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http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/03...teach-history/
What do people think of this decision?
Do they think the fictional textbook is accurate and supports intelligent discourse and learning?
In general how do people feel about Glorifying McCarthyism.
Do people feel questions that are leading and potentially have a political agenda to them are acceptable in high school textbooks?
I think it's criminal for the book publishers to hold the rest of the country down to the standards of Texas. What happens if they don't print the books that Texas wants? Does Texas stop buying books? I doubt it!Quote:
What do people think of this decision?
I haven't seen a textbook in a long time, so it's hard for me to judge. My feeling is that this fictional excerpt is about as far from the truth as what's out there now, just in the opposite direction. That's what comes of letting politicians decide what to teach children.Quote:
Do they think the fictional textbook is accurate and supports intelligent discourse and learning?
McCarthy was right about one thing: there were card-carrying communists in the country. Of course, that didn't make them traitors, just different politicians. What Texas is proposing would open the door to persecuting Democrats in the same manner.Quote:
In general how do people feel about Glorifying McCarthyism.
LOL! I would imagine that there are a lot of people, especially in Texas, who would read that excerpt and say, "What? Not even one mention of Jesus or the Bible? What kind of teaching is that?"Quote:
Do people feel questions that are leading and potentially have a political agenda to them are acceptable in high school textbooks?
All I can say is I'm glad my kids are out of school now. I think it's time to find a nice secluded mountain valley and build my retirement fortress... I mean "home"!
I think Americans should learn true history, not just the glorified crap they feed in schools nowadays. There were most definitely "card-carrying" communists in the country at that time, and I'm sure there are quite a few residing in America now. In fact, I'd be shocked if there weren't. I have no problem with it...no one should. America is not a country that turns people away because of what they think or believe. Everyone has a right to think and feel whatever they want.
History (especially BAD history) will repeat itself unless we learn it and pay attention to the past mistake made by others. I just don't believe history lessons should be skewed towards a specific political party...both sides of every issue should be evenly taught across the board.
Thorne and steelish, thanks, as always, for your insight. Really!
My wife and I are agnostic, so anytime some nut case starts to expound their views as being the ONLY views that are legitimate and they MUST include religion, we run back into our (greatly) fortified home and make sure we have a lot of anal lube because more involuntary bent-over activities are about to occur.
What's wrong with card-carrying Communists? Personally, I'm more worried about all of these RELIGIONS that have clergy that seem to be unable to keep their wicks away from boys. Next, after glorifying McCarthyism, the religious nuts may as well re-start the Salem witch hunts.
And these are the type of folks that are trying to slant history to suit their wants. Damn, my grand-kids are in school. When they come to visit us every summer I guess we will have to deprogram them and teach them the real historical truths. At least the actual information is still available. Fahrenheit 451 will soon be the normal practice in society!
Do people feel questions that are leading and potentially have a political agenda to them are acceptable in high school textbooks? (Sorry, don't know how to do a quote at this point in the response.) Totally unacceptable. They should be taught the truth, and then shown how some folks try to twist the facts and try to get these kids to believe their views as truths.
Did anybody see this guy on the news and hear him? Scary to think that publishers actually think the entire country could give a hoot about what he says. Last time I checked I don't live in the State of Montana, in the country of United States of Texas.
Better quit with that.
Religion and Politics when inserted into the educational system harm us all. It really doesn't matter which viewpoints (lib/con, believer/nonbeliever) either. Both organizations are incredibly efficient at reducing and polarizing topics down to two possible viewpoints. There is more than just two possibilities and points of view in this reality. Its saddening that so many people likely will only ever see two, and only one "clearly" (maybe not even that).Quote:
Originally Posted by SadisticNature
Respectfully,
TS
Well said! This just further reinforces the (admittedly idealistic) need to eliminate political parties completely. Let individuals run on their own merits, and live or die (politically speaking) on their own actions.Quote:
Originally Posted by TantricSoul
Yeah, like THAT will ever happen!
The State of Texas is not unique in finding politically one sided bias of a liberal left to be vehmently entrenched within the education system in America.
In fact the real surprise is that it took a government body this long to come to the realization that there is such a problem and that it needs to be corrected.
