Do all the people advocating teaching this course think it can be done without being overtly political? Not that I disagree with the political aims themselves, but I don’t think it’s necessarily okay to make the classroom a battleground.
I think it’s a good idea to teach this as a civil rights issue in the context of Stonewall and other events leading to the decriminalization of homosexual acts and the integration of gays into society. I do not see any value in noting historical figures who may or may not have been gay unless that was an important part of what they did, historically.
I think it is a bad idea to mandate this by law.
I might have missed something because I don’t see anyone here advocating the addition of an entire course on gay history to the California high school curriculum. I don’t believe most high schools get that specific when it comes to the history courses they offer. Black history might be included in an American history course but you’re not going to see a black history course offered. I imagine it will be the same with homosexuals and they will simply be included in the overall historical narrative. Although most new historical movements are very political,* I don’t think including homosexuals in history courses constitutes politicizing the course. On the other hand, I imagine it will become politicized as school boards, parents and others who simply dislike homosexuals go bonkers at their inclusion in history books.
Odesio
- When Women’s Studies/History started to become a part of universities in the United States during the 1970s it was heavily politicized. If you go back and read many of the papers and books written during that time many of them have a very heavy us (women) versus them (men) vibe. Over the last few decades Women’s History and Gender Studies have made a lot of progress beyond such a simplistic division. Women aren’t a monolithic block and there are many differences including race, sexual identity, class, religion and other factors that make. Today the professors working on Women’s History provide a narrative that is far more nuanced than it was in the past.
I don’t know about that. If I was a little gay boy in school I imagine I might feel rather isolated because I’d be different from most of the other boys. It might be nice for me to learn that there were other little boys like me who grew up and made contributions to society.
I understand where you’re coming from. After all, what happens when they legislate a requirement that I don’t like? What if they legislate a law showing that the United States must be shown in a positive light? Or that history courses can’t hurt anyone’s feelings?
You also weren’t a gay kid who only was told that being gay means you are a bad person who will die of aids and go directly to hell. As I said before, hearing that various historical figures were also gay AND contributed to society in a way that warranted mention in history is very valuable.
I think you are missing the main problem here. History shouldn’t be about making people feel better about themselves. It’s already been distorted with too much of that. There are other subjects that can deal with that.
I’m assuming its like regular history, but it points out notable gays who have been through historical events, and doesn’t seek to hide the impact gays have had on history nor does it pretend they don’t exist. Stonewall might be mentioned.
I think that’s the point of this bill, to allow discussion of gays and what it means to be gay much earlier in the classroom, so that one would not be mystified when they grow up and wonder why all these people want to get married
Emphasis mine. That’s because everyone is assumed to be straight. Its “normal”, so it needs no emphasis. However, if something abnormal were to come from that, we would definitely teach it in history. Much as been written about the unusual, extravagant, or out of the ordinary straight relationships of historical figures. You can’t discuss Henry VIII without his many wives, his inability to have male children, the reformation of the Church. All that stemmed from his very straight relationship. But we teach it because it impacts other parts of history
Gays, because they are a minority, and because they are singled out due to their lifestyle, have their sexual orientation as a much bigger part of their identity than straights, usually by force. Your examples of Roussau and TE Lawrence doesn’t compare because those things don’t define them nor affect their lives. Being gay can get you killed, it can get a brilliant scientist like Turing ostracized and worse. That is part of their identity whether they wanted it or not and that needs to be taught
I’m not saying we should say “So and so historical figure did this, oh by the way he was gay”. I believe that the curriculum mandated by this bill will be more nuanced than that
Judging from the books my kids used, they do this for plenty of other minority groups, so we might as well do it for gays. For gay history as stuff that happened to gays, I think we have Stonewall and the AIDS epidemic, and maybe something about anti-gay laws here and elsewhere, like in England. Remember what they did to Alan Turing. Prop 13 is too close and too politicized to put into a history book. Most of it would be gay historical figures, ones where there is no doubt like Leonardo and Alexander the Great, but not Lincoln.
When I was a kid the only black history we got (and this was in New York) was slavery and the standard black figures, like George Washington Carver and those involved in the Underground Railway. I think it is healthy to teach some real black history. My wife just wrote two books, one on black businesspeople and one on black scientists and inventors, and the story is far more interesting than I ever knew. For instance, integration wiped out thriving black restaurant and hotel businesses in the south.
When I was a kid I just assumed history was created by white people, and I’d suspect kids nowadays just assume history was created only by straight people.
Firstly, there is no such “course.” The bill simply adds LGBT people to an already-existing list of groups that are supposed to be covered in the curriculum.
Here’s the actual text of the relevant section of SB48:
Note the last sentence.
