What's Really Important: Adult Advice to High School Students #1

This is a photo of me "working" well sort of... I spend my days in the
library reading; currently about monarchy and tyranny in 16th century
England. I assure you, it's fascinating! (No really... it is!) by rachel sian

[W]hat we're really teaching our children [in our schools] is to associate learning with work and to associate work with drudgery so that the remainder of their lives they will possibly never go near a book because they associate books with learning, learning with work and work with drudgery. Whereas after a hard day's toil, instead of relaxing with a book they'll be much more likely to sit down in front of an undemanding soap opera because this is obviously teaching them nothing, so it is not learning, so it is not work, it is not drudgery, so it must be pleasure.
--Alan Moore, author of The Watchmen and V for Vendetta, in Salon.com

Student blogger Morgante Pell at Newly Ancient shared a link to a fantastic essay by essayist, programmer, and programming language designer Paul Graham called "What You'll Wish You'd Known." Graham wrote it for high school students, and it's his answer to the question, "What do you wish someone had told you in high school?"

I can't recommend it highly enough. Here's just one of many passages every high school student should take to heart:

Your life doesn't have to be shaped by admissions officers. It could be shaped by your own curiosity. It is for all ambitious adults. And you don't have to wait to start. In fact, you don't have to wait to be an adult. There's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age. (Again, read the whole essay here.)

I want to play with the same question for our student readers, and to ask any and all of you to join in as well. I'm going to limit myself to one piece of advice right now. It's not my number one in terms of importance, but it's an itch I want to scratch first anyway. It's this:

1. Don't mistake your textbooks for your subjects. An example from History:

This sounds like a teacher-y thing to say, I know, but I think it comes close to being a key to a certain kind of lifelong wealth as an adult. Not the kind of wealth that vanishes overnight when banks melt from the heat of unregulated greed, mind you. Wealth that's easier to keep, and impossible to lose.

What I mean is this: your textbooks are dangerous things. They take gold and turn it into dung, and for some reason, schools give you that dung when they could just as freely give you the gold. (This is also true of your tests, and your worksheets, and your writing assignments, and so much of the rest of the schooliness schtick. Don't get me wrong. Much of it is necessary. But little of it makes you feel alive like real history, literature, science, math, and all the rest can - outside of school, and throughout the rest of your life.)

Let me give you a few examples. You can read some two-bit textbook writer's five-paragraph explanation of the Terror-Famine during Stalin's collective farming experiment in the Ukraine, and memorize how many people died, and get the correct answer on your test. You can even remember this factoid, and think you know history.

But if you read real historians - say, Martin Amis' Korba the Dread (and I know Amis is less an historian than novelist, but choose this work for the prose below) - you can encounter that information on a completely different plane. Here's page one of Amis' book:

Here is the second sentence of Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine:

We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.

That sentence represents 3,040 lives. The book is 411 pages long.

Click "read more" below for the rest....

You could read your textbook's two pages about Columbus, Cortés, and the other Spanish conquistadores' devotion to the cliché "three G's" - glory, gold, and God - and yawn your way through memorizing this distant value-system with that nice little mnemonic trick. Or you can read historian Jon Manchip White's Cortés and the Downfall of the Aztec Empire, and suddenly find yourself accused of being every bit as barbaric, though at a conveniently clean remove, as these genocidal hordes in your own devotion to modern forms of gold:

Finally, we must mention the love of the conquistadores for gold. It is quite true that gold was their obsession. The words gold gold gold gold rung out on every page of the chronicles. It was what drew them from Seville, Cádiz, Málaga, Palos and La Coruña to the islands of the Indies, and thence to the American mainland. There is no need to spell out the mystique of gold. Although the open manner in which it was pursued by the conquistadores is often condemned as odious, the economy of the modern world, whether we like it or not, is still based on that same vulgar metal. True, we do not have to soil our hands with it; in the tastefully indirect way in which matters are conducted nowadays, the stuff is extracted by Bantu laborers or Soviet convicts in forgotten parts of the world. But it is hard to see why the frank appetite of the conquistadores is somehow more reprehensible than buying mining shares, or why Cortés should be considered less respectable than some modern, and far more efficient, entrepreneur. If we choose to be censorious and delicate about the conquistadores, we ought to at least face the fact that a dependence on the gold-standard is even more widely marked in our world than it was in his, even if our methods of grubbing it up and marketing it are somewhat more refined. At least they did their own dirty work.

Manchip's book, written in 1971, is dated now in some of its facts, but still timeless in its tone and style. I'd love to share his account of the ritual human sacrifice conducted by the Aztec priests - to the tune of 20,000 victims a year, at a low estimate - but will resist.

I share this because I'm amazed at how many educated adults I've known - many with Ph.D.'s in literature, philosophy, and so forth - who have never read a work by an historian. As a teacher of both history and literature, I can comfortably argue from my own experience that history is not only often stranger than fiction, but just as well-written.

Other recommendations:

• A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes
• The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s by Piers Brendon (stunning Depression history of the capitol cities of all the nations to become embroiled in WW II)
  
• Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives by Allan Bullock
• A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin
• Fidel:: A Critical Portrait by Tad Szulc
• Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Revised and Updated Edition by James W. Loewen
• A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.) by Howard Zinn

And you? What books would you add that put the story in history and the style is historiography? And what advice would you give to students about what's really important for their future, versus what schools make them think is important?