.4 The Real Nature of Mobility

Why does the topic of mobility lead so naturally into a discussion of national standards or any kind of standards? It is because mobility becomes the scapegoat for our lack of standards. The important part is to take note of the real consequences that are there if you don't have national standards. Those real consequences are there and they kick us. Doesn't society have the right to expect certain levels of knowledge? Of course, if you don't have certain level of knowledge you are going to be a burden to the society. You are going to have to be supported by the society. Just because you are miseducated in Mississippi, Missouri, or Virginia doesn't change the fact that if you move to New York you are going to be on the welfare roles of New York and New York is going to have to pay the price of welfare. So the society I think has theright to expect certain levels of knowledge and that is a problem when you have a mobile society. Should schools be designed for those who stay or for those who move? Here we are in a rural community in Virginia and the people want to have an education that is good for their hometown community, is that their right or do they have some obligation to the kids who move out of town? Conventional wisdom, and the way social studies are often taught is that we start our education with the home in first grade, and then we go in concentric circles to the family, to the block, to the city, to the state, to the nation, and the grand finale in the sixth grade is our friends around the world. Unfortunately, that is not really the world we live in. The world we really live in is that some of the kids in our classes will have fathers who right now are in Bosnia or who just got back from the Gulf War or they themselves lived in another country or another state and so their world is not this nice little world of expanding realms of consciences, their world is the reality of the 21st century and is a random order of mixed elements. We have to make sure that education is realistic and not just unrealistically rooted in a mythic notion of what the world should be like. You could move around the country so that every year you would study U.S. history and have no other social studies, every year from grade one to twelve. You could also move so you would go all the way through grade twelve and graduate high school and never study U.S. history. I think that is crazy.

	What are the consequences of not having national standards?	Answer Here
	Mr. Jones is a Marine who moves frequently. His daughter, Jennifer, is a junior in high school and has been enrolled in schools across the country throughout her academic career. She has only had world geography once, and has never had a world history class because of different standards in each school. How might some sort of national standard for teaching history have prevented this problem?	Answer Here