Randi Rhodes Forums

OK, so the same wackjobs that passed Prop H8te are trying to prevent California schools from teaching the history of gay people's contributions to well CIVILIZATION.

You can read about that here: ARTICLE LINK

But let me say what disturbed me about this article even more than their efforts, was this bolded sentence:


Really?

They don't even BEGIN learning about U.S. History until they're in the frickin' 8th Grade???



By the time I was in the 4th Grade, I had to be able to know not only all the U.S. State capitals, I had to know all the capitals of all the COUNTRIES in the world. And we'd had significant study of not only foundational U.S. history -- the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, etc. -- but we had additional activities that was designed to expose us to other cultures history too. I can specifically remember studying about Japan in the 4th Grade, for instance.

It sounds to me like my generation actually got more history lessons from Schoohouse Rock on Saturday mornings than these kids are getting.

And then you wonder why they can find shit on a map or don't know anything about their own democracy?

HELLO, it's because you didn't even START teaching them about history until the damned 8th Grade!!

I thought it was interesting that in his odd little biopic on Alexander the Great, Oliver Stone at least tried to raise the issue of whether he was gay or bisexual. The film certainly hints at it, with his constant male companion. There's one of the guys who basically created the "Western Civilization" of Western Civ courses. Of course, it was a bit hard to really see Angelina Jolie as Colin Farrell's mother... she's not much older.

The problem with this question is that the Greek idea of sexuality was bit different, they didn't really have an idea of "homosexuality" per se that corresponds to the modern one. You have Plato, the father of much of Western philosophy, essentially saying that the highest form of love is that between older and younger men. "Platonic" love was not exactly what people think... although Plato didn't define that love in sexual terms, he didn't say such relationships were purely asexual, either.

I have a daughter who's in the 11th grade now, and who has been in CA schools from the first grade. And as stated above, they really didn't get started with any real study of US history until 8th grade.

But they did make the kids memorize the names of the US States and the names of their capitols, and the names and places of the larger countries in the world. They had to memorize the names of all the Presidents, and they were introduced to the Declaration of Independence, and the Revolutionary War.

They did do all that in grade school, but all of that memorizing isn't a real study of the history USA. It's just setting the basis for what will follow, when the children's minds are more developed.

I don't think most of the little minds in grade school are developed enough to deal with the level of abstraction needed for any real study history until they are of an age beginning in the 8th grade.

So rote memorization of name and places, being taught that there is a Declaration of Independence and it's wonderful, is about as good as it gets, for history studies in grade school.

When the subject came up about Donner Pass when she was in third grade, and why it was named Donner Pass was also mentioned, she asked me if they cooked them first.

The special introduction designed to expose kids to other cultures my daughter received in grade school was focused on China, for me in an earlier era it was Saudi Arabia.

A new report (PDF) by the Albert Shanker Institute and the American Labor Studies Center argues that history textbooks exclude labor from the history that American schoolchildren learn. Their review of four leading high school history textbooks finds that the books:


often implicitly (and, at times, explicitly) represent labor organizing and labor disputes as inherently violent;

virtually ignore the vital role of organized labor in winning broad social protections, such as child labor laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency;

ignore the important role that organized labor played in the civil rights movement;

and

pay scant attention to unionism after the 1950s, thus completely ignoring the rise of public sector unionization, which brought generations of Americans into the middle class and gave new rights to public employees.

Textbooks are incredibly political documents, as the recent Texas textbook controversies have reminded us. But by the time Texas got busy trying to write Newt Gingrich and the Moral Majority into high school history books and Anne Hutchinson and Thurgood Marshall out, the struggles of working people and the contributions of their unions to foundational pieces of today's society such as the 40-hour work week and Social Security had already been largely written out. As the new report details, inclusion of labor history in school curricula has been under attack since the 1930s.


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/0 ... ding-labor history?via=blog_1

Tennessee Tea Party Wants Slavery Removed From School Textbooks To Make Founding Fathers Look Good


Multiple Tea Party members, including lead spokesman Hal Rounds, say they want the state legislature to force teachers to teach history in the way they see it. In other words, they want to re-write history to exclude the fact that the Founding Fathers owned slaves, because according to The Memphis Commercial Appeal, the group wants to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.”

The group wants to change textbook selection criteria to say that “No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.” It’s a fancy way of saying let’s take the role of minorities out of our American history textbooks so our past leaders will look good.



more


http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/01/22 ... look-good/

Too late. That info was scrubbed from school texts long ago. I did not learn about The Founders (tm) owning slaves and a number of other things (like the Indian Removal Act) until college and well into adulthood.