Congressman Miller comes up with a plan to subvert historical thinking through interdisciplinary teaching

Barry attended the House Committee on Education and Labor hearing on the National Mathematics Advisory Committee report on May 21, 2008.

Not much to cheer about, it seems. Math coaches, technology, interdisciplinary studies.... and Project Lead the Way:

Another crowd pleasing testimony came from Dr. Wanda Talley Staggers, Dean of Manufacturing and Engineering, Anderson School District Five, Anderson, South Carolina. She is involved in a program called "Project Lead the Way™". Pardon my cynicism but it's hard for me to not notice the trademark symbol after the title. This program provides pre-engineering type classes in middle and high school that can only be taught by teachers who have been certified by this trademarked program trains such teachers, and testified that "After six years of training high school teachers during the Project Lead The Way™ Summer Training Institutes across the nation, I have heard overwhelmingly from teachers that they come away from the experience with a rejuvenated interest in teaching."

Maybe so, but the key is whether the students in Project-Lead-the Way™ courses will learn any math or simply be entertained.The program is based on the premise that students don't take a lot of math because it's too removed from the real world.The solution? Hands-on project-based courses that involve the students.In order to take such classes, however, they must be enrolled in regular math classes—thus a carrot and stick approach. The program has not been field-tested or validated, and is too young to have data showing whether this strategy is likely to work.Plus problem-based learning, tends to be rather discovery-heavy despite teachers' best and stated intentions that they use a "balanced" approach—the type of balance where someone's finger is on the scale.

Chairman Miller (D-CA) saw the value of this type of program and made a leap from math connecting to applications of math, to math connecting with everything.He rhapsodized about a school he saw in Oregon that became a math academy through an interdisciplinary approach.All courses were interrelated—students had to understand the mathematics of history: distances between cities, depth of the oceans.

I ran that one by Ed, a person who is, by profession, an actual historian as opposed to a Congressman. Paraphrasing: Ed says that measuring the distance between cities in a history course defeats the purpose of history because throughout most of history distance is relative to technology. For example, the distance from Marseilles to Alexandria is 1500 miles; the distance between Marseilles and Paris is 400 miles. But in the ancient world in the Middle Ages, Marseilles was for all intents and purposes much closer to Alexandria because of the ease of shipping in the Mediterranean and also because, culturally, until fairly recently the Mediterranean ports had more in common with each other than Marseilles did with Paris. Marseilles wasn't integrated into the French kingdom until the late Middle Ages. There were no decent roads from the Mediterranean parts of France to Paris. It was an incredibly arduous trip. But it was relatively easy to get from Marseilles to Egypt. The Mediterranean Sea was protected from storms and bad weather, and it was fairly rare for a ship to be lost at sea in the Mediterranean.

Or take the words, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume."

It took 6 months for these words to travel from the center of Africa to the nearest telegraph station. From there, it was only a matter of hours until these words had traveled to all parts of the world linked by telegraph.

To have students in a history course "calculate" the physical distance between cities is to willfully have students overlook the cultural and technological factors that make distance meaningful. It's not just a waste of time, it undermines and subverts historical thinking; It is the opposite of historical thinking. It is harmful.