of the profession in general. Too much, universities have come to reflect the ethos of the last thirty years: An emphasis on personal ambition over public service, a tendency for those at the top --in this case, rapacious college administrators--to make utterly unreasonable demands on those in the front line--faculty--for their own personal aggrandizement. Within my department, the vicious politics of academe had taken a particularly mean-spirited form. Teaching and service were contemptuously dismissed as the preoccupation of mediocre schoolmarm-like professors (read: most women), while research, no matter how poorly-conceived, ill-funded, and inconsequential, was, we were told and told ourselves, of paramount importance. I was witness to the cavalier dismissal of undergraduate education more times than I care to recall, despite the fact that we were a third-rate college with a laughably inadequate graduate program, so that even by the parochial standards of research universities, our efforts in that direction were moot. I loved my work, teaching, service, and, when I had time to do it, research, but it was all too much. Fortunately, unlike too many of my colleagues,I was able to quit.
But now, all the rationalizations that upheld a sick system are no longer in place. With a declining economy, colleges like mine, with pretensions to research grandeur and minimal resources, will either have to back off or will push their faculties past the crisis point. As meaningless make-work jobs disappear, they will take their concomitant vocational degrees (communication studies, anyone?) with them.
The worthlessness of vocational BAs has been a pet peeve of mine since I railed against them as (yes!) a journalism major: Now, it is about to become painfully obvious. Young people who have been encouraged to pursue the big bucks and the toys they buy at the expense of an inner life will find they have been cheated twofold: Once, because their expensive but strangely valueless degrees will no longer give them automatic entree into the world of work and twice, because once the trips to the mall and expensive vacations dry up, they will find they lack the resources to entertain themselves and intellectually enrich their lives.
Public history will also, I predict, be sorely tested. Gone will be the funds and high admission prices that fund fancy displays and technology. But demand will climb, at least for the right kind of public history that engages its audience, and doesn't charge much (or anything) for the privilege.
If the right kind of people are involved in creating public history (and that's a big "if") and if rigid bureaucracy doesn't interfere (an even bigger "if"), those of us involved in public history and in teaching history will discover that, in hard times, the public will embrace imagination, creativity, and human connection with the past.

Georgia Social Studies Test Fiasco, Part 2

The president of the Georgia Council for the Social Studies has issued an announcement about a hastily-proposed revision of curriculum following the disastrous results of the multiple-guess test administered to middle schoolers this spring.

Honestly, without a great deal of autonomy for classroom teachers in choosing curriculum to cover, and without essay exams (the sine qua non), I'm not sure that tweaking will work.

I always remember asking my British history teacher in the Seventies to show me the syllabus for the "O" level exams we took at age 16. With great solemnity, he pulled a chunky book off his shelf, opened it, and passed it to me. As I recall, the entire Government-created syllabus was "English history, 1066-Present." That was it.

How did this work? On the day of the exam, we all received booklets of essay questions, and we flipped through them until we reached the areas we had covered in class, then picked out three we wanted to answer. While imperfect, this system allowed teachers to teach to their strengths and interests, and for us to learn in depth, which also meant learning a passion for the subject and the critical thinking skills that come with it.

And as for periods we didn't cover? Did we remain forever ignorant? Sometimes we covered them earlier or later in our school careers...and, by the time our formal education ended, we had been equipped with the enthusiasm and knowledge to pursue whatever interested us on our own, then and later. For the record, I taught myself American history for pleasure in my mid-teens, and now have a Ph.D. in it, a subject we barely covered at school. Contrast that with my college students, who have been repeatedly force-fed broad surveys in American and World history, and arrive in my classroom without a clue or a care.

All that said, I have asked a few Georgian colleagues to work with me to create and submit our sixpence worth to the proposed revisions in the Georgia social studies curriculum. Meanwhile, here's the text of the GCSS email:

"As social studies educators, we often long for more attention to be given to our disciplines – more emphasis in the classroom, more support by administrators, and more attention by the public. Though the circumstances are not what we necessarily would have desired, social studies has certainly been “in the news” around our state for the past few weeks. Many of us were disappointed with the performance of our 6th and 7th graders on the CRCT this spring; there clearly were problems in our curriculum and our testing program that needed to be addressed.
The State Department of Education took immediate action by forming a committee of social studies teachers, supervisors, state DOE leaders, and college faculty that worked tirelessly during late May to revamp the curriculum for 6th and 7th grade. I’d like to thank these individuals for giving their time and expertise to this task. Such decisions are not easy to make and require both debate and compromise. The results of their work were presented to the Social Studies Advisory Council in early June, where further discussion took place and further changes were suggested.
In addition to the extensive changes made to the 6th and 7th grade GPS, the standards for grades 3-5 and grades 8-12 also underwent a scheduled Precision Review this spring. The proposed changes for these grade levels are relatively minor in most cases, often rephrasing or rewording standards and elements for the purpose of clarity and better alignment.
Now, here’s the exciting part for us as GCSS members! ALL of the proposed revisions that I just mentioned (grades 3 through 12) are now posted on the DOE website for public comment. This is your chance as a social studies professional to voice your opinions about the proposed changes and to help shape the state social studies curriculum. The period for public comment will continue through early August. I strongly encourage you to participate in this process! Your comments and suggestions are vital to the process of finalizing the proposed revisions before the state Board of Education votes on them in August. Go to www.georgiastandards.org and click on Social Studies to view the revisions and submit comments."

