...but maybe it's just that as I've moved through life, I've drifted away from places where badly formed unorthodox opinions are rampant, and toward places where underdeveloped political opinions are mixed at the deepest levels with other things I'm interested in.
I tire of it. I don't have the power to change all the minds of everyone on the internet who thinks that Jesus wasn't real because some other yahoo on the internet made up lies that are easily disproven after five minutes spent in any grade school library's mythology section. I have some hope when I see Copernicus mistaken for Leonardo in the debate about the two world views and someone else chimes in with "I looked into this, and that's not quite true." I can still make my contributions but God will have to do the heavy lifting.
I tire of the same kind of crap as "astronomers calculated the positions of the stars and planets and discovered a missing day that proves Joshua 10:13." Why people would lie about this, I don't know. Maybe it's all false flag operations, but these things just...smell like well intentioned lies by people who don't have the foresight to ask "if they discover this isn't true, are they more likely to throw it all away in a fit of doubt than to forgive me for tricking them into getting saved/opening their eyes to scientific materialism?"
But my point was to touch on a couple semi political things and call it a night. Today's topic: common core.
I'm not going to go deep, just hit a couple factors.
Supporters dislike the idea of what they call "hyper localization," that is, the idea that communities even down to the county level should have a say in their own school's curriculum. They blame that for the whitewashing of history, for such things as learning little or nothing about the history of slavery in America and the Civil Rights Movement. They want it standardized across the nation.
Problem is, the non-academics in Washington or San Francisco who are really more interested in training compliant future high tech employees--they will admit this is their goal when they publicize their support of the program, if slightly less directly--are not in any way immune to propagating other swaths of ignorance when they develop curricula far away from classrooms.
There's no guarantee a nationwide curriculum will be any more truthful about Wilmington or Custer, because there's no reason to be. It's easier to reinvent the past to explain away the historical artifacts you can't or haven't yet been able to destroy, than to erase it all at once and hope no one notices or remembers what came before Year One.
Typical: see a potential problem, magnify it into a crisis, and demand federal intervention. Sound familiar?
But all that assumes that the curriculum reinventors and textbook compilers have all the pertinent knowledge at their fingertips and are simply making different choices about what to include and what to leave out, what to emphasize and what to deemphasize, what fits into the themes they want to teach and what doesn't, what themes ought to be taught and what are too difficult or inappropriate for each grade level, how to define the words "difficult" and "appropriate" in this context.
You get enough scholars and writers together, you'll have enough people who know enough that they do collectively have this knowledge (or at least have a passing familiarity so they'll be more effective at going back to do research to clear up the ignorance they know they bear), but there's no guarantee that this happened, and there's no guarantee that there are enough participants wise and sincere enough to make the optimal choices.
I went to a pretty good school. Mostly we had pretty good textbooks. But the time my history book spent on the Trail of Tears was about the same as that spent on the Grange, and while I recognized that both were just specific instances of bigger things, it wasn't clear how either fit into where the publisher put those few paragraphs. The Trail at least was connected to some things I already knew about Indian reservations that still exist, but what I remember most about the Grange is being a boy sitting with book open to that page on my desk and wondering what it had to do with anything else going on at that time.
I have digressed, but permit me to regress. I was going to say something about the statues of Confederate Civil War officers getting torn down. Not about that, so much. What I see a lot of here is a push to simplify history to singular ideas and motivations. I may have written about this long before--or maybe I have a draft I never got around to publishing; been a while now--about how people will impugn the sincerity of someone who is trying to do the right things for allegedly the right reasons because they can imagine some other good that might come of it that would personally benefit the person trying to do the right thing. Maybe that person recognizes the benefit but didn't have it in mind, maybe the person really didn't ever think of it and was trying to be altruistic because that's what virtuous people do, but it doesn't matter: an ulterior motive can be surmised, therefore the ulterior motive must be the only true one, and thus the virtuous person is just a hypocrite. Utter bullocks, and the last rationalization of an insecure but happy vice-enslaved person.