I am sure however that it will not be corrected in the manner which the article portrayed. That is obviously a political agenda seeping out of the journalists keyboard plain and simple. But who knows, I wouldn't put it past the Republicans to use the very same tatic the Democrats have used for so long against them.
What would be nice for a change, is if teachers would acctually follow an ethical standard that precluded adherence to any political party.
The US military punnishes its members if they do anything that can be construed as being politically orrientated as support for one party over another. Why not hold teachers to the same standard?
Instead of doing as they currently are allmost universally accross the board, especially in colleges.
At present, in the USA , liberal agenda dominates the classrooms, especially at the college level.
If I only had a dollar for every teacher that proffessed political views openly in classess that I attended (especially classess that have nothing to do with politics, like latin, english lit and algebra etc), then encouraged students to do the same and then graded against said students with differeing political views from their own in all the subjective portions of thier ciriculums. (BTW Blue books = subjectivity 9 times out of ten)
Teachers, like the journalists before them, have joined the ranks of the sophists of old in this regard.
The worst part is that the majority of the tenured educational professionals who embraced the changes incorperated by adoption of the Dewey system over the Clasical model in the early 1900's are to blame.
They not only discarded their own honor piecemeal so that they could promote their own political beliefs through their work when and where they ccould get away with it, all while truing the systen into an excersise in programing, but they taught whole succeeding generations of teachers that it was the "correct" standard operating procedure.
First of all the "excerpts" are fictional, as is the text from which derived. Hence the assumption in your question that this is a planned text makes little sense.
That being said; "The first of these New Deal laws, the Emergency Banking Act, was approved in two days by a docile Democratic Congress (the vote in the Senate was 73-7) without reading the actual wording of the legislation. The Banking Act gave FDR and the Democrats unprecedented and potentially dangerous control over the national supply of credit " sounds a lot like now, does it not?
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Originally Posted by SadisticNature
We all know your biases. Does not mean that only one point of view is correct. Nor should the "approved" point of view be the ONLY one taught!
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Originally Posted by Thorne
Hear! Hear!
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Originally Posted by steelish
The issue is not about "glorifying McCarthy" But about if democracy has a right to challenge communism.
I do subscribe to you can believe as you will but I also believe that the priniciples of the nation are not compatible with communism.
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Originally Posted by TantricSoul
The above statement is not quite accurate. There is no article in the UCMJ that addresses this issue, at least directly.Quote:
Originally Posted by denuseri
But members are bound to avoid partisan political activity, largely because of the color of authority. Same reason the fraternization rules exist, although that is spelled out in the UCMJ, and gambling with subordinates.
Sometimes I do try to curb my biases. I'm not always successful, but I do try.Quote:
Originally Posted by DuncanONeil
And you're right. Only one point of view is not, necessarily, correct. Subjects which teach subjective matter, such as English literature, psychology, etc., should portray multiple points of view. Objective subjects, on the other hand, should be required to teach the "approved" material, with the approval coming from those who have spent their lives studying it.
Would you want to attend an astronomy course with the curriculum determined by a flat-earther? Should a lawyer decide which laws of physics are applicable? (You knew this one was coming;)) Should biblical literalists determine the subject matter of a biology course? I don't believe any of these situations should occur, yet they happen all the time.
And to be fair, I also don't think an atheist would be acceptable laying out religious instruction. Although, I've seen some atheists who are far more informed of some religious belief systems than those who profess to be believers. Maybe a course in comparative religion should be taught by an atheist.
The point it, there are some things which cannot be decided by uninformed individuals. Let the experts determine what is right. Instead of allowing school boards decide what should taught in biology or geology or algebra classes, let the biologists, geologists and mathematicians decide. They are the ones who would know, after all.
I scanned most of your message but para two actually made me chuckle!!
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Originally Posted by Thorne
I think part of the problem is that the current education system and the salaries it provides tend to select for left-wing ideologists. I don't think the education system is the way it is because of democrats actively pushing a political agenda, I think its actively the way it is because of the teachers pushing their own political agenda (in some cases the teachers unions own political agenda). One can probably test this by tracking student opinion on issues where the democrats and teachers union disagree, I suspect that students will bias towards the teachers union.Quote:
Originally Posted by denuseri
Some courses are very hard to make apolitical. History for instance is near impossible. You can't promote make history interesting by teaching numbers and facts without providing a viewpoint or context. And that viewpoint or context is always subjective and open to bias. Something objective like Math or Science however, there is a legitimate argument for making apolitical.
