It’s always great to continue our education, pandas, so if you’re looking to learn something new today, you’re in luck. The Blowing Fact Instagram account has shared over 3,000 posts featuring fascinating information that you may have never heard before, and clearly, it’s a crowd favorite, as the page has amassed an impressive 3.9 million followers. From fun facts about celebrities to random tidbits of information about plants and animals, this page just goes to show that there’s no limit to what we can learn!
Blowing Fact is a great resource to add to your Instagram feed, so that while you’re scrolling through and liking all of your best friends’ pics, you can also learn that it’s probably not wise to feed a moose (unless it’s been fed before!) and that 7% of men for some reason believe they could beat a grizzly bear in a fight. You might even find out something that is important for your health to know, such as the fact that staying awake for over 260 hours can cause lifelong effects on your health. So get that rest, pandas!
I’m not proud to admit it, but personally, I was never a fan of history class in school. I found it extremely boring, and I could not for the life of me remember important dates or names. I didn’t see the point! But now I wish I had payed closer attention, because apparently today, American kids know less about history and geography than previous generations. The Nation’s Report Card found that 8th graders in the United States have been scoring lower and lower in recent years on history and geography tests.
But 8th graders aren’t the only ones struggling, as their scores are indicative of the rest of the nation’s declining knowledge of history and geography. “Many teenagers may not know what the American Revolution was all about, how a city differs from a state, or how to locate the United States on a map of the world,” Natalie Wexler writes for Forbes. “Undergraduates at Texas Tech asked their peers questions like ‘Who won the Civil War?’ and got answers like ‘The South.’ Jimmy Kimmel showed randomly selected adults a blank map of the world and asked them to identify just one country. Not a single person in the video, including at least one with a college degree, was able to comply.”
To learn more about how exciting studying history can be, we reached out to blogger, traveler and history teacher Jaunting Jen, who was kind enough to have a chat with Bored Panda about her lifelong love of the subject. “From making paper pyramids in elementary school to my childhood collection of National Geographic magazines, history has always been a part of my life,” Jen shared. “One of my earliest memories is visiting the Town Creek Indian Mound site in North Carolina. It was fascinating! I love studying history because it's like opening the door to another world. No one is too old or too young to enjoy history. There will always be something to learn.”
We were also curious if there are any parts of history that Jen is partial to, and she shared, “My favorite time periods are ancient Greece and Rome and the ancestral pueblo people of the Southwest U.S.A. Many people don't know we still have buildings standing in America that are over a thousand years old.”
And as for why it’s so important that we educate ourselves about the world’s past, the history expert says, “First, it helps us understand and process current events. Second, history absolutely repeats itself. If we don't know where we came from then we won't know where we're going.”
If you’re looking to expand your knowledge of history but just aren’t sure where to start, Jen recommends finding something that interests you personally and just starting from there. “It doesn't have to be a tedious academic journal. There are tons of websites out there with brief (but useful) snippets of history. I personally love the World History Encyclopedia. Also, go out and visit any local historic site, even if it's something that you're not particularly interested in. You'd be surprised how much you can learn from the small local places.”
Plus, you can always begin with Jen’s blog, so if you’d like to learn more from the history expert herself, be sure to check out Jaunting Jen right here!
Unfortunately, many Americans don’t even know much about their own nation’s history. The New York Post reported in 2019 that only 27% of people under the age of 45 in the US can demonstrate a basic understanding of American history, and only 40% of Americans could pass a citizenship test. A quarter of those surveyed did not know that the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, and over half didn’t know that Woodrow Wilson was the president during World War I.
But Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, doesn’t blame the students for their shortcomings. “Based on our research, this is not an issue of whether high school history teachers are adequately prepared or whether kids study American history in school,” he told the New York Post. “The answer to both questions is yes. This is an issue of how we teach American history. Now it is too often made boring and robbed of its capacity to make sense of a chaotic present and inchoate future."