I recognize how it is distasteful, to put it tastefully, to continue proudly displaying things that we as a society have come to recognize were not all that great after all. George Wallace and Orval Faubus weren't just taking a principled stand against social decay, they were just wrong. But I'd prefer to have things like statues of Robert E. Lee and George Custer put in historical museums where their real legacies can be depicted with some context.
Claims like "It was all about ending slavery" or "it had nothing to do with slavery; that was tacked on later" are wildly oversimple. People are complicated and life is complicated and so is history. I'm not expecting students to go to any historical museum and come out thinking the guys on the wrong side were all vilified angels, but I do want them to come out with a sense of these complexities, and some enhanced skill at looking at a story from both sides and seeing the truth and propaganda that each side relies on.
(and I realize I appear to be foisting myself onto my own petard. Indulge me a bit more; I am not a historian and do not want to bore you in a bog of footnotes and tangential analyses)
Not just for the sake of history, either. Yeah, Sherman might have been a horrible person for his practice of total war and his lack of enthusiasm for abolition, but he's not a monster. And by that I mean "a horrible person is not an inhuman monster no matter how horrible," not "he wasn't so bad."
And if we can teach our students not to write off the villains of history as monsters, but to recognize them as fellow humans with motivations that are complex and often conflicted even when not wholly erroneous, then we will be teaching the next generation real lessons in how to understand and love one another.
I was going to make this a separate post, but i think it will be more fitting to finish this one with the following.
"They asked me if I was going to let politics get in the way of my friendship. You're damn right I will. I will not tolerate the presence of racists and homophobes." This in response to the criticism that certain political strains tend to make everything political, that there are people you can't have a normal human conversation with because they are always having just one conversation whether you're part of it or not. Zeal for one's principles is nice, but there's a problem with being the kind of person Winston Churchill described as being folks who won't change the subject. It's the same problem the Pharisees had when they criticized Jesus for supping with tax collectors and sinners.
I don't need to spell it out, do I?
I tire of it. I don't have the power to change all the minds of everyone on the internet who thinks that Jesus wasn't real because some other yahoo on the internet made up lies that are easily disproven after five minutes spent in any grade school library's mythology section. I have some hope when I see Copernicus mistaken for Leonardo in the debate about the two world views and someone else chimes in with "I looked into this, and that's not quite true." I can still make my contributions but God will have to do the heavy lifting.
I tire of the same kind of crap as "astronomers calculated the positions of the stars and planets and discovered a missing day that proves Joshua 10:13." Why people would lie about this, I don't know. Maybe it's all false flag operations, but these things just...smell like well intentioned lies by people who don't have the foresight to ask "if they discover this isn't true, are they more likely to throw it all away in a fit of doubt than to forgive me for tricking them into getting saved/opening their eyes to scientific materialism?"
But my point was to touch on a couple semi political things and call it a night. Today's topic: common core.
I'm not going to go deep, just hit a couple factors.
Supporters dislike the idea of what they call "hyper localization," that is, the idea that communities even down to the county level should have a say in their own school's curriculum. They blame that for the whitewashing of history, for such things as learning little or nothing about the history of slavery in America and the Civil Rights Movement. They want it standardized across the nation.
Problem is, the non-academics in Washington or San Francisco who are really more interested in training compliant future high tech employees--they will admit this is their goal when they publicize their support of the program, if slightly less directly--are not in any way immune to propagating other swaths of ignorance when they develop curricula far away from classrooms.
There's no guarantee a nationwide curriculum will be any more truthful about Wilmington or Custer, because there's no reason to be. It's easier to reinvent the past to explain away the historical artifacts you can't or haven't yet been able to destroy, than to erase it all at once and hope no one notices or remembers what came before Year One.
Typical: see a potential problem, magnify it into a crisis, and demand federal intervention. Sound familiar?
