A message to you from the New York Historical Society

It is nice to think that we once worried about our own collective memory. Then again, this was before the era of compulsory schooling! Nowadays, nearly 5 nationwide polls a year demonstrate a sort of collective amnesia regarding the more salient moments of our nation's past (lets not even TALK about the rest of the world). To what do we owe our dunce cap? Could it be that we have stripped the mystery, the puzzle of history from our curriculum? So many students reportedly hate history because 'it is just a collection of facts and dates'. That is how THEY SEE IT- the view from the ground, so to speak. How could we expect them to see it any differently in the era of standards-based regurgitation? Why have we stripped the soul from knowledge?