I'm not a fan of researching something for the sake of just doing the research. Now, that being said, I find research rather interesting. I think there's much to be learned from research and it's not an exaggeration to say that the results of research have saved my life (2 times and counting - knock wood).
Most times, however, I need a target for doing research. I'd prefer that folks not swing by my office and say "hey - can you research the human population from 30,000 BCE to 2020?" - because the answer I'll give is "yep - I can" and it's true, I *can* research that but I'm probably gonna ask for a "why". Otherwise, "research" becomes "history" and "history" is just not a favorite subject of mine ... and I blame the teaching methods being used at the time.
See when I was in school, "History" was rolled into a larger subject called "Social Studies". Basically, from the 3rd grade on, students were fed a steady diet of dates and phrases and meaningless campaign slogans and battlefield names and the names of a bunch of men (nearly always JUST men) who shaped the history of the country. And then we'd have Summer Vacation and, in the Fall, we'd start all over again.
OH - and each year, without fail, we'd be running behind and we'd never even get to anything beyond the 50's . Honest, it wasn't until I helped edit a Social Studies book in the 1990's that I actually saw mention of the Vietnam War in a textbook. And yet, year after year and grade after grade, I read about Columbus discovering America, where he was met by people who already lived here that apparently had no clue they needed "discovering" at all.
But I digress.
I've been given a research project ... page after page of Global-, Informational-, Ecological-, Technological-, and Design-based factoids that I'm being asked to find and report. And I'm conflicted. This being the Information Age, I know I can let my fingers fly on the keyboard and I'll find all kinds of reliable facts with which to report back. But the facts I'll be providing are, from what I can see, going to be used in a way that will be just as ... "forced fed" ... as how I was taught so many years go, and I don't wanna be a party to perpetuating this diet.
Has History taught us nothing?
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