As for holding teachers to the same standard as the military, I think that would be impossible. The soldiers aren't being told "You are required to educate people about these subjective situations in history". Studies have shown that people can't even agree on what neutral coverage is, because their view of what's neutral depends on their own political biases. So even asking teachers to be neutral and having the teachers genuinely try to do so doesn't result in politically unbiased coverage.
Also, trying to reduce history to facts and numbers without a viewpoint or context is never going to connect with students in a way that promotes learning. Much of history at that level these days is about trying to get students to think "What would it be like to be growing up in these times, how is it different/similar to my own life?"
So for example with McCarthyism we should portray the cold war and its intensity, and the fear about spies leaking criminal information. We should present the view that communism is incompatible with the freedoms of America and that McCarthyism was necessary to prevent that threat. We should also prevent the view that communism is incompatible with American values but McCarthyism was also incompatible with those values. We should talk about how those errors were actually violations of rights, and how McCarthyism was a witch hunt where evidence was often at the level of he said/she said. We should present the Oppenheimer trial in all its gory detail from both sides.
You'd be amazed about how many Americans born well after the fact don't even know about how Oppenheimer (the man who developed the bomb that ended WWII) was treated by the Eisenhower administration due to McCarthyism.
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Originally Posted by Thorne
I agree with you. As I said in my last post, some subjects simply cannot be defined objectively, and history is certainly one of them. One thing I can recall from my own high school history days is a teacher who gave an assignment to the class to compare the descriptions of the American Revolution as written in the Encyclopedia Americana with that written in the Encyclopedia Brittanica. For the most part the facts were in agreement. The way they were presented, and interpreted, were miles apart much of the time.Quote:
Originally Posted by SadisticNature
But this doesn't mean they cannot be taught in a more neutral manner, without bias. Using a consensus of historians to prepare a history text book rather than an extremely biased local BOE would tend to give a much more realistic view of actual events, while still allowing those events to be presented in context.
No one said anything about reducing anything down to just facts and numbers and one can get their students to think just fine without promoting any political agenda as part of one's lecture or be objective in presenting information while at the same time inspiring ones students to make up their own minds about what was what instead of trying to program them with ones own subjective opinion. In fact you can even get them to actually become active in class and have real thought provoking discussions instead of sitting like drones taking notes in bored tandem as they wonder how many more hoops they have to jump through to get their peerage stamped diploma.Quote:
Originally Posted by SadisticNature
Which us back to the main difference in perspectives between the "Dewey" way and its much harder to implement, but better overall results achieving "Classical" predessesor.
One tuaght students what and how they should think.
It says their is no way to be objective so lets not bother.
The other, tuaght students how to think for themselves.
It says a teacher can be objective if they are disiplined enough to put thier students needs before their own.
Purely FYI as a side bar but still releveant to the discussion imho.
I didnt say a word about the UCMJ Duncan. But them the UCMJ isnt the only authority of reference in these matters.Quote:
Originally Posted by DuncanONeil
I am however refering directly to Federal Law (Titles 10, 2, and 18,) and, Department of Defense (DOD) Directives, not to mention all the specific military regulations which strictly limit a military active duty person's participation in partisan political activities as well as clearly spell out recomended punnishments for appropriate actions rangeing from reprimand to Article 15 and or court martial proceedings if nessesary.
At least as it was explained to me by military legal layman like my husband who is active duty AF and the very nice retired Lt Col in charge of the rotc program at my college.
I can understand reprimand and Article 15s (that is a UCMJ provision btw) but these would likely not be immediate response. But attached to repetitive actions.
As for a court martial, that would necessitate a serious breach. Again just an aside, courts martial are governed by the UCMJ. and this is the prime punishment source for the military. I would call everything else merely discipline.
Yes I took a very limited view but since we were on the subject of punishment it seemed reasonable. I did agree that there is a limit on such activity and it was frowned upon, but usually did not reach as far as serious judicial punishment.
