History as the Sixth-Grade Sees It

Insight on the News, Feb 26, 2001 by Stephen Goode

The following items, taken from the Internet, are described as actual history-test answers from sixth-graders. The answers are not just from a few students, but from many elementary-school kids and are put together and arranged to tell what history is from a very young person's point of view. Here they are:

* "Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants had to live elsewhere.

* "Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.

* "In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled biscuits and threw the java.

* "Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. Dying, he gasped out: `Tee Hee, Brutus.'

* "The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He wrote tragedies, comedies and hysterectomies, all in Islamic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couple. Romeo's last wish was to be laid by Juliet.

* "Writing at the same time as Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote.

* "Delegates from the original 13 states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats backwards and declared, `A horse divided against itself cannot stand.' Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.

* "Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest precedent. Lincoln's mother died in infancy and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands.

* "Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Handel. Handel was half-German, half-Italian and half-English. He was very large.

* "Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.

* "The 19th century was a time of great many thoughts and inventions. People stopped reproducing by hand and started reproducing by inventions."