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

[All Along The Watchtower]

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http://denver.cbslocal.com/2014/09/23/jeffco-students-plan-to-protest-history-proposal/

[ElectionsGuy]

What is history if you don't teach the bad stuff?

And why is being rebellious bad? Weren't we founded on rebellion?

[Indy Texas]

What is history if you don't teach the bad stuff?

And why is being rebellious bad? Weren't we founded on rebellion?

Rebellion is only good if you're a bunch of old white people in Nevada with large guns threatening to shoot federal authorities for trying to remove you from land that does not belong to you.

[Person Man]

What is history if you don't teach the bad stuff?

And why is being rebellious bad? Weren't we founded on rebellion?

Rebellion is only good if you're a bunch of old white people in Nevada with large guns threatening to shoot federal authorities for trying to remove you from land that does not belong to you.

What those old white patriots were doing was practicing "citizenship". Pay attention!

[Cassius]

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 .

[All Along The Watchtower]

Disgraceful. Utterly disgraceful. People go to school so they can be taught, not so they can offer up social and political commentary.

I agree that the right-wing school board's proposal to turn the teaching of American history into (right-wing) social and political commentary is utterly disgraceful.

[King]

Yeah, even for Cassius, I don't get his angle here.

[Person Man]

Yeah, even for Cassius, I don't get his angle here.

He doesn't understand that propaganda != history. Ask any FOX news viewer and they will say the same thing that Cassius does. "So what if its propaganda. Its history/news."

[Deus Naturae]

Yeah, even for Cassius, I don't get his angle here.

He doesn't understand that propaganda != history. Ask any FOX news viewer and they will say the same thing that Cassius does. "So what if its propaganda. Its history/news."

I really doubt anyone would willingly admit that the news they watch or history they believe in is propaganda. Most just prefer to say that about the news/views of other people.

[Indy Texas]

Yeah, even for Cassius, I don't get his angle here.

He doesn't understand that propaganda != history. Ask any FOX news viewer and they will say the same thing that Cassius does. "So what if its propaganda. Its history/news."

I really doubt anyone would willingly admit that the news they watch or history they believe in is propaganda. Most just prefer to say that about the news/views of other people.

I don't think the Left or the Right in America is pushing propaganda in the sense of blatantly lying. No one is telling students that Ronald Reagan was born atop a mountain while a double rainbow appeared in the sky as an auspicious sign from the Heavens or characterizing the Cold War as a vast communist conspiracy against the virtuous American people.

But there are only so many days of school and only so many pages long that history books can be. Some things inevitably have to be left out so that others can be included. There's the rub.

A week talking about Phyllis Schlafly is a week that can't be spent talking about Rachel Carson. If you spend too much time talking about the booming economy of the late '80s, you leave no time to discuss deindustrialization or the decline of inner cities. If you want to talk about Jim Crow, you have to cut World War II short. Everything has tradeoffs.

[Redalgo]

The vast majority of historic events are forgotten, most of those remembered are not taught, and those that are taught carry with them the biases of historians, educators, and contemporary cultures. Choosing what to teach in history is an exercise of balancing accuracy of content with social utility in preparing young citizens to fruitfully partake in building up a better tomorrow. This demands the presentation of multiple perspectives and imbuing students with cognitive tools that will empower them to reach their own conclusions and get more out of their lessons than meaningless lists of facts to commit to rote memory.

So building on Indy's point, we need to make wise use of the finite amount of material students can be exposed to in class. It would be foolish of us to stack all the costs of these tradeoffs on any particular interest group - especially if said group has something insightful to contribute to our understanding of where we come from, what is happening, and how the future may come to pass.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

Do conservatives understand just how evil they are?  I don't think they do, because it seems like they feel teaching this crap is the same kind of "for-your-own-good"-ness as teaching kids to eat vegetables.

[Indy Texas]

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.

[AggregateDemand]

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.

[Indy Texas]

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.

Yes, because 400+ years of colonialism, racism, discrimination and their social and economic aftereffects should have been completely erased the minute the the last piece of civil rights legislation was passed in the 1960s.

[All Along The Watchtower]

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.

Yes, because 400+ years of colonialism, racism, discrimination and their social and economic aftereffects should have been completely erased the minute the the last piece of civil rights legislation was passed in the 1960s.

Racism ended when BHO was elected POTUS.

In other news,  people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are the biggest racists in America, no contest.

[Cassius]

Yeah, even for Cassius, I don't get his angle here.

He doesn't understand that propaganda != history. Ask any FOX news viewer and they will say the same thing that Cassius does. "So what if its propaganda. Its history/news."

Virtually all forms of education can be interpreted as propaganda in one form or another. This is not a bad thing, since the world would be a pretty chaotic place if we simply let everybody figure life, the universe and everything for themselves using their own peculiar form of reasoning. Indeed, when it comes to the type of education (low-level, examination orientated) that we're dealing with, individual thought should be actively discouraged (indeed, I vaguely recall one of my History teachers telling me that; I think she said that I was 'overthinking things' by saying that the religious policy of Mary I could be thought of as equally significant to that of Elizabeth I ).

Basically, the teaching of History is always going to be biased in one way or another (I remember having to study the history of Britain's involvement with slavery in Year 9, which basically almost consisted of long, loooong descriptions of the conditions aboard slave-ships, and a very brief mention of Wilberforce!). So, to my way of thinking, the job of those that set the curriculum is to ensure that the curriculum is biased the right way, not the wrong way.

[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.

[Paul Kemp]

Sounds like what they taught in my high school.

[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.  

[memphis]

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.

[politicus]

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.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

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.

We did that in middle school (up to the Civil War in 7th grade, post-Civil War in 8th grade, not sure about high school courses).

[AggregateDemand]

Yes, because 400+ years of colonialism, racism, discrimination and their social and economic aftereffects should have been completely erased the minute the the last piece of civil rights legislation was passed in the 1960s.

I didn't expect students, many of whom never lived a day in the 20th century, to beg for old-fashioned education. I can't even imagine what it must be like to be an African American in the US, learning dramatized horrors of slavery, year after year, starting in middle school and continuing through college. It must undermine your sense of self-worth, and make you feel isolated from everyone else.

Eventually, some of these students will be lucky enough to stumble into a social economics class, where irrelevant political commentaries cannot be inserted into the data. They'll learn that the horror of slavery was not violence, death, and economic exploitation, but that one man kept another man as a servile pet, restricting from him all life choices and any sense of self-determination. This trend continued long after the Emancipation Proclamation.

That's real education, supported by historical data, not a political commentary supported by sensational pictures or stories. Real education changes your world view, and your interpretation of modern events. Some people will advocate affirmative action insofar as it reverses economic discrimination. Others, like me, will become critical of the racist paternalistic plantation LBJ created in the 1960s.

These kids are basically begging to continue the foolishness of their parents and grandparents generations, and I have trouble believing they put themselves up to it.

[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.