This bill is not calling for a class in GLBT history. It’s not asking teachers to point out the sexuality of every historical figure who might be suspected of having been a homosexual. It’s essentially telling schools to focus on the contributions of LGBT men and women in places where that is appropriate, and to pay particular attention to the role that LGBT people play in contemporary society.
As i’ve already said earlier in the thread, i worry that mandates like this make it difficult to design a coherent curriculum, because there’s a constant concern about cramming in every mandated group, but people who are arguing that this bill will result in the teaching of a “gay history” course, or history where every figure’s sexuality becomes a subject of study, don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.
As for the classroom being a battleground, that ship sailed long ago. Read books dealing with the history of education in America since the beginning of the 20th century, and you’ll see hundreds of political battles over what to teach. In the period between the world wars, there were incredibly hostile debates over how to portray the British in American history books. During the Cold War, history instruction in schools was politicized to emphasize American institutions and religion in contrast to “godless Communism.” In the post-Civil Rights era, the history of African Americans and slavery drew increasing attention as educators recognized how much of that story had previously been omitted or distorted. From the 1970s, women’s contributions to history justifiably received more attention than had previously been the case. And in the 1990s, there was a massive national debate over history standards, as Lynn Cheney and other conservatives complained that minorities and women were getting too much attention, to the detriment of presidents and heroes.
Just like the Republican i quoted back in post #2 of this thread, anyone who thinks that this particular issue is what politicized the American classroom has no idea what he’s talking about.
You realize, i assume, that Stonewall was in New York?
California has a ay history of its own that is quite separate from Stonewall. There were homosexual activist groups in the 1950s in San Francisco and in Los Angeles, and the history of homosexuality in the state goes back much further than that. Also, part of the reason that activist groups emerged, such as the “bar groups” and the homophile groups in San Francisco, was precisely because law enforcement had been doing everything they could to oppress and marginalize the people they saw as “perverts” and “deviants.” This is part of the social and cultural history of the state. Nan Alamilla Boyd’s book Wide Open Town, about the history of queer San Francisco, goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, and stops well before Harvey Milk.
Even moving beyond California, we need to get past the idea that gay history suddenly began with Stonewall. George Chauncey’s award-winning book Gay New York begins its story in the late nineteenth century, and ends well before Stonewall. And yet, it’s a 400+ page book talking about the emergence of a homosexual subculture, the reactions to that subculture from police and other authorities, and the ways in which that subculture became part of the social fabric of New York. Reading Chauncey’s book is not just an exercise in gay history, it’s a social and cultural history of the city itself, but told with a focus and from a point of view that is often completely absent in other works of history.
On the one hand, i agree. On the other, though, noting instances where this is the case can serve to make clear that gays and lesbians are people just like any other, and that they have made contributions to American society. While things have improved considerably for GLBT folk over the past decades, there’s still enough hostility and ignorance in some sections of society, and enough people who believe that homosexuality is a marker of inferiority, that some good can come from showing that homosexuals are just as capable as anyone else, in ways that might be completely unrelated to their sexuality.
Again, in an ideal world, i’d agree with you. I tend to agree with one aspect of the the Republican legislator’s comment that i quoted earlier: leave the education to the educators. The problem is that legislators and the American people have never really been willing to do this. It’s just educators alone who have made public education a political football; it’s self-interested politicians and self-righteous citizens who drive this stuff.
The California Education Code still has a prohibition on teaching communism. It mandates the teaching of “consumer economics.” It mandates a focus on the history of “the entrepreneur and labor,” as well as attention to the Holocaust. It has a whole section where it recognizes that family as “our most fundamental social institution,” and lays out a series of instructional priorities designed to “ensure that each California resident has an opportunity to acquire knowledge of parenting skills prior to becoming a parent.” The section of the Code mandating certain types of education, and certain educational focuses, is thousands of words long.
I guess it’s possible that this single Bill will be the straw that broke the camel’s back, and that California education is only NOW so laden down with mandates and requirements as to be unworkable. But i’m not really convinced that this is the case.
What should history be about?
Facts. Facts that tell the course of events known to have occured in the past. The purpose is simply to counteract the lies people tell. I know this won’t be a popular opinion with historians who feel there is something else to be gained, but that something else always turns out to be the lies. As I’ve stated, there is too much story telling already. You don’t get an accurate picture by stacking one blurry image on top of another. History is not the place to debate cultural issues.
The teaching of history is even more difficult to deal with. It really isn’t about learning history, it’s about the ability to study and comprehend a subject, and provide demonstration of the knowledge and insight gained. I have no objection to achieving those ends in the study of human sexuality or any other subject.
I’ve heard the arguments by both advocates and opponents of this bill, and in no case did I hear the argument that this provided a better factual account of history. There are approriate subjects to cover matters of sexuality. History just isn’t it.
