History: the Feel Good Experience
This LA Times Op/Ed denounces the California state board requirement that history textbooks should offer positive images of religious, racial and ethnic groups while demonstrating absolute parity in portraying males and females as "active" "creative" agents of history.
Everyone has to come out looking like a winner!
This is such a ridiculous idea of history that it makes me want to home school Leo. What students will learn from this feel good sanitized version of history is that history as a discipline is full of BS.
Discuss amongst yourselves.
Everyone has to come out looking like a winner!
This is such a ridiculous idea of history that it makes me want to home school Leo. What students will learn from this feel good sanitized version of history is that history as a discipline is full of BS.
Discuss amongst yourselves.
6 Comments:
Whenever the legislature intervenes in the curriculum, it's awkward; witness the relatively recent bill in France (later rescinded) asking schools to teach about the "positive aspects" of colonialism.
Nevertheless, this California law isn't completely wrong-headed. Isn't it likely schools might be forced more and more to focus on social history and how people experienced life in times past?
Isn't this better than teaching a narrative that focuses on individuals and events and makes everything into a contest where there are winners and losers? Such a narrative invariably makes certain groups look passive and incapable of contributing to the social body.
Confusing literary/imaginary and politic representation is all too common on the left. Still, the effects of such a law might be far from bad.
Hmm...I wasn't thinking of teaching history as a series of battles from which emerge losers and winners -- I certainly wasn't taught history very well myself, -- it was the Cold War so the values of the West were constantly being compared to the totalitarianism of the East.
But I am thinking about a more critical way of understanding historical events and movements -- modernization being one of them. I suppose I am thinking, perhaps too utopically of a critical and materalist history that could translate itself into a non-idealized notion of the past, and one that could convey to students the depths of the struggle for what little autonomy we can claim as our own today.
No one should come out of history looking good would be another way of putting it.
No matter WHAT is going on in the public school system, home schooling is not the answer. It is the refuge of religious freaks (who also hate the school system), abusers, and egomaniacs who seek to produce replicants. Trust me, I ran up against the progeny of this trend for years at Evergreen! Uggh.
I was joking about homeschooling -- and GG has confirmed some of my suspicions about the overwheening arrogance and narcisssism of the parents who would undertake it.
Much as might pitch a fit about the way history is taught in secondary schools, I have NO idea what it's like to teach high school and I don't pretend to really know so in the end, I defer to experience .
As a university professor, however, these textbooks requirements strike me as NOT promoting a idea of how people experienced life in times past, but how we WANTED them to experience it.
Despite what I said above, this last comment is probably more to the point. Legislation surrounding textbooks is largely a waste of time. Any teacher worth her salt could help her students find better things to be reading.
I actually think the liberal feel good version of everyday life of history does as much damage to historical consciousness as the conservative version of great moments/great men and women version.
I actually don't think it's impossible to teach materialist history, but I think that the struggle for "hegemony" is one that cannot be remembered and has to be repressed at whatever cost.
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