Wot, No Fun British History Books For Bored American Kids?

So much for globalization.

I created a short list of recommended summer history reading for my local independent bookstore, the amazing Book and Cranny. Among my suggestions were Terry Deary's Horrible Histories, a marvelous (and phenomenally successful) British series that is listed with major online booksellers in the U.S.

Silly me. I thought this meant it would be no problem for Debbie the bookseller to stock a few of the titles.

Boy, was I wrong. Turns out, she would have to forfeit the standard booksellers' discount of 45% for a measly 25%, assuming a title was available at all, because most of the books have to be imported from the UK. Since Debbie has to pay her rent, and bookstores are hardly places of great profit, I couldn't ask her to take a hit. We settled on ordering Horrible History of the World (mysteriously re-titled Wicked History of the World for the U.S. market) and the Horrible History Pirates' Handbook, the only two titles available at standard rates on this side of the Atlantic.

I do wonder why these books are so hard to find

I doubt very much that demand is low because American kids wouldn't enjoy the series: My son and several of his friends love it to bits.

Perhaps the problem is that American parents may be shocked by a history series that cheerfully tells of heads being chopped off, and other ghastly subjects that kid adore. Certainly, there are a couple of easily-shocked adults who have vented their spleen in Amazon reviews…But it's not clear that all the critics are in touch with what kids really like. Moreover, American parents have staunchly defended the titles, and praised them for their humor and lively approach to history.

Some years ago, there was an effort to launch an American Horrible Histories brand, with a book on Columbus that…wasn't very horrible at all. In fact, it was rather dull.

Fascinatingly, many of the Horrible History books are readily available in the U.S., but only in Spanish. I'm guessing this means they're big in Latin America, and so can easily be trucked here. Does this mean that Latin American parents have a better appreciation of good kids' history, and that the cultural differences in publishing between Britain and Peru or Mexico are not as great as those between Britain and the U.S.? But I'm just guessing wildly.

Still, I am encouraged that at least two of the titles are available here, but concerned that they aren't much promoted, and hard to find. Let's see how The Book and Cranny does with the two titles in a small, conservative town in Georgia. I'll keep you posted.

What’s History? A Random Ramble.

Working on my second children's novel recently, I keep on thinking about a comment from an Amazon customer who praised my first book for reviving her son's interest in reading (hooray!) but who also criticized it for not having as much history in it as she had hoped (Not hooray. Hmm.)

I really, really wish I could ask her for more feedback.

This was an extremely interesting comment, because I hadn't heard it before from anyone, not even the three academic historians, other than myself, who read the book in draft. I asked one of those historians, what to make of it. Without being unkind or patronizing, I promise, she said "Oh, she doesn't understand what history is."

That's the sort of comment that understandably rankles people, so let me explain.

We often use the word "history" generically. We use it to mean "the past."

A building becomes "historical" by virtue of its age, regardless of whether it is genuinely of interest in terms of architecture, social history, or political history.

Even the most tedious chronicler of the past can dub himself a historian without being challenged, so that very, very boring and/or unrepresentative people and books become the public face of history.

In too many high schools and, I'm ashamed to say, in all too many colleges, what we call "history" classes are really exercises in one damn thing after another, in which students are fed and tested on random factoids, without rhyme or reason.

Why does this matter? It matters because history is not the past, but interpretation of the past. History is honesty, not apology. History is critical, not celebratory. History is argument. History is questioning. The word history itself comes not from the blending of "his story" (contrary to the imaginings of 60s feminists who celebrated "herstory"), but from the Greek "historia", which means (roughly) learning through enquiry.

If historians engage constantly in argument with themselves and others, doesn't that imply that they are deliberately manipulating the past?

True, the ethics of professional history do not require absolute objectivity, because that's humanly impossible: We all have our biases and prejudices. But they do require self-examination, and honesty,. Put another way, I am not required as an historian to shed every opinion I may hold (how could I?) but I am required to pursue truth, no matter how unpleasant I may find it. I am required to be willing to revamp or even abandon a thesis when the evidence does not support it.

