Will Fitzhugh

Teenage Soapbox
July 31, 2009
 

Little Jack Horner sat in the corner

Eating his Christmas pie:

He stuck in his thumb, and pulled out a plum

And said, “What a good boy am I!”

I publish history research papers by secondary students from around the world, and from time to time I get a paper submitted which includes quite a bit more opinion than historical research.

The other day I got a call from a prospective teenage author saying he had noticed on my website that most of the papers seemed to be history rather than opinion, and was it alright for him to submit a paper with his opinions?

I said that opinions were fine, if they were preceded and supported by a good deal of  historical research for the paper, and that seemed to satisfy him. I don’t know if he will send in his paper or not, but I feel sure that like so many of our teenagers, he has received a good deal of support from his teachers for expressing his opinions, whether very well-informed or not.

From John Dewey forward, many Progressive educators seem to want our students to “step away from those school books, and no one gets hurt,” as long as they go out and get involved in the community and come back to express themselves with plenty of opinions on all the major social issues of the world today.

This sort of know-nothing policy-making was much encouraged in the 1960s in the United States, among the American Red Guards at least. In China, there was more emphasis on direct action to destroy the “Four Olds” and beat up and kill doctors, professors, teachers, and anyone else with an education. Mao had already done their theorizing for them and all they had to do was the violence. 

Over here, however, from the Port Huron Statement to many other Youth Manifestos, it was considered important for college students evading the draft to announce their views on society at some length. Many years after the fact, it is interesting to note, as Diana West wrote about their philosophical posturing in The Death of the Grown-Up:

“What was it all about? New Left leader Todd Gitlin found such questions perplexing as far back as the mid-1960s, when he was asked ‘to write a statement of purpose for a New Republic series called ‘Thoughts of Young Radicals.’ In his 1978 memoir, The Sixties, Gitlin wrote: ‘I agonized for weeks about what it was, in fact, I wanted.’ This is a startling admission. Shouldn’t he have thought about all this before? He continued: “The movement’s all-purpose answer to ‘What do you want?’ and ‘How do you intend to get it?’ was: ‘Build the movement.’ By contrast, much of the counterculture’s appeal was its earthy answer: ‘We want to live like this, voila!’”

For those of the Paleo New Left who indulged in these essentially thoughtless protests, the Sixties are over, but for many students now in our social studies classrooms, their teachers still seem to want them to Stand Up on the Soapbox and be Counted, to voice their opinions on all sorts of matters about which they know almost nothing.

I have published research papers by high school students who have objected to eugenics, racism, China’s actions in Tibet, gender discrimination, and more. But I believe in each case such opinions came at the end of a fairly serious history research paper full of information and history the student author had taken the trouble to learn.

When I get teenage papers advising Secretary Clinton on how to deal with North Korea, or Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke on how to help the U.S. economy correct itself, or telling the President what to do about energy, if these papers substitute opinion for research into these exceedingly complex and difficult problems, I tend not to publish them.

My preference is for students to “step away from that soapbox and no one gets hurt,” that is, to encourage them, in their teen years, to read as many nonfiction books as they can, to learn how little they understand about the problems of the past and present, and to defer their pronouncements on easy solutions to them until they really know what they are talking about and have learned at least something about the mysterious workings of unintended consequences, just for a start.

Since 1987, I have published more than 860 exemplary history research papers by secondary students from 36 countries (see www.tcr.org for examples), and I admire them for their work, but the ones I like best have had some well-earned modesty to go along with their serious scholarship.