So there’s Regis Philbin –the man who made “Final answer” a part of the language – facing down a five-year-old “whiz kid” on his morning TV show this past Monday. They are in the midst of a quiz show and dueling over the U.S. Presidents. Regis is losing to the little boy –and it’s not even close.
I only discovered this “mano a mano” because it turns out that Regis Philbin had prepped for this “Whiz Kid” challenge with a copy of my book Don’t Know Much About the Presidents. Apparently, they didn’t give the book to him soon enough. The little boy cleaned Regis Philbin’s clock –left him at the starting line – with rapid-fire answers about Teddy Roosevelt, Martin Van Buren and Abraham Lincoln. Regis was a man in desperate need of a lifeline.
The astonishing ability of this small boy to answer some rather tough questions about American Presidents left the audience dazzled. But why should it?
Have you ever encountered one of those kids who seem to know EVERYTHING about dinosaurs? Or horses? Or baseball? Sure. We’ve all met them. They are kids with an incredible passion for a subject. Rarely is it a passion for our past.
So why don’t kids know much about history? (Quick answer. Because their parents don’t either.)
I’ve been working on that problem for nearly twenty years and the real answer is still the same. We don’t really care about history, so we don’t spend enough time teaching it. When we do teach it, it is usually reduced to a laundry list of dates, battles and legislation. And most of all, we’ve embraced textbooks that suck the life out of the subject.
What’s worse, there is the “fear factor.” We are afraid to tell kids the truth, as if we are protecting them for the harsh realities of the world. I got a taste of that recently at a museum in Florida where a timeline said that the Spanish had “banished” the French from Florida in 1565. No they didn’t. The Spanish massacred the French in Florida. It isn’t a pretty picture. But why lie about it?
The antidote is simple. Keep it real. Kids love to learn history, as the whiz kid on Regis and Kelly proved. But kids want real stories about real people—and if there are cannibals, pirates, massacres and mayhem, that’s OK. The untold tales that the schoolbooks leave out are often the stories that kids love. They all remember that it was Taft who was so fat that he got stuck in the White House bathtub. Or that George Washington had false teeth made of ivory and human teeth. Or that Barack Obama loves basketball and promised his wife he would try to stop smoking if he ran for president.
Want your kids to love history? Try telling true stories full of fun facts.
Final answer.