What's more, I must constantly play devil's advocate, asking myself over and over if I have taken every available bit of contradictory evidence into account.

That's why ideologues don't make good historians.

If I screw up, if I don't deal honestly with the evidence, if I inadvertently interpret it out of context, or if I miss some major body of evidence entirely, I expect to be called to account by peer reviewers before my work goes into print. Our ideas are run up the flagpole at conferences, and tested further in articles and books. Even if we survive the vigorous debate to that point, we expect our work to soon be rendered obsolete: Every idea worth its salt inspires a dozen other scholars or more to rush to the archives on a hunch that it's wrong.

Lecture over. Now, hands up: How many people learned all this about history and historians in high school? Or in college?

That's the problem.

When practically everyone who didn't go to graduate school in history is only taught history in vapid survey courses, a "history" without theses, without argument, without passion, without debate, what is generally understood to be history is indeed one damn thing after another. Without an awareness of the ongoing arguments and the vast publishing output of professional historians, we believe that history is enshrined in textbooks, having been passed down since time immemorial on stone tablets.

I recall attending a lecture given some years ago by the then-head of the American Historical Association, Dr. Joyce Appleby, who said wearily, "People think that when we tell them something different from what they learned in elementary school, we're lying to them." (Not a word for word quote, because it has been a few years, but pretty close.)

Which brings me back (sort of) to my Amazon critic, who (unless she contacts me to clarify, and I really hope she will!) I can only assume meant that my novel was lacking in textbook-type facts.

Normally I don't respond to reviews, because having been trained as a journalist as well as an historian, I am used to criticism and, indeed, genuinely welcome the feedback.

On this occasion, however, I did respond, because it was an opportunity to make sure we were both on the same page. What I emphasized is that history is not just dates and battles, but changing attitudes and values: As a cultural historian, that's my specialty. By bringing three 21^st century American kids to mid-20^th century England, I had to exercise all my skills of historical imagination, as well as my (imperfect) knowledge of the period, to show how things really do change over time and place. That said, I wasn't trying to write history, but fiction that would ignite kids' interest in history. I wanted, above all, not to sound like a textbook.

I referred this parent to the many entertaining and informative non-fiction books for kid on British childhood during World War II. But I'm still worried that I sounded condescending, then and now. I promise that I don't mean to: The tone is rather of a young woman in a hurry, trying to get out the word to the real public (not just those who read the New York Times) that history is so much more than meets the eye.

Why does all this matter to kids, parents, and democracy?

Stay tuned.

Random Ramble: History and Humor

A few years ago, chatting at an academic conference textbook exhibit with a Big Bad Book Corporation sales rep, I bemoaned how boring textbooks are. Would it hurt, I asked, if they could have a bit of humor occasionally?

He looked gravely and pityingly at me, as if I just suggested that Big Bad Book Corp. should publish the printed version of Springtime for Hitler, and slowly shook his head in wonderment at the naïve and unworldly chick academic.

"Humor in history," he pronounced heavily, "is a dangerous thing."

Perhaps, I would wonder later, having not really known what to say at the time. But for whom?

My college students? Doubt it. They've been laughing at my tacky jokes for years, except for the lame ones that I drop from the repertoire after they fall flat for three semesters running.

Kids? Not if the success of the Horrible History series in the UK is anything to go by. And I still have yet to see any evidence that tasteless and funny books corrupt the young: Quite the contrary, because kids who think for themselves are usually far more interesting, sensible, and likeable than kids who don't.

The Appropriateness Nazis? A small but vocal number of overly-sensitive adults who seldom seem to have even an inkling of what kids are really like, and to whom the best response may be a polite suggestion that they get over themselves. Being an Appropriateness Nazi, of course, is not an irredeemable state. Most of us go through that phase when we first have kids: Ooh, no toy guns, no TV unless it's heart-warming and improving, no unhealthy snacks. But then our kids turn on Barney the 12-Step dinosaur, and become monsters… Not really, if we're honest with ourselves (and most of us are). They just become more completely and recognizably human, bless their little flatulence-and-poop-joke hearts.

So who suffers, then, from humor in history? Could it be Big Bad Book Corp. and their fear of of millions of Appropriateness Nazis launching a boycott of their overpriced textbooks? Of irate parents demanding that all their books be banned?

But I'm still confused: When books are banned, they get more publicity than the publishers are ever likely to pay for, and lots of silent-majority librarians, parents, and kids rush to buy or read the books in question. Harry Potter leaping to mind, here.

What do y'all think?