Colorado students walk out of class to protest right-wing revision of history

[pbrower2a]

Disgraceful. Utterly disgraceful. People go to school so they can be taught, not so they can offer up social and political commentary. I mean honestly, I'm sure the forebears of many of these kids would have given their right arm to be taught history, whether it was portrayed in a good light or not.

Can't they just go outside the school gates and smoke dope - that was sufficient 'rebellion' at my school .

The ones smoking dope aren't the ones who think that the school board is trying to manipulate them. High-school students savvy enough to understand psychological manipulation in the form of political propaganda offered as 'education' are the best-and-brightest, and not dullards with personal grudges against a teacher or school administrator.

Just think how manipulative education can be in dictatorial regimes. If kids were being taught how wonderful 'socialism' is as was the norm in the Soviet Union and its satellites, would you as a conservative find that troubling? Or how wonderful it is to fight and die for the glory of the nation as in fascist states like Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and militarist Japan?

Even a word like "free" can be twisted into something perverse, as in "free" from capitalist exploitation, "free" from the Versailles treaty, "free" from the Jews, and from the beloved Horst-Wessel-Lied, the streets free to Nazi militias. In view of how "free enterprise" operates in the US today, it could mean that owners and managers are "free" to express their greed and power in the imposition of mass suffering.

Much is rotten in contemporary America. It is not the duty of the People to endorse the rottenness but instead to demand its excision through peaceful reform -- and to keep it out, as much as possible, from the public life. If We the People have no willingness to resist evil, whether of a tyrannical overlord or schemers from inside the System, then we Americans could end up with concentration camps and torture chambers -- maybe even peonage in all but name.

[pbrower2a]

Looks like we're in for another 50 years of White Guilt. I thought it would be done and dusted by the time the 21st century arrived.

Would you like children to learn that killing off the First Peoples was innocuous? Or that slavery was essential to the development of the American economy? Or that the incarceration of the Japanese in the western US was an unqualified good deed? Or that Jim Crow laws were innocuous?

We learn from history, much of it obscene tales written in the blood of innocent people, so that we do not make the same misjudgments when we have the opportunity to do otherwise.  

[pbrower2a]

FWIW, I never studied anything beyond World War II in any elementary, middle or high school history class I ever took. There was never enough time in the school year to get further than that. I distinctly remember that in my 8th grade American history class, we started talking about World War I the last day of class before the final and our teacher said there wouldn't be anything about WWI on the final for that reason. He also claimed we were the worst class he ever had and that our counterproductive, off-topic behavior was the reason we only made it up to 1915-ish.

Unfortunately, this is a huge problem pretty much everywhere. As a crappy solution, Tennessee and Mississippi (maybe other states too, I don't know that much about every state's curriculum) do only through 1877 in 8th grade and then only do 1877-Present in high school US History. It's not much better.

I am personally a great fan of chronology, but  history education doesn't have to be chronological. Often you can start with current affairs - like when you take Islamic terrorism or Islamophobia in Europe and work your way backwards to the crusades and look at how Christians and Muslims have interacted and the resulting conflicts. I think that approachn is preferable on a lot of issues when you are teaching teenagers, generally you get more motivated students (the ones that can be motivated ...) if you start with current affairs and try to put them into historical perspective. US history is well suite for that approach.

Historical knowledge is generally pretty useless if you don't use it to think about how the world became what it is today. So critical thinking is at the core of studying history.

History is best written in sequences, but if it is to show causes one often must treat some events as practically irrelevant to others. The Crusades have nothing  to do with World War II, but they have much to do with Western-Islamic relations. The Russian Orthodox Church might be practically irrelevant to the history of the Soviet Union, but once the Soviet Union came to an end it becomes extremely relevant to Russia.

.........

Perhaps most significant to the walk-out is that it is an act of conscience against ideologues who have their own plans to turn schools into propaganda machines.  The Hard Right has its agenda for schools -- ensuring that those who attend school are fully convinced that capitalism at its most inequitable is the best of all possible worlds.

[pbrower2a]

I question whether its worth it to do a lot of history with middle schoolers. The age of the kids and nature of the teaching doesn't lend itself accurate teaching. High school seems like a much better time to get into history and civics.

Most of my middle school history was pretty shrill and simplistic. It was either "OMG teh Anglos were EVUL to the Natives/French!!!!" or "The Fathers of Confederation were SUPER SPECIAL AWESOME". High school provided an opportunity for a much more nuanced view.

I'd much rather cut out history in middle school and then do a solid in depth history course in high school than the mess memphis just described.

History should be different for middle schoolers, not just left out.  If you want to get away from the simplistic moralism, teach it in a different way.  Connect it to archaeology and the history of science and technology. I think it is a great time to do ancient history.

It makes sense. The further back in time one goes the less bias creeps into teaching.