Today, my brother discribed his US History class to me. The class is not being taught from a textbook, nor from a examination of events and themes in more or less chronological order, as every history course I’ve ever taken has done. Instead, the class discussion jumps arund in time discussing various themes and occurances in American history. Fair enough, I suppose. I have no problem discussing the Boston Tea Party, Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and Rosa Parks in a few interconnected lessons, in theory.
That’s not how it worked out.
The first issue in class was the asassination of JFK, and why it couldn’t have been Oswald. The class decided that it was most likely the CIA acting in conjunction with the Mafia. The next project my brother had to do was on the “asassination” (his words) of Marilyn Monroe at the hands of RFK. My brother claimed that he would have felt intimidated to support the conventional conclusions (Oswald acted alone, Norma Jean committed suicide) in class, and that the lectures and other materials supplied by the teacher were heavily biased.
I don’t like this. While I appreciate that history is reevaluated as new facts and a new culture unravels (anyone remember when Columbus was a hero?), I’m deeply unnerved by the teaching of fringe interpretation to high-school children as fact. I understand that such investigations can be useful to teach critical thinking and investigation techniques, but the Kennedy assasination is a quagmire of half-assed conspiracy theories. And is the death or Marilyn even worth thinking about?
So, fellow dopers, my debate is thus:
To what extent should teachers by allowed/encouraged to deviate from the “conventional” histories?
I say, as much as they want, but they’d better present the mainstream story and its support in great detail as well, before presenting a defensible refutation, with citations. The students need to know what the history books say, if only to prepare them for the conservative professor they;ll meet in college. I also think students should never be intimidated from voicing their own, defensible, well-researched positions. To do otherwise would discourage critical thinking and spread the kind of ignorance we work so hard against on these boards.
This is a high school class? If this is an American high school class, then it jolly well IS being taught out of a textbook, or it had better be, since the U.S. History course is a graduation requirement for most, if not all, of the 50 states.
If you’re entitled to any input into your brother’s education, I strongly suggest you go down there and have a talk with the principal, because that is totally weird, and non-U.
In Australia, some teachers have been lambasted by parents for teaching that there was a genocide of Aboriginal people, as explanation for why Aborigines regard Australia Day (the date of Cook’s landing in New South Wales) as Invasion Day. As the adgae goes, the victors make history, and some teachers have been known to revisit that history, to the discomfort of some parents.
These things are supported by facts, though: it may be a not commonly held view, but at least its verifiable.
When a teacher starts teaching kids conspiracy theories, he or she starts ranging out from the topic of “history” and into “speculation”.
In the early 80s, there was a high school teacher in Alberta who was teaching Holocaust revisionism to ninth grade high school students in history class. One day a girl came from class and told her mother that she thought what they were being taught was “weird”. The mother starting asking around, and discovered that he’d been teaching this for several years, but no one had ever noticed.
Of course, she went to the press, he was exposed, lost his job, and the high school bent over backwards apologizing, and got a real history teacher.
Talk to the school administration. If they don’t satisfy you that your brother is getting a real education in history, go to the school board or the press. There’s a difference between alternate theories of historical events, and fringe conspiracy material.
It’s entirely possible that no one in a position to do anything about it knows what’s going on.
The standard for high school, with which I completely agree, is that only material which has been accepted at the university level should be taught in high school.
Before one reaches college, one knows far too little to accurately evaluate competing ideas. Even truly stupid ideas can look good if presented as fact by authority figures. How the hell is anyone who hasn’t studied the Kennedy assassination for decades supposed to be able to weave through the mounds of evidence to reach an informed conclusion? They can’t, which is why the only ideas that should be taught to school children are those that have gained acceptance by those who are in a position to evaluate all the evidence and reach an informed conclusion. Critical thinking is fine, but it is often used as a guise to introduce nonsense into the schools: “Let’s teach both evolution and creationism, and let the kids decide for themselves.”
This teacher sounds like a real bozo; you should definitely make some sort of complaint against him.
Tell me about it. My 10th grade English teacher, Ms. Shackelton, was a True Believer in the existence of psychic energy fields and similar pseudo-scientific nonsense. She even gave the class a hand-out about World Light Vision meditation and about some guy who bumped his head and thereafter became a powerful psychic. When she stated, flatly, that Uri Geller was “for real,” I had no reason at the time to doubt her.
Departing from the textbook is often a very good idea for a history teacher. At the university level, the field is about evaluating original documents and weighing the value of different interpretations. Unfortunately most secondary school history textbooks ignore the existence of scholarly debate, present little source material, and even distort important facts. See Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen.
Political pressures affect the teaching of history more than most other fields. The textbook publishing market also accounts for part of the problem. Few academic historians undertake basic instruction and most secondary schools place a low value on critical thinking.
For all of these reasons I would give history teachers wide latitude. Unfortunately this also creates opportunities for ideologically motivated instructors to distort the subject. If this person is indeed doing what your brother describes, then it also assaults the credibility of hundreds of other professionals who pursue better goals.
I would be slow to judgement. Have you seen your brother’s notebooks or spoken to his classmates? Have you met the history teacher yourself? It might be possible that your brother has misunderstood the classroom approach.
If this teacher really does teach farfetched conspiracy theories as history, then your best strategy would probably be to get Mom and Dad to insist on a transfer to a different classroom. Make enough noise in the front office and a seat will probably open for your brother somewhere else.
That’s why I’m here instead of the prinipal’s office.
Good replies all, I’ll respond in more deatil as time allows. I’m more interested in a more general debate about unconventional history and teaching methods than my specific situation.
Given the utterly execrable pap that is foisted off on most kids in the U.S. as “history,” I have no problem with the idea of abandoning text books altogether and creating a course that will actually inform them of history.
That said, a course that has gotten into the second week of October and has dealt only with assassination theories for JFK and Marilyn Monroe(?!) is not teaching an alternative view of history, but an alternative view of reality. Despite Kennedy’s great cultural influence on the late 20th century, he is not even among the top ten or 20 most important presidents (Kennedy handled the misile crisis well, but he did nothing surprising or innovative during that period; there is no reason to think that Nixon or anyone else would have acted differently in Vietnam; the Civil Rights movement was singularly independent of the presidency; and the race to the moon could still have gone on at a different pace with a different president). I think that JFK should be studied–in context.
This is not informing kids of history, it is grinding axes on their skulls.
