Gladly Wolde He Teche: Students, Canon, and Supreme Court History

Abstract

Gladly Wolde He Teche: Students, Canon, and Supreme Court History William M. Wiecek From senior high school through graduate and professional school, anyone who would teach the history of the Supreme Court faces a cascade ofchallenges. All teaching is a media­ tion between three things: teacher, subject mat­ ter, and student. Assuming that the teacher is capable and well prepared, difficulties arise with the students and the subject matter. Where the subject is the history ofthe Supreme Court, prob­ lems abound in both areas. Let’s begin with the students, who, in today’s college classroom, are mostly young adults, native English-speakers who have spent their entire lives immersed in the American culture of the past two decades. Already, we have identi­ fied part ofthe problem. College history teachers voice a universal la­ ment today: their students are ahistorical. They know little about history, and care less. Sam Cooke spoke for them in his much-recorded hit “Wonderful World”: Don’t know much about history, Don’t know much biology, Don’t know much about science books, Don’t know much about the French I took Don’t know much about the middle ages I looked at the pictures and I turned the pages Don’t know nothin’ bout no rise and fall Don’t know nothin’ bout nothin’ at all.1 This characteristic historical ignorance is irrespective ofgender, race, ethnicity, geographic origin, and socioeconomic class. Our colleagues in other fields nag us: “Why don’t my students know any history?” There are actually several sensible answers to that question. One is that “History,” as a discrete subject, has disappeared from the secondaryschool curriculum. Our students don’t know any history because they aren’t taught any before they come to college. Instead, they are “ex­ posed” to history in courses labeled “Social Studies,” where the history content has to com­ pete for the students’ attention and time with everything else in that intellectual goulash. His­ tory is not taught systematically. A secondproblem is that it is often not taught well, either. Every college history teacher faces the frustration ofhaving students who have been “turned off” by history because their original in­ troduction to the subject consisted of memoriz­ ing dates. When we encounter them, these undergraduates are history averse. No one comes away from the subject with any positive attitudes toward it after such an experience, so we first have to repair damage done in the past by inept teaching before we can hope to open their minds to history. Our students are also notoriously deficient in languages other than En­ glish, ancient or modem, which further shrinks their cultural horizons. A third problem with the students, which is 12 1995 JOURNAL really an opportunity in disguise, is that their learning skills differ from ours. By the time they arrive at college, students have already spent twenty hours a week watching TV, perhaps 15,000 hours oftheir life (!), plus some unknown additional number ofhours playing video games such as Nintendo. Even the high school library has mutated into the “media center.” So teach­ ers complain that their students are illiterate. That charge is unfair to the educational attain­ ments of today’s students. The illiteracy com­ plaint is especially pernicious when it serves as the launchpad for a tirade about the disintegra­ tion of the canon. (More on that later.) Many people assume that today’s students have not spent as much time reading, relative to other learning activities, compared to previous generations. I do not know ofany empirical stud­ ies that supportthis assumption. Grant it for sake of argument, though. The comparison itself is almost meaningless. All it tells us is that the earlier generations did not have multimedia learning opportunities. Today’s students compensate for whatever deficiencies they may have in reading by other abilities, not recognized or valued by those ofus of earlier generations simply because we don’t possess those abilities ourselves. In place ofthe relatively slow and totally linear process of acquiring information by reading, our students acquire information and sensations visually, graphically, fast, and hot. Their media include MTV, with its dazzling, colorful, suggestive imagery reinforced by sound, and now, multime­ dia...