The Kids Are All Right
Hundreds of students walked out of classrooms around suburban Denver on Tuesday in protest over a conservative-led school board proposal to focus history education on topics that promote citizenship, patriotism and respect for authority, in a show of civil disobedience that the new standards would aim to downplay.
Got that? The conservatives in this school district want to replace an education in American History with “patriotic” indoctrination.
The school board proposal that triggered the walkouts in Jefferson County calls for instructional materials that present positive aspects of the nation and its heritage. It would establish a committee to regularly review texts and course plans, starting with Advanced Placement history, to make sure materials “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights” and don’t “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”
Those of us who had a fairly well-rounded education in history can see the fatal error in their reasoning here — namely, that the United States of America would have never come into being if there was not “civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law”. Civil disobedience is in our DNA and many of our signature civic achievements would not have happened without them. Pick your “agitator” — Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (the list is very long) — and you find Americans who exercised their rights to actively address a government that was oppressive. You can’t teach a sanitized history of the US — one that encourages blind obedience to authority — because blind obedience to authority is not our history.
Thank goodness these kids already know that and already know that sometimes you have to break the rules to tell an oppressive authority to check itself.
And how about those nanny state conservatives? Because there is NO Freedom in rewriting history in order to create a compliant citizenry.
Tags: Featured, Republican Bamboozlement
Not unique to Colorado. It happens all over Texas including at the State Board of Education. Why? Because 20+ years ago liberals and Democrats were asleep at the switch and allowed the very quiet takeover of school boards by evangelical rightists and Republicans and the Dem. party leaderships at the county and state levels would not listen to us sounding the alarm on their strategy and so candidates were not recruited and priorities not set. We Dems have no one but ourselves to blame for being outflanked.
In 1992-1995 when we were creating the Social Studies Standards for Delaware (which are technically still in effect, not having yet been replaced by CCSS), we intentionally did not specify what facts or interpretations should be taught–only the broad general chronological areas that would be covered in each grade cluster. The rest of the standards were focused on teaching students the skills to read and assess historical material critically.
My philosophical bias for that approach is pretty simple: unlike Math or Science, where there is an accepted body of knowledge and a general consensus on when it should be mastered, with History or Civics/Political Science what we really have is an ongoing conversation about what it all means, often with equally credentialed people (as well as ideologues) on opposite sides of major questions.
As an historian AND as a parent, I have always been more confident in happy anarchism in the classroom wherein my children bounce back and forth between conservative or liberal (or otherwise) teachers and learn at the very beginning that this is a pretty damn subjective field. I’m much, much happier risking that they’ll get some bad information that way than via a State-mandated curriculum. To be honest (and this includes the materials on the Praxis II and APUSH), I have yet to see a set of detailed “everybody should know” history standards that rises above the mediocre.
So I think in general we are better served–at least in this discipline–by a lack of consistency among educators.
It is interesting that they want respect for authority taught. This country was born of people who did not respect the authority of the king and parliament.
To your point Steve–I treasure the year my 9th grade Civics teacher subscribed to 5 different newspapers. Each week we were responsible for reading 3 of the 5 papers on a current event topic of the week and critically review the presentation, writing, content, EVEN LOCATION, in a newspaper that event was reported. Never did I know it would serve me so well in life in deciphering the events that would be extinguished or exacerbated in where the course of history has gone since then. Wish I could have expressed my appreciation then of what he prepared us for, instead of begrudging “why do I always get left the WSJ first, and have to wait for the Daily News?” 🙂 To his, and only his credit (because face it–parents then only bought one newspaper), I have emphatically shown my children, the same story—elsewhere. They will never get that real time multi- perspective in the prescripted lock step “Columbus sailed in ’42 ……” or who had a dream, under any mandated content curriculum. Wiki has more credibility :).
BTW- THAT WAS a Delaware public education
“It would establish a committee to regularly review texts and course plans, starting with Advanced Placement history, to make sure materials “promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights” and don’t “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.””
And this would be what “too late” looks like. Starting with AP students won’t work. These kids, for the most part, are too smart/informed and will challenge this nonsense in the classroom – voraciously. This proposal was obviously written by people who never took an AP course. 😉
nor understand that an AP History course doesn’t wait, rely, or align to ANY prescribed high school curriculum.
Geesh, these people must think education is one big, tear-out workbook!!
Good for those kids. Cape in relative progressive Lewes managed to ban the whole summer school reading list because a group of right wing religious nut rubes objected. We are in great danager when we allow self serving religious nuts take over.
@joanne
I regularly do this with my classes: purchase paper copies (for the same day) of the NYT, LA Times, Orlando Sentinel, Times of London, and Jerusalem Post. The students are divided into groups by paper and each given an outline map of the world. They take each international news story that day and draw a line from the paper’s place of origin to the countries generating those stories (completely ignoring any “slant” to coverage) and this gives us five different “star” diagrams showing how the world would look differently to you in the same day, depending on where you live. It’s always interesting, as the LA Times focuses heavily on the Pacific Rim, Orlando Sentinel on Latin America, and so on.
The other exercise we do is have students watch RT (24/7 Russian TV news network in English) for 30 minutes a day for a week and then report on what’s happening in the world and what it means from a Russian perspective. (We keep a control group of about five kids listening to CNN, Fox, and MSNBC for contrast)(one of the interesting things they discover is that from Russia’s perspective the aforementioned US cable news outlet that we think are so ideologically divergent are to them interchangeable)
@pandora They are starting with APUSH because there is a large controversy right now because “traditionalist” (read “before Gary Nash”) historians have lost control over the AP US History Standards, and therefor APUSH is being rewritten by historians who started their careers in the last 20 years of so. So the “traditionalists” and the “revisionists” are going at it for control of what information will get kids past the APUSH exam. Personally I don’t think any high school kids should get past it, because 99% of them have never actually had US History in any meaningful sense of the word no matter how well they score on a test.
Science is already being replaced by religious dogma in the slave states
Geez Steve…I was only in 9th grade!! 🙂 Anyway, to your “location point”–you make a great case geographically, actually I was referring to the placement in the paper. What was a headline in one, may be page 11 in another….surely, nothing as grand as what you have enthusiastically achieved with your college kids. Great work! The emphasis then being on bias of newspaper ownership, readership, editorial board, etc..Of course back then it was all, Nixon, Viet Nam, and Angola wanting independence. Nothing like the ROLODEX of global matters of today.