I was reading an interesting article in the New Yorker this morning entitled “The Good Fight” by Carlos Lozada. In essence the article talked about the challenges and outright harm caused by the nostalgic canonization of the people and events involved in the Second World War, particularly evaluating the portraits in a number of recent books.
The author was not arguing the war itself or the bravery of many participants, but his point seems to be that it is easy to anecdotally create a picture of a time much clearer, a populace more supportive, and soldiers more uniform in their support and valor. The romance of looking backward paints with broad strokes and rose-colored glasses make everything, well, rosy. As time passes, and the variety of voices become unified in death, we can hail the “Greatest Generation,” but we cannot really know them.
I introduce this not to discuss the less than simple history of our country’s military involvement in Europe and the Pacific, but rather to make a point about education (WWH started as an education blog, remember?). As I make suggestions for changes to the form and content of modern education, I am often confronted with nostalgia-based resistance. Education used to be so excellent; our children were well-behaved and smart; learning the basics set our children up for success.
While I am the first to acknowledge challenges to new models of education, I think it is foolish to castigate the present by creating a “Greatest Generation” of past students that never really were. Anecdotes of hard work and mental fortitude are tearfully related, fallaciously equating parts to the whole, and behaviors that can be tied to technology are treated as if they had never existed prior to the cell phone. One of the most common complaints I hear is that technology can be a “distraction” for students, and this is important because students were never distracted in the past.
I think this is natural, as it is easier to perceive the problems of the moment while having amnesiac blindspots for the problems of the past. Today comes at us with myriad new challenges, while the past gradually fades into uniformity. New York Times writer and comedian, John Hodgman, calls nostalgia, “the most toxic of emotions,” because it simultaneously reforms and smooths over the past and then embraces that reformation.
This is not to say that we are not in a very challenging time in the world and in the world of education. There are many growing pains (and not-growing pains) along the way. But it is important not to forget that the new forms and content we are introducing now is the outcome of what we were taught. Every “Greatest Generation” is ultimately responsible for the generations that follow.