Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, who has taught English and history for 30 years and writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
It was the turn of the millennium, and that particular Y2k New Year’s Eve we’d been warned that all the planet’s computers were likely to curl up and die. Assuming you’re old enough to remember 2000, what did you figure would happen when the ball dropped in Times Square? In case you’d like to relive your anxiety, today’s silicon seers predict a similar catastrophe in 2038 for equally arcane digital reasons.
Anyway, that night Poor Elijah was stopping by on the way to his sister’s costume party. Since we’re talking about a character who wears riding boots and tails to Price Chopper, naturally I was curious. What would a man with the everyday fashion sense of General Custer wear to a masquerade?
Suddenly there he was in his customary jeans and corduroy sport coat. At first I was puzzled. “What are you supposed to be?”
“Who, me?” he replied. “Nobody special. Just a man from the 21st century.”
I should have known. I’ve lived through enough New Year’s Eves and birthdays to realize that nothing momentous ever happens just because numbers change. That’s why I’m so tired of 21st century sermons and sales pitches.
Visionaries continue to preach that technology is turning our present world upside down. But look back for a second to the turn of the last century. Consider the upheaval that generation saw – telephones, light bulbs, radios, phonographs, movies, antibiotics, automobiles, and airplanes, not to mention zippers and safety razors. Sing a song of silicon, but first tell me which was the real revolution. Which changed life more – emails and text messages that save us the trouble of talking on the phone or a day’s wait for Federal Express, or the airplane and telephone that reduced months and weeks to hours and minutes in the first place?
Which shook its generation most – Marco Polo’s gunpowder, Mr. Nobel’s dynamite, or Dr. Oppenheimer’s atom? This is a fool’s debate. Each was enough to turn its generation upside down.
They say that we live in a new global economy. They should read a little more about 19th century imperialism. They tell us everything changed after the Cold War. Except history records the fall of mightier empires. Vladimir Putin and Isis have nothing on Genghis Khan and the Vikings.
I doubt my students’ future looms any more imposingly than my grandfather’s did. He grew up during World War I, came of age in the Roaring ’20s, and fed his children during the Depression so he could send them off to fight the Nazis. Then there was the bomb, Milton Berle, world communism, civil rights, Neil Armstrong, and me. I’d say he had a lot to get used to.
Our perspective is off. We’re like children who think the three weeks until Christmas is an eternity. We each feel as if our brief span on earth were the pivotal moment in human history. If you’ll pardon the narcissism, we’re the most excellent narcissists the world has ever seen, the Founding Fathers and Mothers of 21st century American narcissism.
At school a legion of experts choruses that we need to prepare our students for a different world from the one we face today.
When has this not been true?
This new world, they inform us, will require skills in problem solving, communication, and technology.
Excuse me, but is this supposed to mean the world has been rolling along without these things so far? What exactly do the experts figure workers and citizens of the past and present have been doing on the job and with their lives?
Forty years ago, “A Nation at Risk” explained how American education toughened up after Sputnik, only to fall apart as schools “restructured” in the 1970s. Today’s reformers warn that we face crises even more perilous than the space race. The problem is they want schools to prepare for that brave new world by adopting many of the same bankrupt restructured practices that “A Nation at Risk” blamed for our late 20th century academic decline.
Vocational and technical programs do need modernization, but it doesn’t require grand educational theories, Common Core rhetoric, or standards-based grading systems to accomplish this. Meanwhile, American teachers and students are staggering under the burden of recycled jargon, endless assessments, and twice-baked fallacies masquerading as a blueprint for the future.
Yes, my students will need technical skills I don’t possess. But anyone who believes that the problem with schools is they aren’t preparing students for the 21st century needs to examine how students have been doing since the closing decades of the 20th. Because our most pressing problem isn’t that students can’t “collaborate” and do calculus. Our problem is too many can’t sit still, add, and write a paragraph. Reading, writing, and fractions are skills for any century. Knowing how we gained our independence and how the earth revolves around the sun is knowledge for any century. Anyone who tells you that Facebook and smartphones will somehow make learning those skills and that knowledge obsolete is a fool.
Where does achievement come from?
Winston Churchill promised his people only blood, toil, tears, and sweat. This is a truth and a lesson for today and tomorrow, for us and for our children, at home and in the classroom.
The change in the calendar isn’t nearly as fateful as the change in ourselves.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Peter Berger: The future has always loomed.