Comment by dylan604 2 days ago
the power of disinformation on social media platforms is apparently stronger than classroom teaching. it doesn't help that what is taught in classrooms is just getting worse for $reasons which is only going to get worse now that states are going to do whatever they want with schools now.
It is rather lazy that people 'prefer' patriotic history and 'disciplined workforce'. I see no evidence of this.
I do gather that some parents are rather sanctimonious and scandalized about their children learning anything but the most sanitized version of history. That seems so far to be the most presence in banning anything. Witness Harry Potter being listed as one of the most challenged book at the height of popularity.
History as it was taught in my grade school years certainly wasn't whitewashed and they are rather explicit about some of the horror. Moreover, the problem is that history wasn't taught well and made 'boring'.
>> Moreover, the problem is that history wasn't taught well and made 'boring'.
This. 100% this. At school we got an extremely biased view of history, but even then it was taught soooo badly.
History (regardless of viewpoint, correctness, or accuracy) could be an enormously exciting topic. It's full of things that would appeal to any child when presented well.
But school history curricula for me was full of meaningless names, dates, actions - endlessly repeated with no enthusiasm at all.
Fully agree. My kids consider(ed) history to be very boring, other than when I teach them about it. I thought I disliked history after coming out of high school because the classes were always so excruciatingly boring and felt so irrelevant to anything "modern day." As I went through my early career I found myself constantly wondering "why is X that way?" Personal research including reading books written by historians who actually tell the story and also describe the many various links between events, and especially the "other side" of many of the issues (that's particularly fascinating regarding the USA "founding fathers" as they were far from a cohesive single-minded unit as presented in most history classes) many things started to click. When I've taught my kids about history using the same approach, especially zeroing in on the real fascinating aspects of it, they still don't love history but they have a strong appreciation for it.
By way of example, "the founding fathers were Christians" is a classic oft-repeated phrase I continually hear, to which I love talking about Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, all of whom were clearly agnostic (at the time, they were "Deist" which was essentially equivalent to "agnostic" nowadays). Thomas Paine's phenomenal book "The Age of Reason" was utterly mind-blowing and extremely radical at the time, receiving widespread banning and igniting firestorms in the culture. It's still a great read today! Especially fascinating when you consider this was many decades before Darwin would provide one of the most important scientific explanations that massively shrunk the area for God of the Gaps.
I agree with you, but I would also add that real history is also typically much more uncomfortable, for nearly everyone. It can also be legitimately controversial as there's truly a lot that we don't really know, particularly around people's motiviations and sometimes true beliefs. For example it was common practice for people to burn any letters that didn't reinforce or support what they wanted history to remember. It takes someone with real dedication towards separating themselves emotionally from the topic to attempt an accurate portrayal, and that is a rare quality indeed. Certainly not a quality widespread enough to be present in every middle school and high school history teacher (though there are some excellent ones out there).
Some examples of the discomfort: to many white people now the history of slavery and racism is deeply uncomfortable. It's not even difficult to find hard evidence of such as many racist attitudes persisted well into the era of recordings and have been immortalized in movies and TV shows. I suspect a big part of that is the recency effect since we're still living with many follow-on effects of the practice even if we don't practice it actively anymore.
Much less talked about though is the history of racism and slavery among nearly all people at different times. For example a large majority of the black slaves that were sold to Europeans (including the Europeans living in the Americas) were originally enslaved by other black Africans and sold to the slave traders. Not all the slaves were sold either. To be fair the Spanish (at least in first half of the new world exploration) didn't have much of a problem doing the enslaving themselves as they routinely enslaved native people's after conquering them. We can also go back millenia and see the same behavior. Greeks, Romans, Persians, pretty much everybody had their slaves for as far back as history is recorded (and surely much, much farther).
We like to think we are enlightened nowadays, but I think history really demonstrates that as humans we are almost universally inclined toward enslaving other humans. Hopefully we're irreversibly past that now and well on our path to the Star Trek society, but even if that is the case it doesn't make the history any more comfortable.
I think white ppl (i’m one of them) should get over themselves. We’ve been the bad guys of history and we need to face it and correct course. It’s not written in our fate, it’s in settler colonial ideology and capitalism. We can adopt a new outlook in solidarity with our brothers and sisters and the world and make a fairer more decent world. Being uncomfortable is ok
some are worse than others, or at least, the consequences of the world hegemon teaching jingoistic history has really terrible results for all of humanity. one can envision an ideal world where the most powerful countries both emphasized a scientific and empathetic understanding of history combined with a sense of responsibility to decolonize the world and shepard institutions for constructing a more equal world, but we do not have that. instead we have a murderous former slaver settler-colonial nation that used to pay lip service to human rights doing realpolitik regime change around the world and settler-colonialism in Palestine.
social conditions are deteriorating so people are reaching for alternative explanations. you want people to reach for true history? then you have to show them true history will benefit them. fortunately, there is a way to do this, but powerful people hate it and prefer patriotic history and disciplined workforces instead. then they blame minorities for the problems they cause.