It is also possible that she was as good at paying attention as my coworker who didn’t know Dunkerke had been kind of an important place at the beginning of WWII, nor what does “D-Day” stand for.
I would say that you think that because you were raised in a morally relativistic society and culture, so you view ‘moral relativism’ as an honest and true look at history. This is a relatively new concept and prior to the 1960s was not much experienced in primary education.
History is not a very clean thing to study unfortunately. My favorite example is George Washington at Jumonville Glen. Was he a murderer or was he acting in self-defense or was the murder a rogue Indian ally or something else? I actually have read many of the primary sources from the time and actually own a number of newspapers printed immediately following the incident and they all have their own version of events. Now it’s certainly not invalid for an historian to simply drop the sources on your head and say ‘figure it out,’ but it’s also not invalid for an historian to sift through the sources and attempt to come up with their best version of what they think the ‘truth’ is.
What they teach you in history grad school is that there is no such thing as a truly neutral viewpoint; however you choose to report is always subjective. By reporting on a minority claim (by minority I mean a claim that was made by a minority of witnesses, not a claim made by a racial minority) you are lending credence to that viewpoint even if it is extremely unlikely. If I were to write a report on the Mountain Meadows Massacre as an example, do I really need to include the early reports from Brigham Young that ‘Indians did it?’ or do I need to point out that juries refused to indict? in a way that hints those might be valid expressions of truth? If I were truly neutral, there might be a temptation to do that, but that would lend credence to a completely false narrative. Indians had nothing to do with it and the jury was obviously prejudiced in the affair. We have a pretty clear consensus on what happened, so reporting it in a relativistic manner is completely unfair to the aggrieved parties.
I can understand why it might seem a strange question, but I truly ask it from a position of ignorance. To better understand the perspective from whence it was asked one would need to appreciate that when someone in the US my age (50’s) attended public school we were presented with a pretty whitewashed version of history in our textbooks. It was only later that I learned that WW2 was anything but a conflict of pure ‘good’ allies vs pure ‘evil’ axis powers. There was no mention, for instance, of Japanese-American citizens being placed in internment camps. And our texts avoided altogether mention of how our CIA was actively involved in regime changes toppling or supporting various dictators in developing countries around the globe in the decades that followed. Terms like ‘manifest destiny’ in discussing the settlement of the west were used in texts to camouflage what pretty much amounted to a campaign of genocide our government waged. There simply WAS no mention of what happened to the indigenous peoples in North America in our textbooks. So from my perspective it might not be such a strange thing to wonder if educators/textbooks in other countries engage in similar practices.
The omissions from the texts I describe above have improved considerably over the past 40 years, but the battle of the textbooks is still being fought.
Are you being too subtle for me? I didn’t think it stood for anything (well, beyond “Day”). 
j
Well, that’s one thing being utterly annihilated will do to you. You’d be hard pressed to find something good about WWII being taught in a German school. To expand on what was said above: There was a war, we started it, we lost - and that’s a good thing! May 8th, armistice day and end of WWII in Europe, is called Liberation Day in Germany. Having lost the war is not source of shame or sadness - the reason for the war is, and we as a country are much better for having thoroughly lost it.
Regardless of how much this time period is taught in school, you might not hear too much about Dunkirk or D-Day, as the actual progression of the war is not emphasized as much as the reasons behind it and the atrocities of the holocaust. Come to think of it, I never learned all that much about individual battles in other wars. Just a different way of approaching history, I guess.
History books are a big issue in Quebec. They don’t want to admit that English speakers and natives had any role in Quebec history.
I’ve never heard any resistance to teaching evolution, but I am not in Alberta (AKA Texas north, which is funny because that’s where Ted Cruz was born).
There is no resistance to teaching evolution in Alberta. Oh, perhaps among a few hardcore fundamentalists there is; but there is certainly nobody pushing to have the Biblical story of creation included as part of a science class or textbook.
The UK curriculum varies quite a bit, but certainly when I was at school, there was very little mention of colonialism, and certainly not the negative impacts. We skipped over the British Empire a little at little kid level, but focusing on Victorian England and the cool stuff that was being imported.
The only periods we looked at with any degree of seriousness or critical thinking were the world wars.
Like I said though, there’s a lot of variation, guidelines are very broad, and my experiences are 20+ years out of date now.
I understand moral relativism in a social issues context. Those who think moral relativism is a bad thing usually have some ironclad standard of morality, usually religious. For instance, supporting SSM could be considered moral relativism by someone convinced it is a sin.
While I’ve never taken history in grad school, I have read extensively, and I understand that a “true” look at history is absurd, and an “honest” one may or may not be absurd based on the person relating the history.
That’s interesting. I’ll have to look that up. But wouldn’t an honest and true appraisal present the dilemma without dumping primary sources on the student? In my day the incident wouldn’t be mentioned. A simpler case is the irony of Jefferson owning slaves. I don’t remember if that was mentioned in my textbooks, I think it was in the ones my kids used.
