David: thank you for putting WEST WING into context. The NYTimes review is symptomatic of a culture that finds the study and teaching of history time-wasting and abusive. I'm not surprised by the opinion passing as fact, which characterizes our times.
(Each year, as a professor at Savannah College of Art and Design, I would ask at faculty meetings for the college to install at least ONE CLASS in American and World History...Each year, I was told that SCAD had history classes in film, design, architecture---I replied that such classes meant nothing, that the events described were never put in social context, but were simply names and dates and an aesthetic delineated without the meanings for its existence). The American and World History classes were never added to the curriculum.
Moreover, the use of reason for writing an essay was not as important as the essay's grammatical or syntactical merits! In other words, "What's the point?" had disappeared, or never was seen as a reason for the very existence of the essay
And you wonder, how did we get this way?
History may be a nightmare from which Joyce didn't awaken ---Nice line, but the lack of its study probably produced the nightmare in the first place.
David: thank you for putting WEST WING into context. The NYTimes review is symptomatic of a culture that finds the study and teaching of history time-wasting and abusive. I'm not surprised by the opinion passing as fact, which characterizes our times.
(Each year, as a professor at Savannah College of Art and Design, I would ask at faculty meetings for the college to install at least ONE CLASS in American and World History...Each year, I was told that SCAD had history classes in film, design, architecture---I replied that such classes meant nothing, that the events described were never put in social context, but were simply names and dates and an aesthetic delineated without the meanings for its existence). The American and World History classes were never added to the curriculum.
Moreover, the use of reason for writing an essay was not as important as the essay's grammatical or syntactical merits! In other words, "What's the point?" had disappeared, or never was seen as a reason for the very existence of the essay
And you wonder, how did we get this way?
History may be a nightmare from which Joyce didn't awaken ---Nice line, but the lack of its study probably produced the nightmare in the first place.