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Originally Posted by denuseri
The separation of church and state had more to do with how political the church became than how religious government became.
When our founding fathers created this new nation, they didn't want a repeat of what happened with the British government. The English had very political churches, which helped "rule" the masses. Church was a form of propaganda for politics. Our founding fathers wanted a new land in which we had religious freedom and politics had no place in religion.
Now if we could only get the religion out of politics we'd all be better off.Quote:
Originally Posted by steelish
To be clear I was not aware you were a history teacher and did not intend any of this as a personal evaluation of you. Furthermore, I wasn't saying one has to promote one's own political agenda or program students in any fashion, I'm just saying its very difficult to comment on some topics without being open to bias.Quote:
Originally Posted by denuseri
Take for instance the Abraham Lincoln election. One of the main issues was the issue of government spending on infrastructure. Do we completely avoid that topic because its controversial? Do we say it was an issue and get students to comment on this? How do we select which discussion points the students make to focus on without introducing political bias?
You'd be surprised how often people present this election as being about slavery, despite the fact that Lincoln did not support the abolitionist movement until late in the war, well after the election. But abolishing slavery is far less controversial and far less political.
Even if one decides to teach by presenting certain specific topics in a very neutral manner, and allowing student discussion to control political discourse, the very choice of topics can be politically motivated.
For example consider a 20th century American history course that chooses to divide the century into the following areas: Pre WWI, WWI, The Roaring 20's, The Great Depression, WWII, The Cold War, and the Post-Cold War Period.
Say such a course doesn't cover the war in the Philippines at all during the Pre-WWI period. There is potential bias in choosing to avoid that topic entirely. It's not the fault of the teacher who doesn't cover it. But rather the choice of curriculum. If the selection of which topics are important to teach our youth about involves portraying certain nations, individuals or political parties in favorable or unfavorable ways by selectively covering their finest moments and avoiding their worst then there is bias in the course even if it is taught neutrally.
An example of a course I took in my high school where the educator was great and but I considered the course biased was Ancient Civilizations. The furthest we got out of Europe was Egypt and Mesopotamia. We covered Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome (Rise to Collapse). But we didn't cover other influential civilizations like the Indians, the Chinese, the Mayans, the Incans, the Aztecs, the Rus. This is despite the fact that India had the strongest Economy around for much of the time period we covered, China was the most technologically advanced for much of the time period we covered, and numerous other major factors. Instead it was make sure you know these pagan gods by both their Roman and Greek names, make sure you know these traditions many of which are nearly identical by both their Greek and Roman names, etc. Many would claim the Euro-centric choice of curriculum has bias even if the material is taught neutrally.
I never said this was a planned text, I'm asking people how they would feel about a text like this.Quote:
Originally Posted by DuncanONeil
As for the particular statement in question I think a textbook really ought to examine things like:
(1) The contents of the Emergency Banking Act
(2) The economic arguments for and against it at the time.
(3) Consequences of the Act.
Furthermore I'd suggest that they review the statements in a slightly more neutral fashion:
The bill gave the government control of the banking supply, it happened to be FDR & The Dems at the time, but it certainly passed on to future Republican or Democrat leaderships.
So if you want a point for discussion to be:
(1) The bill gave the government further control of the money supply? In what ways was this a good thing? In what ways was this a bad thing? On the whole do you think the Act was a positive or negative influence on America and the problems it faced in the 1930's?
This would be the difference between a textbook saying:
Bush and the Republicans committed the Americans to an unpopular, expensive and futile war in Iraq, without any international support to the great detriment of the country.
Or giving a bunch of data and information and then asking:
The government elected to go to war in Iraq without UN support. In what ways does this complicate things for the US? What is a situation in which you would support such an action? What is a situation in which you would oppose such an action? On the whole do you think this action was justified? What do you feel the consequences were on the US?
Or even:
(1) Compare and Contrast the Vietnam War and the Iraq War.
I am right there with you when it comes to picking out Dewey's orignal Euro-centric paragons out of what we commonly call a "Western Civ" course. they tried to do a history of "us all" thing but failed to see the hipocracy in excluding the majority of the "us" in the world didnt they, lol. But thats a matter of course selection that is easily fixed if we can ever get enough of us non-euro-centrics and objectivcists together to topple the current regime.Quote:
Originally Posted by SadisticNature
It's not quoting the nested quotes so I'm just not going to quote at all.