Another good example. The danger of not mentioning the false narrative is that the student might come across a source which accepts it, and then doubt the history book’s story. Mentioning it and stating that it was false is better, but works only for things where there is a wide consensus. And with the limitations on textbook size, there probably isn’t room for nuance anyway.
But here’s an example of my dilemma about this. We teach young students (or did when I was in school) that the Revolution was a good thing, run by patriots. But in high school we read Oliver Wiswell with a sympathetic portrait of a Tory and a description of the not very nice things the patriots did. Is that moral relativism in the context of history, according to those who oppose it? And on the flip side, how about teaching that slavery might be bad but not that bad and kind of justifiable in the context of the day?
I’m not at all surprised that there would be wrangling everywhere about the country’s history and how various groups want to control that internal narrative of how/why/what things happened.
Where I think the US might be unique is that we have religious loons and cranks trying to do the same with *science *books. Almost by definition science books at a primary/secondary school level should not be controversial- most everything in them is stuff that’s been settled (at least from a scientific perspective) for 100+ years, or that is incontrovertible, such as physics.
Yet the cranks persist in trying to foist their dumb-ass religious beliefs on the general population by trying to modify the books to consider flat-out wrong ideas, or not to mention things that have been proven to be true. Is this an issue anywhere else, or is it a uniquely American thing?
This anti-textbook attitude was in place long before the internet was very pervasive. Yes, Georgia has standards. I just looked them up, and they aren’t as vague as they were 8 years ago when I was teaching.
Another problem back then was the administration’s fetish with rubrics. Rubrics are fine for adding objectivity to certain tasks, but aren’t necessary for objective subjects.
You could benefit from thoroughly examining a number of US History textbooks instead of going by what you imagine might be going on. For one thing, it’s not “their” history; it’s American history, and it took us far too long to broaden how being American was presented in textbooks. History textbooks published in the Fifties tended to be narrow and whitewashed, as was television. I certainly wouldn’t use textbooks of that era as a standard of excellence.
Right wing idiots have had negative influences on textbooks (i.e. in Texas), but they’re arguably a limited part of the problem.
“…as someone who has worked writing educational materials for K-12 students for two decades, I can tell you with some authority that idiotic, anti-intellectual regulation of content is not restricted to the far right. On the contrary, for me, working on textbooks and exams, the major difficulty is not catering to the far right. It’s catering to a nebulous, ill-defined fear of offending anyone. Obviously, when freelance writing or finding test passages for kids of whatever age, I know my work will be rejected if I mention evolution. But I’m also not allowed to mention snakes, or violent storms, or cancer, or racial discrimination, or magic. Authority figures, including teachers and Woodrow Wilson, can never be questioned. Pop culture can’t be mentioned. Living people can’t be mentioned. Death can’t be mentioned. As Diane Ravitch said in her still-relevant 2004 book The Language Police, there is “an elaborate, well-established protocol of beneficent censorship, quietly endorsed and broadly implemented by textbook publishers, testing agencies, professional associations, states, and the federal government.” Or, to put it another way, the people in charge have apparently agreed that the ideal educational content is a bland, colorless paste.”
I get the feeling that critical thinking is the most verboten subject of them all.
By the way, Texas looks good in comparison to India. :smack:
As I understand it, American school districts buy textbooks, so fights over which textbook to buy are an American thing.
In contrast, in Aus, school textbooks are mostly decided by the individual school teachers. So the fight is about the curriculum, which is set by the state, and argued about nationally. One major section of this argument is called “The history wars”, which is an argument about both the facts of our history and the interpretation of them.
Looking at this from outside, the distinctive thing about the US is the degree of local political control over the details of what goes on in schools. In the UK, even when the dominant force in education management was the elected local authority, they didn’t control what was taught: the major qualifications schools were teaching to, and hence the curricula and examinations, were set by external bodies.
That said, over the last 30 years or so, national government has taken on greater responsibility in prescribing, or at least signing off on, the broad content of national curricula, and it is more common now for national politicians to debate what ought or ought not to be taught in history, or whatever.
But the structure of the different organisations means they can’t just turn it all upside down overnight; and simply to say “That book out, this book in” would get nowhere. The details of how the national curriculum is taught, down to recommended text books, are a matter for the public examination boards (and schools can choose between several) and individual schools and teachers. That doesn’t stop individual parents and school governors from raising a stink about individual textbooks. And the whole business of relationship and sex education is one that the most interventionist of national politicians tend to shy away from.
The shift from local authority control to semi-independent “academy” school organisations may create more room for debate, but the external examination and inspection systems will have the same sort of effect. If a school gets bad exam results and inspection reports because it only teaches flat earth theory, it gets noticed.
More generally, I’m sure I’ve read of agreements between neighbouring countries with a history of competing nationalisms, to set up joint commissions to review their textbooks with a view to finding a common interpretation of their history (whether it ever worked, I don’t know).