But all that assumes that the curriculum reinventors and textbook compilers have all the pertinent knowledge at their fingertips and are simply making different choices about what to include and what to leave out, what to emphasize and what to deemphasize, what fits into the themes they want to teach and what doesn't, what themes ought to be taught and what are too difficult or inappropriate for each grade level, how to define the words "difficult" and "appropriate" in this context.
You get enough scholars and writers together, you'll have enough people who know enough that they do collectively have this knowledge (or at least have a passing familiarity so they'll be more effective at going back to do research to clear up the ignorance they know they bear), but there's no guarantee that this happened, and there's no guarantee that there are enough participants wise and sincere enough to make the optimal choices.
I went to a pretty good school. Mostly we had pretty good textbooks. But the time my history book spent on the Trail of Tears was about the same as that spent on the Grange, and while I recognized that both were just specific instances of bigger things, it wasn't clear how either fit into where the publisher put those few paragraphs. The Trail at least was connected to some things I already knew about Indian reservations that still exist, but what I remember most about the Grange is being a boy sitting with book open to that page on my desk and wondering what it had to do with anything else going on at that time.
I have digressed, but permit me to regress. I was going to say something about the statues of Confederate Civil War officers getting torn down. Not about that, so much. What I see a lot of here is a push to simplify history to singular ideas and motivations. I may have written about this long before--or maybe I have a draft I never got around to publishing; been a while now--about how people will impugn the sincerity of someone who is trying to do the right things for allegedly the right reasons because they can imagine some other good that might come of it that would personally benefit the person trying to do the right thing. Maybe that person recognizes the benefit but didn't have it in mind, maybe the person really didn't ever think of it and was trying to be altruistic because that's what virtuous people do, but it doesn't matter: an ulterior motive can be surmised, therefore the ulterior motive must be the only true one, and thus the virtuous person is just a hypocrite. Utter bullocks, and the last rationalization of an insecure but happy vice-enslaved person.
I recognize how it is distasteful, to put it tastefully, to continue proudly displaying things that we as a society have come to recognize were not all that great after all. George Wallace and Orval Faubus weren't just taking a principled stand against social decay, they were just wrong. But I'd prefer to have things like statues of Robert E. Lee and George Custer put in historical museums where their real legacies can be depicted with some context.
Claims like "It was all about ending slavery" or "it had nothing to do with slavery; that was tacked on later" are wildly oversimple. People are complicated and life is complicated and so is history. I'm not expecting students to go to any historical museum and come out thinking the guys on the wrong side were all vilified angels, but I do want them to come out with a sense of these complexities, and some enhanced skill at looking at a story from both sides and seeing the truth and propaganda that each side relies on.
(and I realize I appear to be foisting myself onto my own petard. Indulge me a bit more; I am not a historian and do not want to bore you in a bog of footnotes and tangential analyses)
Not just for the sake of history, either. Yeah, Sherman might have been a horrible person for his practice of total war and his lack of enthusiasm for abolition, but he's not a monster. And by that I mean "a horrible person is not an inhuman monster no matter how horrible," not "he wasn't so bad."
And if we can teach our students not to write off the villains of history as monsters, but to recognize them as fellow humans with motivations that are complex and often conflicted even when not wholly erroneous, then we will be teaching the next generation real lessons in how to understand and love one another.
I was going to make this a separate post, but i think it will be more fitting to finish this one with the following.
"They asked me if I was going to let politics get in the way of my friendship. You're damn right I will. I will not tolerate the presence of racists and homophobes." This in response to the criticism that certain political strains tend to make everything political, that there are people you can't have a normal human conversation with because they are always having just one conversation whether you're part of it or not. Zeal for one's principles is nice, but there's a problem with being the kind of person Winston Churchill described as being folks who won't change the subject. It's the same problem the Pharisees had when they criticized Jesus for supping with tax collectors and sinners.
I don't need to spell it out, do I?
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