But regarding Lincoln speaking against slavery the contents of those speeches are highly relevant.
There were many different positions in the anti-slavery camp. These ranged from:
(1) Abolitionist
(2) No New Slave States
(3) Don't allow expansion of slave states outside the bounds of a particular treaty.
There are many people of that time period in camp (3) who made anti-slavery speeches, so without providing specific contents of speeches it is hard to place where Lincoln was at a particular period of time along this spectrum.
I think much of the problem is media literacy and the difference between good and bad sources. This is a very tricky subject in the humanities as with the creeping in of postmodernism even the journals are often full of biased opinionated pieces supported by unsound or invalid deductions. For example something as simple as showing evidence for a->b, then showing evidence for not(a) then concluding not(b), when in fact a implies b shows nothing at all about what not(a) implies. The reduced popularity of peer review and standards makes it very tricky to assess the difference between good and bad sources. Basically we often get to the point where in media literacy we teach students "X, Y and Z are not good sources for information because of R1,R2 and R3", then in every high school class we encourage the use of "X,Y and Z" as sources.
Alas copy and paste is such a nice thing, next time to make it easier I wont type within the brackets when I quote you and I will pull each section seperately so you can formulate a responce better. Ok?
and again:
I am not bringing the above points of my own up about the Civil War/Lincoln Administration's well documanted statements for the pupposes of refuting your veracity in and of itself so much as to make my point about how history can be very objective as opposed to subjective depending upon how its presented as in the examples you and I both have now provided.
In fact I don't believe there exists any subject material that cannot be approached objectively if one is willing to take the time to do so.
To actual debate the purposes of the Civil war or Lincoln's Administration or any other topic that may hold potential for debate or contention not directly related to this threads topic:
I would suggest; as opposed to a side bar here where it may take over or derail the thread, that we make a new thread if you like where we can go into as much detail as you desire or take it up in private message notifications at your liesure.
This sounds fine.Quote:
Originally Posted by denuseri
I still think history has a lot of subjective content that can be made somewhat objective, or taught somewhat objectively, but at the end of the day the conclusions drawn from the material are very subjective for many subjects.
Perhaps coming from the sciences biases me, but my view of an objective subject is a subject where there are clear right and wrong answers based on the material, and any hypothesis can be verified or refuted, through either experiment or application of known rules. Examples would include Mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, computer science and statistics. High school economics and accounting would also qualify as its pretty much a system of rules at that point.
My view of a subjective subject where one can consistently show evidence for a statement and its converse despite having an abundance of information.
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Originally Posted by TantricSoul
Actually, separation of the church and state was to protect the church from our government...not the other way around. Religion (no matter WHAT religion) was at one time a very large part of the educational system. Not that they taught religion, but they did begin each morning with the pledge of allegience. They did allow kids to pray in school. They did allow ALL kids to observe their own religious beliefs without interferring with the religious beliefs of others.
This has been twisted and twisted into "separation of church and state" until any hint of religion has been banned from the schools and it seems as if it is now out of the government too.
America is a land in which it doesn't matter what religion you are or aren't. Unfortunately, all that is changing. The government is now infiltrating the churches.
BTW - I really see nothing wrong with adding "conservative values and historical interpretations to the statewide social studies curriculum".
What's wrong is only teaching one side of an issue to children. Isn't that the same as forcing an opinion down someone's throat?
They said they were going to ADD conservative values and interpretations. Not REPLACE what they had with it.
OR are we a nation that's going to sit back and let someone tell us what to think? We can't learn issues from all sides and make our own decision? Or is that too much information for any one single person to handle?
So very true. It has been found that current history books relate back (use as a reference) a book dating in 1926 or 29 that slandered Thomas Jefferson and printed a lot of untrue things about him. There are no footnotes in the book, and actual (still around today) ORIGINAL writings between him, Washington, Franklin, etc. dispute what is in the book, yet our history books STILL teach the slanderous material.Quote:
Originally Posted by SadisticNature