The US might be unique in the quasi-religious status of the courts and the constitution, which means that debate about the content of science books inspires a particularly quasi-religious fervour. In the rest of the world, religion in science books is just religion in science books.
Science books at a lower secondary level are sociology books with science content. At primary level, they’re entertainment with science content. If you’re looking for Huxley or Kelvin science, you won’t find it in junior science textbooks.
In the US, it’s typically not local (sorta). Curriculum standards are determined by the state. Every state is allowed to decide how it treats textbook decisions. To make a point I have made many times before. The US government is more like the EU than it is like the UK. Individual states effectively function as sovereign entities underneath of a ‘Union’ banner. The federal government is always trying to get more power and states are always trying to get it back. The Federal government is Constitutionally prohibited from making many decisions in law, but over time has figured out ways to force states to comply. An example is the minimum drinking age of 21. The US government is not legally able to make that a law. States have a sovereign right to set laws within their own borders. The Federal government wanted it to happen though, so in 1984 they created a bill that said ‘If states don’t have a minimum age of 21, we’ll cut their federal highway matching dollars by 10%.’ No state was going to go to the mats for a drinking age and lose the 10%, so they all fell in line.
Similar with Educational initiatives. The states can say what they want about education in their states, but the Feds threaten to withhold money if their standards aren’t met, so you tend to have overarching federal standards like ‘No Child Left Behind’ that states have to follow or lose their funding. Sometimes states find things so offensive for whatever reason that they leave the money on the table, the Affordable Care Act is a recent example, but usually that sweet piece of the Federal pie is too coercive to pass up.
This is only to say that states within their borders can do what they want about things like textbooks since the Feds haven’t tried to coerce them into a national standard. Some states (notably Texas until 2011) buy books en masse for all students. They feel this gives them more say over content and they are correct. The text book market often uses Texas for its guidelines because it’s so massive and if you sell to them, then you’ve made your profit for a long time. Other states allow local schools to choose for themselves from approved lists. Some states just say, “Here’s the curriculum, you know your students and teaching style best, do what you want about books or no books.”
Perhaps a little bit of background would help the Dopers reading this thread who are from other countries:
Texas had long been a focal point for many major publishers due to its sheer size and population. Houghton-Mifflin, Longman, Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and other publishers with a segment of its market in textbooks, not only had warehouses and publishing offices in Texas, but they took their content guidelines from the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) which, once it had consolidated its many regional/district/county boards-of-education into one body, had the largest population of students under one umbrella. This combined with the waning of the religious right which had been strong during the Reagan administration.
During the Reagan and Bush Sr. years, fundamentalism rose (remember the Moral Majority making headlines every month?) and neo-Patriotism rose (remember the Buy American ads on TV?) with Christian extremists getting into politics and pushing their agendas and members of the Young Americans for Freedom disrupting college classes (particularly in the social sciences) and complaining that the professors were too sympathetic to Communism or Pagan themes.
But by the middle of Bush Sr’s term, middle-of-the-road and progressive-minded people started pushing back. As extreme right wing politicians were getting recalled or no-confidenced out of office, it was an intentional strategic decision by Christian conservatives to focus on influencing the way children are educated, and the Texas Textbook guidelines were the ideal target of their influence. [See Senoy’s quote, above.]
The issue (call it a problem; call it an advantage) is that while Texas has a huge population and a multi-member curriculum panel, there are some districts and even some states that don’t have a curriculum panel at all and just choose from the books available from the publishing companies AFTER the content has been decided and produced. By influencing the content of the books created to satisfy the Texas SBOE, one could shape the content – the truth and reality – that every student up to at least 10th grade learned and internalized year after year after year. And so it became something of a sport to load the Texas SBOE panel with Christianity-favoring and Nationalistic members whose decisions on everything from Subject Scope to word-selection in title and sentences are carefully nuanced and painstakingly chosen to direct and misdirect the minds of students in a certain direction.
Which direction?
As recently as 2014…
And, further back in its roots…
Now, however, the Texas SBOE is still going strong and still doing its thing, but they are not quite as influential as they used to be.
Note, however, that the emphasis on multiple-choice testing in the No Child Left Behind helps to dilute nuance and contrast – which are better explored through multi–page readings and tested via essay exams – and leave memes and mythical tropes that can run from partly-true to counter-factual. But, since multiple-choice and True/False exams can be rapidly scored by machines, they are favored over the critical thought-requiring essay exams.
What the Christian and Nationalistic right would fear, of course, is a state like California unifying its school districts* into one textbook-buying entity. As the world’s fifth-largest economy, it had 39.4 million people in 2017 versus the 28.3 million people Texas had in 2017. And politics is only one of the reasons people call it the “left coast.”#
–G
- Don’t expect it in this century!
Yes, I’m joking around with that last sentence. Lighten up!
I’ll just leave you with a couple more links…
https://wiki2.org/en/Texas_State_Board_of_Education
https://wiki2.org/en/Strengths_and_weaknesses_of_evolution#Texas_SBOE