{"id":9241,"date":"2010-03-15T06:34:28","date_gmt":"2010-03-15T11:34:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=9241"},"modified":"2010-03-15T06:34:55","modified_gmt":"2010-03-15T11:34:55","slug":"a-mixed-blessing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=9241","title":{"rendered":"A Mixed Blessing"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw this news last week…:<\/a><\/p>\n

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers\u2019 commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…and thought “oh, great”.<\/p>\n

Not that I don’t think some balance is in order.\u00a0 After having kids and stepkids in one school or another for the past twenty years, there’s no question that the public education system is biased to the left, especially in whatever pass for “humanities” in the public schools.\u00a0 History education in particular is a joke; I’ve spoken, exasperated, about this in the past; my kids have gone years where all <\/em>they studies were slavery and civil rights.\u00a0 Important, sure.\u00a0 Episodes with big impact on many of the kids’ lives?\u00a0 Absolutely.\u00a0 The only things, practically, worth studying?\u00a0 Hardly.<\/p>\n

And on the occasions where other parts of history and current events were studied?\u00a0 Yeah, pretty much “America last”; the few kids who are even exposed to the ideas of “liberalism” and “conservatism” seem, for some reason completely <\/em>unknown to me – to come out of school with the idea that “conservatism is about the right to own slaves and the freedom to let old people freeze”.\u00a0 Nothing new there.<\/p>\n

So the idea of “balance” seems, on the surface, to be an improvement.<\/p>\n

The problem is, I don’t want either <\/em>side – any <\/em>side, really – writing the history books “favorably” to themselves.\u00a0 I’m not one of those people who ever thought teaching kids the dates and places and events was such a bad thing; tell kids what <\/em>happened, and show them what other commentators – not textbook writers – have written about the events, and let them make up their own minds.<\/p>\n

“But Mitch!\u00a0 Kids are stupid! <\/em>They don’t have what it takes to process all that information!”\u00a0 So do you think they’re processing the pre-digested stuff that’s slanted one way or the other?\u00a0 Hell, most history teachers haven’t processed most of what history actually means.<\/p>\n

The big question with this Texas fracas is “how good an idea is it for committees of politicians, most of them pretty ignorant themselves, to be determining what goes into textbooks and curricula?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw this news last week…: After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers\u2019 commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9241"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9268,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9241\/revisions\/9268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}