Hmmm… perhaps the patriotic song which best encapsules the American dream is “America the Beautiful”, which paints an idealistic picture of what America could be, and recurs to the plea to God to “crown [America’s] good with brotherhood…” I cannot help but think that Prof. Bates’s experience of living with her life partner at the turn of the 20th century contributed to that plea.
And the work of Sumner Welles in the run-up to World War II should not go unnoticed.
In English history, an imortant component of world history, the explanation of why Henry I and John became kings, the influences of Piers Gaveston, the Despencers, and the Duke of Buckingham, among other things, should not go unrecorded.
And there are cultural influences galore, from Socrates to da Vinci to Elton John.
It did not.
Living with her life partner eight years before the turn of the 20th century may have contributed to it, however.
This demonstrates so much ignorance of history as an intellectual exercise that it’s hard even to know where to start.
Here are some facts:
Harvey Milk was gay.
Harvey Milk was a gay activist who lived in San Francisco and ran a camera store.
Harvey Milk ran for city office on a platform of helping local business, supporting labor, pushing for public transportation and other public goods, and advancing gay rights, among other things.
Harvey Milk was the first openly-gay man elected to the SF Board of Supervisors, and first openly-gay man who was not an incumbent to be elected to public office in the US.
Harvey Milk was killed, along with SF Mayor George Moscone, by Dan White, in San Francisco City Hall.
Those are all facts that, if we added some more detail, would “tell the course of events known to have occurred in the past.” None of the stuff i’ve posted above is terribly controversial; it is all easily confirmed by reference to readily-accessible sources.
The problem with the “history as facts” idea is that there are simply too many historical facts for anyone to grasp. Even if we focus just on the history of California, there are far more facts and far more “events known to have occurred in the past” than can possibly be covered in any shelf of books, let alone in a school-level history course.
Even if one were to concede (i do not) that history should focus just on “the facts,” the fact is that a considerable part of history if selecting which facts to focus on, and how to arrange them. History is about selection and omission, and the acts of selection and omission are, in and of themselves, intellectual and political and subjective exercises. I teach California history to college undergraduates, and in the space of 15 weeks i have to cover the period from the founding of the Spanish missions to the end of the 20th century. Half of time i spend designing my curriculum is devoted to agonizing over what to put in and what to leave out, and the decisions i make reflect particular ideas i have about what is important, and also how different periods and themes in California history can be fit together in order to make a somewhat coherent story of the state’s past.
Also, history is about interpretation, another fact that the simplistic, anti-intellectual, self-righteous “just the facts, ma’am” crowd can’t seem to grasp. Even when historians agree on “the facts,” they often don’t agree on what those facts mean, what their significance might have been in the broader sweep of history, or whether those facts are more important than other facts. History is about interpretation and debate and a way of thinking about the past that encourages analysis and the weighing of evidence.
Basically, anyone who argues for history as just facts has shown themselves, from the very start of the debate, to have no idea at all about what history is.
Too late! Just about every subject is pinned down by a web of state rules. My wife wrote part of a high school biology text, and the combination of strict word limits to cut costs and leave room for graphics and a long list of items that must be covered due to state mandates left little room for stuff like transitions from one subject to another. I’m sure history texts are at least as constrained, probably more so.
Maybe if we keep on adding stuff the whole system will collapse and we can get back to texts that might even be interesting to read.
I never said your post was an example of spreading ignorance, just that the other poster had a good point.
History isn’t just facts though. History is an interpretation of the past based on available evidence.
Fact: Between 1880 and 1930, X number of African Americans were lynched in the United States.
Interpretation #1: Whites turned to lynching because Anglo-Saxon law was not designed with blacks in mind. (James Elbert Cutler’s interpretation ca. 1905)
Interpretation #2: Lynching was a mechanism by which white society controlled black labor and enforce a racial hierarchy. (Walter White ca. 1929)
Just presenting the “facts” will leave people with no meaningful understanding of the past. They won’t know why something happened.
Would that not include the lie of omission?
Can you clarify? I’m working on my thesis about the role the prohibition question played in national, state and local elections in 1908. I can assure you my intention is to expand our knowledge and not to lie.
To underscore this I’ve explicitly removed my mod hat in the post, just above where I mention your name, along with some slight additional redaction.
And I think you can do that by teaching about the gay rights movement in the last few decades. No need to go back and speculate about who was and who was not gay 200 years ago.
I’d also suggest this be put into the Jr High curriculum (I guess we’re calling it Middle School these days, and it’s 6th - 8th grade) and in High School. Not in Elementary School (1st - 5th).
You are obviously too ignorant to understand that anything other than facts is fiction. So it’s no surprise that you have no idea what history is. I have no trouble grasping all of the facts that I need to know about history, which are minimal, because the knowledge of history is generally useless. It may be entertaining to some, and enlightening to those who cannot think for themselves, but anything outside of the facts is not science. If history is just opinion and fiction woven around facts then it shouldn’t be taught at all.