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- Thread starter scooter1369
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scooter1369
HTTR Forever.
Buckeye513;1628232; said:
Sometimes when you try hard not to, you just don't
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Six Train
TOSU Applicant
My problem with the all of the alleged political agendas in my school was that the chapter in my text book about Japanese internment was 12 pages, women and black people's service another 12 or so, but the ENTIRE history of the American military in the pacific was like 2, and then 12 more pages on why we shouldn't have bombed the Japanese. The result is that the student comes away with an overbearing image of American racism, sexism, injustice, etc., instead of what actually happened in the war. If you said "Guadalcanal" to anyone in my US History class in high school, they would raise an eyebrow. Say "Korematsu v. United States" and they'll be damned to let you forget it. I'm center-left in my political identity, but I totally understand when people say that public schools have a liberal bias. Usually, it isn't that they are explicitly propagating (they did in my school, but I grew up in the People's Republic of NYC) a liberal agenda and telling students what they should believe, it is that what they choose to emphasis and what they choose to omit from their teachings lead people to adapt a liberal stance on everything.
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Gatorubet
Loathing All Things Georgia
I hear you six, but if ignoring the past leads to repeating it, then you can repeat the successes all you want....but the internment camps and racism and sexism need to be pounded into some of our heads so that such conduct will not be repeated. They harp on this stuff, if for no other reason than the fact that the ones who are the most likely to not "get it" are from homes where this kind of thought will never be mentioned. And while you can't change a lifetime of exposure to - say - racism - in a film in history class, you can at least make it clear that if you are going to hold those beliefs that you are going to be in the minority, and can infer that those who think that way are in a small group of the poorly educated.
You make a good point about the way that such stuff does not highlight our successes, but I see it as a lessor evil than letting kids think that holding those other repudiated beliefs is somehow "normal", by virtue of a light touch on the subjects.
The emphasis on the bad stuff at least denies them that opportunity.
You make a good point about the way that such stuff does not highlight our successes, but I see it as a lessor evil than letting kids think that holding those other repudiated beliefs is somehow "normal", by virtue of a light touch on the subjects.
The emphasis on the bad stuff at least denies them that opportunity.
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MaxBuck
SoCal, Baby!
Historically, the winners have written the history books. But since about 1990, an alien visiting the earth would conclude that the losers have taken over that task in the USA.Gatorubet;1634341; said:
I think we can all agree that avoiding hubris relative to our past successes requires some level of familiarity with, and regret of, our bad actions. But emphasizing those bad actions over the successes is a recipe for inaction, self-doubt and failure in the future.
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cincibuck
You kids stay off my lawn!
Six Train;1634318; said:
And mine never mentioned John Brown, Harriet Tubman or Fredrick Douglas -- I think we did get something about George Washington Carver and his 2000 uses for the peanut -- I remember when Sports Illustrated told me that Oscar Robertson graduated from Crispus Attucks and I thought that was a strange name for a Catholic high school. There was nothing about civil rights -- everything was "jus' fine." Anything I learned about the labor movement, child labor, the Grange movement, Wounded Knee and on and on, I learned on my own.
In fact the movement to make history more focused on social history and less on the history of warfare comes from Arthur Schlessinger Sr., a history professor at The Ohio State University in the 20's and 30's.
More to the point, it matters more which state you are raised in as to where the focus of your history text will go. The movement to ban books, begun by a Texas couple in the 50's, created a very limited text that was adopted as a statewide text and not just in history -- other states have followed suit to include the need to have equal space for creationism and evolution.
School text books; where politics, democracy and truth collide.
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