Me: I just want to learn how to do my taxes. School: Shut up and square dance. I suspect that those who think this way have nothing against music and dancing in general. After all, learning to square dance will not help you in the real world. But what should we be learning in school? Indeed, what is the point of education? Is it meant to supply life skills, to teach students how to budget, write a check, do their taxes, fix a leaky faucet, repair a car engine, or the like? To be sure, these are all helpful and necessary things.
Men and women often attend schools that specifically teach these skills. But college-age or adult students attending a trade school or university to learn career specifics is a far cry from teaching the general public about everything that could be encompassed under education. When a third-grader wanders into a classroom, what exactly do they need to know?
Think of all the knowledge in the world, then bring it down to the level an eight-year-old would understand, and try to pick out what should be taught in the or so days of a school year. This question is continually asked by teachers , administrators, superintendents, government officials, and others: What should we teach? Thankfully, as Christians, we have a definite direction in the overwhelming wilderness of modern education.
Our end goal is heaven, and the only way to heaven is through Christ. Teaching Christ crucified is our primary objective. Everything else is secondary to that objective, and everything else points to that truth. Clearly, looking to the Gospel as our primary objective does not make everything else about curriculum development magically fall into place.
It gives us a primary goal but not an exact roadmap to get there in our educative system where children need to know so much. Even within theological education, how do we choose which Bible stories to teach? Which Bible verses should students know by heart?
How much contextual history should they know? Do they need to learn biblical languages to study the Bible thoroughly? Which church writings outside the Bible should they study? In our Lutheran schools, should students stick to studying Lutheran writings, or should they explore those of other denominations? This is in addition to deciding what should be taught in math, history, science, literature, spelling and grammar, PE, art, and music.
This all brings me back to the meme. With so much to teach, why do schools waste time square dancing? At this time, however, the dance form was already seen as old-fashioned and, well, square. Even in the country, where these kind of dances had once been popular, jazz and swing were taking over. By bringing back square dancing, as well as other primarily Anglo-Saxon dances like waltzes and quadrilles, Ford believed he would be able to counteract what he saw as the unwholesome influence of jazz on America.
People, he imagined, would leave the dance halls and cabarets in droves to swing their partners round and round at liquor-free square dance clubs. In order to bring his dream to life, Ford poured tons of money into square dancing and country music in general.
Henry Ford. While European dance traditions like the French quadrille certainly informed the evolution of square dancing, the addition of the call-and-response form of calling out dance moves initially started with the black slaves, who were required to perform at white dance balls in order to reproduce the steps themselves without formal dance training. Nonetheless, Ford saw these dances as intrinsically white, and thus more intrinsically wholesome. Although Ford never fully supplanted jazz, he did spark a revival of interest in square dancing.
Newspapers published full-page dancing instructions; 34 colleges across America started teaching early American dancing. It was practically a national rage again for a few years—before dying out again. But square dancing did not go quietly into that good night. As you might have guessed, he was successful in these ventures. Through the next few decades, Modern Western square dance clubs popped up all over the country.
In , these clubs—initially led by the California-based National Folk Dance Committee—began their long quest to establish square dancing as the official folk dance of the US. From to , there were over 30 bill proposals to make square dance the official folk dance of the United States. Curiously enough though, those who were most opposed to this were folklorists and square dancing purists, who thought that the Western-style square dancing promoted by these clubs was tainted by newfangled moves and their tendency to use recorded music rather than live fiddlers.
The attempt to nationalize square dancing was granted in —but only temporarily. Sponsored by the late West Virginia senator Robert Byrd, a bill passed by the House and Senate and signed by then-president Ronald Reagan declared square dancing the national folk dance of the US for the years and Ford had a solution: square dancing. He saw jazz and its related dancing styles as a force for moral decay, and sought to cure it by bringing back traditional folk dances.
In doing so, Ford rewrote the cultural history of the dance form and set the stage for a pantheon of racist ideas that still animate modern white supremacist movements. Most Americans rightly think of jazz as an African-American art form.
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